According to the Peter Principle, a business theory formulated by Canadian Lawrence Peters back in 1968, in a hierarchy, people tend to rise to the level of their incompetence. But in Boulder, that earnest, non-hierarchical community in the shadow of the Flatirons, people rise far higher than that. Like so…
Wes McKinley has never washed a vehicle. A horse, yes. But in the arid southeastern corner of Colorado where he lives, “washing a truck is a waste of water,” McKinley says. “A waste of precious liquid.” Out in Walsh, just sixteen miles from the Oklahoma border, they talk a lot…
“I’m not comfortable at this point becoming part of the story,” Brian Maass told Denver City Council’s DIA committee meeting Tuesday morning. Too late! The Channel 4 reporter has been a part of the story since well before Maass’s station actually aired his first report on DIA security last Thursday…
Those blue beacons lighting up the Denver skyline must emit mysterious waves that hypnotize everyone in sight. How else to explain why, when several states are raising holy hell about Qwest’s latest efforts to monitor your phone habits, interrupt your dinner and spill your private data, it’s been relatively quiet…
Colorado got a glimpse of hell with Columbine. It also showed Coloradans what it takes to start making your way back from the abyss: money, and lots of it. And then still more money to manage the money. “It costs money to give money away,” says Phil Nash, director of…
Without all the flag-waving, nobody would have noticed the penises. After all, they’d hung in the Canyon Gallery of the Boulder Public Library for three weeks before the library received its first complaint about “Hanging ’em Out to Dry,” one of fifty pieces included in Art Triumphs Over Domestic Violence,…
Shhh! No complaining in the library! Or about the library. Last November, the Denver Public Library proudly announced it had been named the top library in the nation. Its new building had already snagged national awards, it had recently fended off the evil Dr. Laura (“The Doctor Is Out,” September…
In the middle of October, James Goodwin, a 34-year veteran of United Airlines who’d spent the last two years as chairman and CEO, sat down and composed a letter to his troops. As a rallying cry and a sign of confidence in this country, it was only slightly less inspiring…
Andrew Hudson, press secretary for Mayor Wellington Webb, breezed through Denver International Airport security on Tuesday morning — but then, he’d arrived at the airport at 5 a.m., five hours before his scheduled flight. It would be the first time he’d flown out of DIA since the September 11 terrorist…
Touchy, touchy. Since I wrote last week about Denver International Airport’s overly enthusiastic, and absolutely inexplicable, frisking of females that insulted numerous travelers and stalled security-screening lines (“Busted!”), numerous readers have provided their own accounts. “I was one of those lucky females wearing a Victoria’s Secret underwire bra that set…
War is heck. After the terrorist strikes, we all recognized that profiling was not only politically expedient, but suddenly politically correct. We accepted, if reluctantly, that certain males of certain nationalities would be subjected to more stringent study at airports, a more thorough going-over at security stops. We never suspected…
Get me rewrite! Denver loves beating dead horses — especially dead Broncos. That’s what the city’s been doing all August, ever since the Denver Post decided to rewrite history by calling the team’s new pigskin palace “Mile High stadium” — despite the fact that there’s a perfectly good, if defunct,…
From my back yard — a polite term for “mess of weeds overlooking a highway interchange” — the history of the city stretches wide. When gold was found at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek almost 150 years ago, that discovery inspired the Rush to the…
A thousand miles of highway from where I’d left Montana that morning, the blue Qwest signs welcomed me back to Denver. From gazing at stars, I was now reduced to seeing stars over corporate Colorado’s continued incursions on the skyline (a vision no doubt clouded by my inability to get…
The Boulder City Council just banned circuses, five years too late. The circus came to Boulder on December 26, 1996 — the day that six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was reported missing — and it’s never left. Although the Ramsey action occasionally moves out of the center ring and into some lunatic-fringe…
First things first: The new Broncos stadium does not look like a diaphragm. A spaceship, maybe. A bedpan, sure. But a diaphragm? No way — unless it’s a diaphragm that’s just gone through your washing machine’s spin cycle, an activity not recommended by its manufacturer. The new Broncos stadium does…
Donta Page never should have been allowed to leave a Maryland prison, never should have entered a private treatment facility in Denver, never should have spotted 24-year-old Peyton Tuthill outside her Gaylord Street duplex that day in February 1999. Had Donta Page never come to Colorado, Peyton Tuthill would be…
Picture this wildly improbable scenario: Brilliant businessman who abhors publicity and favors conservative causes slowly buys up much of the known world — oil fields, Western art, real estate, railroads, sports teams, sports stadiums, a publicly ridiculed Baby Bell — then ventures into the entertainment industry with the stated goal…
Just two hours after Wellington Webb faced the cameras and confirmed that yes, Boeing had snubbed Denver in favor of Chicago, fourteenth windiest city in the country, the mayor received his consolation prize: a thirty-pound meatball. Chicago had landed 500 aerospace executives and major bragging rights to another Fortune 500…
My polling place was empty at 7:20 Tuesday morning; I was the first — and by all appearances, likely the last — resident in the precinct to vote on Denver’s charter amendments. Obviously, the rest of my edge-of-downtown neighborhood — home to almost as many proposed jail sites as District…
Back in the days when Denver fretted over its designation as a cowtown rather than a world-class city, the great city it had already imagined it could be, local boosters introduced a hospitality program known as Smile High Denver, which was intended to turn our frowns upside down. It didn’t…
Jack A. Weil surveys the street outside of Rockmount Ranch Wear. He’s been doing business here for 55 years, since the days when Wazee Street was lined with warehouses, shops and factories rather than restaurants and offices and lofts. The five-story Rockmount building at 1626 Wazee, built in 1908, housed…
