As if Scott Gessler didn’t have enough trouble. The Secretary of State is already being investigated by theIndependent Ethics Commission to determine whether he violated the law by using office funds on a trip to Florida. (Gessler has sued the commission; a hearing is set for Thursday). Meanwhile, the Denver…
Twenty years ago, a new member of the Arvada City Council was making waves in the normally sleepy suburb. Joanne Conte, who’d been elected in 1991, was shaking things up so much that then-Westword staff writer Karen Bowers started working on a political story about the situation. But she got…
Raise a glass to the death of this year’s dopiest bill — so far. Senator Greg Brophy had proposed that parents be able to buy grown-up beverages at Colorado bars and restaurants for children over seventeen. But yesterday a Senate committee decided that Brophy’s “Drinks With Dad” proposal was all…
The truth, like plutonium, has a way of leaking out. After two years of deliberations, the Rocky Flats grand jury wanted to charge eight individuals for environmental crimes at the nuclear weapons plant — but the Justice Department declined to indict, and instead sent the jurors home in the spring…
The 107th National Western Stock Show rode out of town yesterday, leaving behind a passel of questions about how the Stock Show complex and concept can be rebranded for the future. One innovation this year was free parking, but overall attendance was also down to its lowest level since 2004…
Westword was only a few years old when a housewife who lived in a mobile home in Commerce City told us she wanted to write a humor column for the paper. We declined the offer: She wasn’t funny, we said. That housewife soon became known around the world as Roseanne,…
One mystery of the legendary Lost Dutchman gold mine has been solved. The remains found in late November in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix have been identified as those of Jesse Capen, “the gentle giant” who’d worked as a night bellman at the downtown Sheraton for almost a dozen…
“No convention to be held here this year will exceed in importance the gathering of this week,” the Rocky Mountain News pronounced in January 1906, the year the National Western Stock Show got its start, as an adjunct of the annual Colorado Cattle and Horse Growers Association convention by the…
How to put profit back in the non-profit National Western Stock Show — enough to keep it corralled in its current location? That’s the question a group of NWSS officials, business types and city representatives are studying, and their mission includes the possibility of establishing a Western heritage center. They…
Editor’s note: Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday that got its start here in Colorado. The Westword office is closed, but Latest Word will be posting occasional updates. Watch for our full roster of stories to return tomorrow. The country’s largest parade in honor of Martin…
Suffering from the flu? As soon as you can hold a book or tablet without your hand shaking, find a copy of Katherine Ann Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and remember this: It could be much, much worse. And in Denver in 1918, it was…
Governor John Hickenlooper is scheduled to speak at today’s reopening of the Aurora Century 16, where “an evening of remembrance” will honor the victims of the shootings on July 20 during a screen of The Dark Knight Rises. Let’s hope the event works as well as Hickenlooper’s subsequent talk about…
“Patty C. is so out of touch and over-the-hill that she buys into the pretend anonymity nonsense… or even the entire absurd pretense of reviewing dispensaries, by a recreational stoner pretending to be a medical patient.” Yes, DonkeyHotay is back at the keyboard, commenting again, and again, and again…
Is Colorado at the center of the U.S. cultural divide? Or does it just seem that way because the national media would rather capture America’s pulse in Denver than Dayton. Would a little beauty queen’s murder have gotten as much coverage if it had happened in Biloxi, not Boulder? But…
What should happen to the site of a tragedy? It’s been a month since the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and yesterday members of that community met to discuss what should become of Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 died. Aurora faced that same question after the July 20 Aurora theater…
And we thought the Broncos orange cowboy hat that Mayor Michael Hancock sported yesterday as grand marshal of the Stock Show parade downtown represented the ultimate cultural collision in couture. But just a block away, an icky icon has been gussied up in honor of “United in Orange Friday.” Finally,…
Today is officially “Dress Western Day,” with a parade through downtown Denver marking the kick-off of the 107th National Western Stock Show; tomorrow is “United in Orange Friday,” pushing this town’s other show ponies, the Denver Broncos. What’s a busy mayor to wear?…
As lawmakers head to the State Capitol for opening day of the Colorado Legislature, critics are already taking aim at new gun-control proposals. Some will be rallying outside the building for a 1 p.m. Guns for Everyone event. Others are arming themselves — literally — for the legislative battles ahead…
If at first you don’t succeed, tri, tri again. The first Biennial of the Americas was a very ambitious, very confused celebration that brought international stars to Denver in July 2010. So confused, in fact, that when the time came for a second biennial, the event was pushed back to…
At the downtown Sheraton, where he worked as a bellhop, they called Jesse Capen “the gentle giant.” And he had a big dream — to find the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains. But after Capen disappeared in the area east of Phoenix three years ago, he became part…
Yes, that’s the entrance to El Diablo, the restaurant in the big corner space of the old First Avenue Hotel building — which was tagged, again, this morning with “Danger” signs and a notice to vacate…immediately. Two city officials, accompanied by a Denver police officer, posted the notices shortly after…
When the dust finally settled on December 31, a complicated $10 million land swap involving the Colorado State Land Board, Boulder and Boulder County, Jefferson County and the Department of the Interior — which now owns Rocky Flats, the former nuclear weapons plant — had gone through. And that paves…
