Plutonium lasts forever…or close enough. Certainly the stories surrounding Rocky Flats, the now-defunct nuclear-weapons plant sixteen miles northwest (and that means upwind) of Denver, are never-ending. The most controversial current chapter involves the six tons of weapons-grade plutonium scheduled for transport to South Carolina, so that the last phase of…
They speak from the bookshelves. “What’s going on?” murmurs Greg Lopez, the Rocky Mountain News columnist killed in a hit-and-run six years ago, when he was just 35. Some of his best columns — and there are many — are collected in a volume whose name echoes Lopez’s trademark greeting,…
Denver remains the Sally Field of cities. “You like us, you really like us!” we cry out in gratitude whenever anyone pays us the slightest bit of attention. Best city for pets? We’re there. Best city for bikes? Ditto. Biggest laundromat? Then-congresswoman Pat Schroeder offered that sop back in the…
Somewhere down the slope was my father, happily unaware that I’d wrapped myself around one of Winter Park’s historic trail signs. We were carving out our own piece of history. Forty years before, my father had introduced me to Colorado, and skiing (not that the two can be separated), on…
The new year was barely a day old when a city truck appeared out of the pre-dawn murk on my northwest Denver street. Minutes later, it had left a calling card for one of my neighbors: a Denver boot, clamped to the left front wheel of the car. It was…
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…
