“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…
Dear Mexican: In 1983 or 1984, I was walking home down Haight Street in San Francisco one evening and stopped into Watusi Records to look through the dollar cutout bin. I flipped through it for a bit and then stopped dead when I saw the Jonny Chingas Pachuco LP. I…
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…
Dear Mexican: Can you please tell me something? How do you think it’s fair that all the people who come to our country and stay get treated far better than some of the people who have busted their butt all their lives here? Tell me, how is that fair?! You…
“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?…
Dear Mexican: What is it about Mexicans and collecting old cars? I have three Mexican neighbors with middle-class incomes, but in each case, when the old car or truck wouldn’t run anymore, they would buy a nearly new replacement and then just let the old clunker sit in the driveway…
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…
In the wake of the shootings in Newton, Connecticut two weeks ago today, experts have tried to find clues in the dozens of school shootings over the last three decades. They’ve found that 60 percent of the shootings happened in small towns. And almost inevitably, the culprit has been a…
Dear Mexican: My wife (who’s a half-Mexican L.A. native, just so you don’t think we’re a couple of white hipster dickheads) and me (I’m white, but an immigrant, so I hope that lowers my dickhead factor a little) have had it up to our orejas with our Hispanic neighbor’s music…
Running for governor “was the most fun I’ve ever had,” Tom Tancredo said last week, in a conversation that ranged from his rogue 2010 candidacy against John Hickenlooper and Dan Maes to Amendment 64 to the slopper at Gray’s Coors Tavern to the Sudan to immigration. A lot about iimmigration…
No one could have predicted that all the wacky doomsday predictions tied to the Mayan calendar and December 21, 2012 would mark a new beginning for PeaceJam, the homegrown effort that links Nobel Peace Prize winners with kids, teaching them how to make a difference in the world. But assuming…
