Year: 2007

The first crime tome that really stuck to my bones was Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, the psychological profile based on the 1924 Leopold-Loeb murder. I couldn’t put it down until I finished it — all spooked and riveted by its awful realities — at three in the morning. Fascination and revulsion…

“The Farley Mowat was an 180-foot all-black North Sea trawler that had been converted into, basically, a pirate ship,” says Colorado adventure writer Peter Heller. “Its bow was ice-reinforced — ideal for ramming — and mounted with water cannons for defense. Then, four days out of Melbourne, Australia, two welders…

As with any worthwhile tale, the beginnings of the Manhattan Short Film Festival started with a dream. “I just wanted to make the Olympics of film,” says festival founder Nicholas Mason, who started the movie melee one September day ten years ago by projecting a handful of short films onto…

Ballroom dancing: Is it the next big thing? If you ask the six celebrity finalists in tonight’s YWCA of Boulder County fundraiser, Dancing With the Boulder Stars — designer Richard Foy, banker Wendy Reynolds, real estate maven Stephen Schaller, entrepreneur and self-help author Theresa Szczurek and Boulder parking czar Molly…

When I lived with my artist roommate, we were always doing weird stuff — like printing “Sasquatch for President” banners during the 2004 election and making plaster casts of our faces. The latter activity wasn’t as fun as it might sound: We sat around waiting for the plaster to set,…

Trust me: It’s impossible to win an interview with Al Gore when your media credentials are ozone-thin. You’d think he was trying to save the planet; you’d think he was a big-name politician or even a movie star, with all the hoops and fire-walks involved in four little e-mail questions…

Just before The Matrix Revolutions was released, I had an in-depth conversation with several graduate philosophy students about the Matrix series up to that point. It was just as lofty and cerebral as you might imagine, with the obligatory references to René Descartes’s Discourse on the Method and a long…

The Colorado Avalanche is thirsty, and only a really big cup can quench that thirst. After an all-time low end to their 2006-2007 season — they fell just short of the playoffs for the first time in their eleven years as the Avs — the boys in burgundy and white…

There are certain books that you run to acquire the day they hit the shelves. This summer, that book for me was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver and family. Having read nearly everything Kingsolver has written, I couldn’t wait to join her on an adventure after my own heart…

Although Terry Gilliam is the best-known director to spring from the coils of Monty Python owing to productions such as 1985’s Brazil, Terry Jones may be the man most responsible for preserving the comedy troupe’s maddest celluloid moments. He co-directed 1975’s riotous Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Gilliam;…

Have you ever looked up “nothing” on Wikipedia? It’s a six-part entry. Similarly, the enormously popular Seinfeld was a sitcom about nothing, yet ran for nine seasons. Today, Will Eno’s Pulitzer finalist, Thom Pain (based on nothing) opens at the Bug Theatre. Clearly, there is something to this nothing. The…

I resigned myself long ago to the fact that I will never be a model. With a 5’4″ frame and no desire to starve my curves away, it’s just not something that’s in my future. But I still love fashion, and I love going out when there’s no cover charge…

Jax Fish House PR gal Kate Baird saw last year’s changing of the guard at the James Beard House as a great opportunity for top Jax toques Sheila Lucero and Hosea Rosenberg. So she asked the duo to collaborate on a sample menu and sent it off to new Beard…

“The best way to describe this issue,” says Jake Adam York, editor of Copper Nickel, “is if you threw a rock into a body of water and watched those ripples move throughout. Where the rock hits is obviously the point of deliberation, and while everything else may seem a little…

The beet takes center stage in Mead. The town of Mead, around 35 miles north of Denver, is steeped in sugar-beet history. It was founded more than a hundred years ago, when a railroad line was built through the area to transport beets to the refinery in Longmont. It’s fitting,…

The story goes like this: Corridor 44, at 1433 Larimer Street, was once a brothel owned by a reformed showgirl and her ornery husband. When the couple’s daughter began dallying with a city lowlife, the irate father sent a hit man to rub out the boyfriend — except the plan…

John Nathan, who fronts a group called the Rotten Gamblers, was born to perform during the fourth annual Hankfest showcase. He and Hank Williams, the country icon whose music is being celebrated tonight, share the same birthday as well as an appreciation for music founded on authenticity. “They’re simple three-chord…

Before there was Harry Potter, there was Discworld. Created by another internationally best-selling British author, Terry Pratchett, the fantasy series, which debuted in 1983, was set on a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle. In the tradition of The Lord of the…