One night just before college graduation, Amy Butcher’s close friend Kevin met her for a drink and walked her home. It was just a one-block walk on a warm night in sleepy Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but he insisted, and she let him see her to her door. Then he went home…
When Andrea Moore’s artists’ residency culminates in an opening, it’s nothing glamorous. After all, it happens in her garage. “It’s rough,” she says. “There’s only one finished wall, so it’s not like there’s a whole lot of presentation space.” Still, there’s something charming about The Detached Garage — literally the…
The jury’s still out on the actual instructional value of the decrees in Perplexity Pictures’ web series Decrees, which debuts its first episode today. The show, which follows the exploits and misadventures of two twenty-something dudes trying to make it in this crazy world, compresses the character’s travails into dubious life-lessons (i.e.,…
Working on her sociology dissertation landed Maren Scull in some strange situations — like the time she ended up alone in a motel room with a newly released ex-con. Then again, most dissertations don’t involve male strippers. But Maren Scull’s did. She spent 18 months studying a strip club, Dandelion’s,…
Forsooth, the festivities of ye olde Colorado Renaissance Festival were greatly upset this Satyr-Daye by the young scallywag Connor Ward, aged 22, when the knave allegedly disturbe’d a jousting match, seize’d a sword from a nearbye haystack & absconde’d therefrom, with various citizenry in close pursuite, finally to be tackle’d…
Art is elemental to skateboarding. It’s the only sport where artwork comes as part of the essential equipment. Add the designated art-space on every skateboard deck to a culture with no teams and a bunch of hot-dogging outcasts with a penchant for self-abuse, and you get an aesthetic that tends…
Caitlin Doughty wrote the book on death: Last year’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, whose title references the popular Platters hit and the emotions associated therewith, but also ties to how actual smoke gets in your eyes when you’re cremating a corpse and have to go in there and stir the bones…
The ritual involved blowing into the cartridge, then the console, then the cartridge again, and inserting the cartridge just enough so that it snagged the edge of the console on its way down into to the satisfying springform click of its bed. That was long ago, but Roger Norquist and…
Editor’s note: In honor of Bike to Work Day 2013, we’re re-sharing Jef Otte’s timeless advice for drivers from 2011. Used to be, the only adults who rode bikes were either weird fitness freaks or those with multiple DUIs. Times have changed, however, and more bicyclists than ever are taking…
For his students at the University of Colorado Denver, where he was an associate professor of English, Jake Adam York had a reputation for being a hardass. You got the feeling it was a reputation he enjoyed. We feared him or we loved him — often both — and the…
The Lord notwithstanding, there were a couple of awesome things about growing up in the Calvinist parochial school system. JK — there was nothing awesome about growing up in the Calvinist parochial school system, but some aspects of it were more bearable than others. For example, sitting in chapel for…
Back in the days before MTV nailed down the formula of finding the worst assholes of any given demographic and putting them on television — back even before The Real World ushered in that glorious era — the network came up with some truly weird shit to air between music…
Certain liberals will try to tell you that Europeans are more cultured than Americans, that Europeans are refined people who sip tea in fancy ways and visit their various art museums while Americans are fat, vacuous slobs who lap up asinine sitcom entertainment like the grape-flavored corn syrup they enjoy…
There is no escape from the slow and inscrutable march of time. The passing of the seasons, the withering of these corporeal chains, the replacing of old malls with newer malls: All things must begin and so must end. Or, as Lord Byron put it, “Time! On whose arbitrary wing…
Earlier this month, artist Daniel Nilsson posted an ad on Craigslist inviting one lucky stranger to live with him in a 4′ x 8′ x 4′ box for exactly one week with no food. “It was kind of like a vacation,” he recently told Westword concerning his previous experience doing…
The 1997 Detroit Red Wings post-season was an awesome thing to behold for a fifteen-year-old in West Michigan. That’s when the Wings shut out the loathsome Anaheim Mighty Ducks — a hockey team named for a Disney movie about a fictional hockey team led by Emilio Estevez — and ended…
Perhaps it was their shared propensity for posting weird ads on Craigslist that was fated to bring them, like so many missed connections, together. Or maybe they’re just two weird dudes. Whatever it is, there’s something approaching ironic about the fact that Daniel Nilsson — who had been looking via…
Radium was hot at the turn of the twentieth century. Discovered by Marie Curie in 1898, it quickly became big business. People loved radium. They put it in watches, in dials, in paints. They figured it had some kind of curative powers, so they also put it in toothpaste, in…
In spite of his being just a wee tiny baby, my nine-month-old son has some surprisingly powerful pinchy-claws. In fact, combined with his baby fingernails, which are honed into needle-sharp points like tiny knives, it can hurt quite a bit when he grabs at you. Nevertheless, my girlfriend and I…
It was 1984 when the most METAL band of all time (Manowar, obviously) delivered the loudest documented show ever played. Clocking in at a max of 129.5 decibels — the sonic equivalent of a jackhammer — the show’s most brutal moment, as the legend goes, came during the playing of…
Scientists have long understood that farts are hilarious. What’s less understood, however, is why. In all seriousness, though, actual scientists have been trying to theoretically understand humor since the time of Aristotle without much success — until University of Colorado Boulder professor Pete McGraw came around with a pretty good…
It wasn’t long after former Westword staffer Joel Warner wrote about “Humor Professor” Peter McGraw (“The Nutty Professor,” August 26, 2010) that Warner went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Since then, he and McGraw have been traveling the world, trying to crack what they call…
