When I watched Ferris Bueller’s idyllic ditch day for the first time — as a teen growing up in the same Chicago suburbia immortalized by John Hughes — I related more to the straitlaced best friend Cameron, who was destined to get busted for taking his dad’s fabulous car downtown…
It turns out that 24-year-old Matt Buschbacher already had experience leading underground groups of men when he moved out to Colorado and started the Denver Pick Up Artists Lair earlier this year. He’d also been a leader of the hate movement. Buschbacher had dropped off the radar of the Southern…
From a dingy stepstool, the auctioneer announced that he was starting with a bulk bid: one price for everything left in the pale-blue store at 46 Broadway formerly known as Crown Mercantile. He’d let people bid on individual items — vintage furniture, clothes, jewelry, toys and housewares, mostly picked out…
Denver comics Anthony “AD” Demmer and Akwame D say comedy is one of the oldest art forms in black history. For hundreds of years, laughter’s been a tool for healing and commenting on society. Just like the legendary Richard Pryor, the best comics are those willing to tell the truth…
In January, it looked like the McAdam family was finally on their way to a happy ending. Denver Juvenile Court was letting parents David and Tiffany bring home their oldest son, four-year-old Martin. Once he was settled, the Denver Department of Human Services would start transitioning the couple’s six-month-old baby,…
After seven days of deliberation in Arapahoe County — the longest trial Judge Stephen R. Ruddick’s courtroom had ever seen — Bill Stiffler was acquitted on six counts of animal cruelty on June 21. Witnesses who testified to the neglect they had seen and documented at Stiffler’s Denver-area horse rescue…
“No, I’m not going to relax!” “Stop strangling me, fucker! Fuck you! Just fucking shoot me!” The raving man was being held to the ground in the Office Depot parking lot at East Colfax Avenue and Pearl Street when Evan Herzoff walked by around 9:30 p.m. on April 8. The…
Debra Fine groans when she hears the title of Matt Buschbacher’s book: Date the Women of Your Dreams. “I hate that,” she says. “We judge people so quickly based on superficial things.” Fine is sitting on an airplane in California, about to return to Denver from one of her many…
At 37, Brandon was smart, good-looking and well-off. He’d enjoyed hookups and had girlfriends, but he’d always felt like the women had chosen him. He was tired of waiting for things to happen to him; he wanted to make them happen himself. So the Boulder property manager started studying. His…
You have to approach women. This is the very first step. They arent likely to approach you. You have to do something. When you look at a woman in the eyes, and she smiles, she thinks her job is done. If you dont approach her, she thinks you are rejecting…
Trapped inside a place where people come to die, John Gordy waits and watches. His athletic six-foot-five-inch frame is dead weight. Gordy has just enough use of his contorted right hand to control his electric wheelchair. The slender black man in his early forties is handsome despite his cracked front…
Last year, Boulderite John Georgis bought a school bus on eBay that came from Moline, Illinois. He tore off the roof and added logs, wood paneling — recycled, of course — and a rubber chicken. Inside, he installed saddles, recliners, a couch and disco balls. Thus, Banjo Billy’s Bus Tours…
I’ve always felt just as drunk after a day of drinking 3.2 as I do after a day of drinking any light beer. Yet friends and acquaintances claimed to despise 3.2. They’d go to great lengths to avoid it, even if they knew that 3.2 percent alcohol by weight is…
Blake Harrison sips on an Odell 5 Barrel Pale Ale as he talks about his two lifelong passions: public policy and finding the perfect beer. The Odell 5 is not his favorite — that place in his heart is reserved for Flying Dog Doggie Style Pale Ale — but it’s…
When Brenda Denton rolled into Denver in the late ’80s, she quickly made a name for herself on Capitol Hill. She was the Queen of Punk. Psycho Brenda. Brenda the Bitch. Her black leather jacket was hand-pierced with rows of fat, heavy screws that jutted out like spikes along her…
Where’s one of the best places to shop in Denver if you shun crowded malls and bustling Wal-Marts? Why, Denver International Airport, of course. USA Today, along with Executive Travel magazine editor Janet Libert, recently ranked DIA one of the ten best airports for shopping, thanks to its “locally made…
The Denver Dumb Friends League has charged the owner of a Denver-area horse rescue with six counts of neglect, alleging that animals in his charge have suffered and died for lack of proper care. Bill Stiffler, founder and president of Friends of Horses Rescue and Adoption, has brushed off similar…
Standing alone in the crowded hallway outside Denver Juvenile Court, Tiffany McAdam folds her arms tightly across her chest to calm her shaking. She is waiting for the hearing in which Judge Dana Wakefield will rule on the fate of her four-year-old son, Martin — the boy whom police took…
Jenni Przekwas is a self-proclaimed angel living on Capitol Hill. Her home is decorated in deep reds, calmed by candles and soft music. Quotes such as “On a good day I am so filled with love, I feel like my heart might burst” surround her kitchen. The 34-year-old single mom…
All eyes were on Mike Hoover. The 33-year-old autistic man had a typing machine propped in front of him and his mother at his side. The room was silent as Hoover reached his left arm toward his mother’s right hand and pulled it to the keyboard. Leaving his thumb and…
Bill Stiffler sits on the front porch of his office, his sun-crisped face shaded by the wide brim of his white cowboy hat. He’s watching over the ten acres that are home to Friends of Horses Rescue and Adoption, the nonprofit he started in 2001. A decade earlier, he had…
Genesis: Focus on the Family packed them in like sardines. At $35 a head, more than 1,500 teens, parents and youth-group leaders had converged on Colorado Springs from 21 states, Puerto Rico and Canada for the two-day Dare 2 Dig Deeper apologetics conference, aka the “Big Dig.” A few dozen…
