The 16th Street Mall today was the same mess it’s been for a week: ugly T-shirts, people selling ugly T-shirts, and bewildered delegates and staffers haggling over a final-day discount on said ugly T-shirts. I dropped in to see my buddy Biker Jim at Biker Jim’s Gourmet Dogs in Skyline…

Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah. No, seriously, do it! Nada Surf, Cold War Kids, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Silversun Pickups Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2008 Manifest Hope Art Gallery Better than: Hanging out in the industrial stretches of north Denver when the DNC is not in town. By 6…

Spike Lee, with relish. In the few minutes before Bill Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night, I was inching along the perimeter of the floor in the same type of delegate scrum I’d experienced the night before when the Pepsi Center started vomiting celebrities. Suddenly, I…

Bill Clinton makes a point. I made it onto the Pepsi Center floor on Wednesday in time to see Melissa Etheridge belt out a medley of “God Bless America,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Give Peace a Chance” and “Born in the U.S.A.” — for the latter, she left out…

Bloggers of the world, unite. The so-called “bloggers lounge” at the Pepsi Center during the Democratic National Convention, which I got a chance to eyeball on Wednesday, was a small room accessible through a door in the press room. The space was small, poorly lit, and had an ugly couch…

“Type faster, damn you.” The Democratic National Convention press room was located deep in the guts of the Pepsi Center, and when I stopped by on Wednesday afternoon, nearly every seat was occupied — and no one seemed to be having the slightest fun. It reminded me of the scene…

NBC’s David Gregory. During the Democratic National Convention, the back corridors of the Pepsi Center didn’t only serve as a staging area for carefully planned “spontaneous” demonstrations. They also led to green rooms and dressing rooms for assorted media organizations — and lucky thing. Over the past two days, I…

Smokin’ hot stars Jon Hamm and John Slattery in Mad Men and with Mayor John Hickenlooper at the Pepsi Center. I’d been getting kind of cranky about all the celebrity hype surrounding the Democratic National Convention. Where were the big parties? a radio producer wanted to know. The only party…

Look what they found. Upon entering the Pepsi Center on Wednesday, I tried to rendezvous with Westword cartoonist Kenny Be, who was working in the bloggers lounge, located in a part of the venue I hadn’t visited the day before. This attempt took me into the bowels of the building,…

Belly up to the bar. After getting through the security line outside the Pepsi Center on Wednesday afternoon with much more ease than had been the case the day before, I decided to try out the pass I’d obtained for the CNN Grill, located in the Brooklyn’s restaurant space. At…

The DNC is smashing. I first saw the remains of this unfortunate lil’ feller as I moved past the first security checkpoint outside the Pepsi Center early on Tuesday morning — and when I headed toward the arena on Wednesday after five p.m., he was still there. Way to go,…

“How do you spell ‘lunatic’?” The funniest thing about the scene from Wednesday captured here? Not the costume of the guy on the right. No, the most amusing part was that the reporter was seriously interviewing His Holiness as if he was an expert on church abuse. Then again, the…

Please give generously. Seen on Market Street en route to the Democratic National Convention festivities at the Pepsi Center on Wednesday. Hope everything worked out for this guy — because clearly, the people of the Big Easy have suffered enough. — Michael Roberts…

Elvis has left the building — the hard way. After Hillary Clinton moved that the delegates at the Democratic National Convention make Barack Obama the Dems’ presidential candidate by acclimation, the throng outside MSNBC’s headquarters behind Union Station erupted in applause. After watching them celebrate for a few minutes, I…

As you can see, the elephant is topless. Amid MSNBC’s coverage of the Wednesday roll call of votes at the Democratic National Convention, a truck affiliated with a conservative organization — I didn’t catch the name — rolled up to the curb opposite the net’s headquarters to deliver the message,…

The Rocky Mountain News’ front-page headline described the mobs that have descended on the 16th Street Mall as a “hundred-year flood of humanity,” and that’s about right. How packed with people is the area? Yesterday, I walked from Westword’s offices, at approximately 10th and Broadway, to the mall with the…

That’s Pat Buchanan on the lower level of MSNBC’s Election Express. I arrived at MSNBC’s Democratic National Convention headquarters about midway through the roll call of votes that finally resulted in the formal nomination of Barack Obama as the Dems’ presidential standard-bearer. Speakers amplified the voices of co-hosts Chris Matthews…

Choo choo. MSNBC’s headquarters for the Democratic National Convention can be found behind Union Station, which may explain why it looks disturbingly like part of Disneyland’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. During the first Denver taping of The Daily Show during convention week, host Jon Stewart ridiculed the net for leaving…

Hello, you must be going. When we stopped by the visitor’s bureau booth in Pavilion 3 outside the Pepsi Center yesterday — chips, beer and hits of oxygen! — the conversation turned to an e-mail that several Denver bold names had received that day, a painful slap in the face…

Slide show Anyone who’s cruised the streets of the Denver this week has encountered a slew of Barack Obama-inspired T-shirts, both on sale racks and on bodies. Here are 20 we’ve seen, ranked from worst to best on a scale of 1-10 Obamas. Get’em while they last! Or don’t!…

Slide show This week’s Westword features a cover story by Jessica Centers about Mike Johnston, principal at Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts in Thornton and one of Obama’s education advisers. For photos of Johnston, his students and teachers, see Mark Manger’s slide show. And read on for the text…