Just in time for holiday stocking stuffing, Alvertis Simmons — local rabble-rouser, black activist, disgraced former city employee and local Million Man March organizer — has written a book about his adventures in Denver. Although it’s titled Hold Your Position: Denver’s Version of the Million Man March, the 119-page self-published…
It’s December. The malls are crowded, there’s ice on the streets and, as always, the Denver City and County Building is lit up like a mosquito caught in an electric bug trap. In other words, according to lawyer and local Freedom From Religion Foundation activist Bob Tiernan, “‘Tis the season…
Nothing breeds success like, well, success. And John Fielder has had plenty of it — on the business side, anyway. Although Amendment 25, the growth-control initiative he helped create and publicize, was bulldozed into oblivion like a Douglas County prairie dog habitat on November 7, the photographer’s must-have coffee-table book,…
Now that the election season is (mostly) over, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at a lot of malls and stores around town — except, of course, for the giant wall on the back of the Denver Pavilions. As usual, it looks a lot like nothing. Mall manager…
It was February 1998, and as Chip Berry looked around the nearly empty Belcaro Shopping Center, his old anger came back. For four years, his landlord had been promising to fill the center with shops that would help bring business back to the old strip mall. Hodel’s Drug Store, which…
Denver International Airport, that little bigtop on the prairie, has never exactly blended in with the natural environment. And why should it? DIA’s an airport, not a state park, and its form should follow a function dedicated to great planes, not the Great Plains. But despite its size, noise and…
Taking their cue from police departments that solicit help from TV shows such as America’s Most Wanted to track down the most elusive of criminals and clues, the folks at the Colorado Department of Unclaimed Funds, part of the state treasurer’s office, recently gave out info on their toughest –…
As governor, Dick Lamm made national headlines when he pronounced that we all have a “duty to die” and get out of the way. But today the former Governor Gloom is only 65, which means he may have another twenty, or even thirty, years left before he fulfills that duty…
The Rocky Mountain News apparently didn’t have room for third-party candidates in its October 22 voters’ guide, but it managed to make some space on Tuesday after the Libertarian Party coughed up a chunk of change for a full-page ad listing the state Libertarian candidates that the Rocky didn’t –…
Russ Seward gets up with the prairie chickens. So does Carol Twiss. In fact, so many people in eastern Yuma County wake with the birdies that the local historical society has printed buttons featuring a picture of the prairie chicken and the slogan “I got up with the prairie chickens.”…
They kick, they scratch, they fight for attention, but third-party candidates just don’t seem to get any respect in Colorado. And despite the biggest push by Libertarian and Green Party candidates in state history, no third wheels made it into the Rocky Mountain News’s October 22 Election 2000 Voter Guide…
When Lieutenant Governor Joe Rogers organized a conference on youth education last spring, he got a lot of help: The University of Denver lent him the Magness Arena at cost; BeWell.net, a local Internet provider, set up a Web site; polling company Floyd Ciruli and Associates pitched in its expertise;…
No matter how scary this Halloween becomes, it can’t be as frightening as the vision of Halloween 1995 conjured up by Suzanne Galante, at the time a 22-year-old Channel 7 intern. At a party at a house in Boulder, she fell upon a longtime fantasy: a fellow with “peach-fuzzy sideburns,”…
When Colorado Public Radio woke up on September 29, it hadn’t exactly turned into a cockroach. But that didn’t makes its fall subscription drive — or, as one CPR host called it on the air, the “Franz Kafka fundraiser” — any less surreal. For the second time during the ever-growing…
While Denver braces for political fireworks — as well as a few explosions — over Saturday’s Columbus Day parade, the city’s still getting fallout over an actual, if unheralded, fireworks show last Thursday that marked the Pepsi Center’s first anniversary. A full-page ad in Sunday’s Denver Post (a Pepsi Center…
Spit happens to hometown girl Amy Van Dyken. During Saturday’s Olympics coverage, NBC’s camera caught the spittin’ image of Van Dyken engaged in a trademark intimidation tactic: hawking a loogie into a competing swimmer’s lane, in this case that of Dutch rival Inge de Bruijn. NBC swimming analyst Rowdy Gaines…
Cheap shots: On Friday, Arapahoe County sheriff’s deputies responded to the ICG building near the Denver Tech Center on a report that a shot had been fired at the top-story conference room, breaking a window. According to the sheriff’s office, the area was checked and no suspects were found, but…
Rocky Mountain Animal Defense was out prowling again this weekend, protesting the use of dogs in labs at the University of Colorado medical school. The group had already made the papers several times this year, even convincing Nederland state representative Tom Plant to propose a bill that would ban med-school…
Michael Carrier knows that asking politicians to be civil with one another is like asking lions not to chase zebras. But he just can’t help himself: His vision of politics is one with fewer carcasses on the Serengeti. That’s why Carrier, who is president of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado,…
The Community College of Denver doesn’t worry too much about admission standards. Just about any potential student who wants to take a class there knows that he can probably get in. Unfortunately, that same approach seems to have been taken by computer hackers. CCD’s home page, at ccd.rightchoice.org, has been…
The tax man recently came knocking at state treasurer Mike Coffman’s door after the Republican businessman failed to pay the quarterly withholding taxes for his company, Colorado Property Management Group Inc. Embarrassed by the snafu, Coffman says he hadn’t been keeping abreast of the day-to-day business — which he used…
They could be separated at birth (and by a few decades) — self-made men who share a hatred of the media and a love of guitars, animals (one shoots them with cameras, one with guns), the military, their fathers, America, Charlton Heston, and writing about themselves in endless detail. In…
