Ka-Ching!

Tourism boosters kick off the summer season at a rally today at the State Capitol. And what a season it should be: Come July 1, the state’s annual tourism budget will increase from $5 million to $20 million (pending final legislative approval). But at the same time those boosters tout…

Chile Today, Hot Tomorrow

You don’t find green chile in Mexico — but here in Denver, it’s the signature dish at most Mexican restaurants, a sauce/soup/stew of green chiles (always) and tomatoes (sometimes) and onions (sometimes) and pork (sometimes). Order green chile in Puerto Vallarta, or Phoenix, or Cheyenne, and you get a side…

Down and Dirty

The price of a particular, peculiar piece of Colorado real estate is dropping through the floor. Back on September 23, 2004, in Home Security, we told you of an unusual home-ownership opportunity: a circa 1960, 50,000 square-foot missile-silo complex out on the former Lowry Bombing Range, as well as the…

The Writing’s on the Wall

Maybe the City of Denver isn’t as backward as Marc Ecko and his attorney, David Lane, thought it was. The pair threatened to sue the city for First Amendment infringements if officials didn’t overturn the anti-graffiti ordinances in time for a proposed graffiti festival. Maybe Lane got busy with all…

Terrorist Likes Us, He Really Likes Us

Denver’s about to get The Real World, but four years ago we had a shot at getting a much bigger piece of a world that was — and remains — all too painfully real. “In the name of Allah,” began the 29-page, handwritten pleading filed in U.S. District Court for…

Foraging and Fine Dining

Nothing in the house for dinner? Just step outside, scoop some little critters off the ground and pluck a few berries from the garden, and you have the makings for a tasty snack of “black currant and roasted ant tarts.” That’s just one of the delicacies on the menu at…

A House Divided

Some day in 2008, you’ll be able to stand on top of the 33-story Ameristar Casino in Black Hawk (right by the pool) and have a clear view of the gold fields that gave birth to Colorado’s past. The future looks cloudier. At last Thursday’s ceremony unveiling Ameristar’s big plans,…

Mining History for Laughs

Aggressive panhandling is forbidden in Denver, but at The Mock Trial of Baby Doe Tabor, a Colorado History Group/Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame production, the cast will be begging shamelessly for laughs. Patty Limerick, Mary Mullarkey and Tom Noel will prosecute Colorado’s most notorious homewrecker on a variety of charges,…

No Whine Before Its Time

Quick! Call a lawyer! Student Jason Sharman is still several years away from achieving that status, but as the president of the University of Colorado at Denver Pre-Law Society, he’s already getting a pretty good education in the Law of Unintended Consequences. Or maybe CU really intended for events like…

Flats, Busted

After months of testimony and weeks of deliberation, the ten jurors considering the case of Merilyn Cook, et al., vs. Rockwell International Corporation and the Dow Chemical Company had finally reached a verdict. But before it was revealed, U.S. District Judge John Kane had a few words to say. “Through…

Photo Finish

If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, I should simply have snapped a photo outside of Zengo on Monday night. Inside, the restaurant was turning a record number of tables — all thanks to Denver Restaurant Week, the promotion that runs through March 3 and is packing the…

Peak Performance

Lewis and Clark are so yesterday. This is Zebulon Pike’s year. In 1806, Pike led an expedition exploring the Southwest, an adventure that took him through what is now Colorado Springs to the base of the mountain that bears his name. (He never climbed it.) An exhibit commemorating that trip,…

Testing Boundaries

Okay, so John Holly’s Asian Bistro in Lone Tree isn’t Super Star Asian (the incredible dim sum place at 2200 West Alameda) or the old Mee Yee Lin (another incredible dim sum place that became a merely passable dim sum place with great shu mai and incredible dumpling soup after…

Testing Boundaries

Okay, so John Holly’s Asian Bistro in Lone Tree isn’t Super Star Asian (the incredible dim sum place at 2200 West Alameda) or the old Mee Yee Lin (another incredible dim sum place that became a merely passable dim sum place with great shu mai and incredible dumpling soup after…

Pumpkin Pie Martini

Drink of the week? We were looking for the drink of the season, and it wasn’t going down all that well. Twenty-eight restaurants had signed up for the Denver Convention & Visitors Bureau’s first Mile High Libations contest — that added up to 31 drinks, each bearing a Mile-High friendly…

Hall of Shame

Shame was the name of the game in 2005. Just when it seemed this state’s bad behavior had gotten as low as it could go, the bottom dropped out — or, in the case of Bob Dougherty, the Home Depot party pooper, the bottom stuck smack in the forefront of…

The Butt of the Joke

At least Home Depot didn’t accuse Bob Dougherty of shoplifting. Michael Panorelli, a carpenter in Massachusetts, was buying lumber at a local Home Depot. His client handed him a pencil to do some calculations, which Panorelli subsequently pocketed. He didn’t realized his mistake until a Home Depot worker caught up…

Going to Pot

“Mind if I smoke?” asks Frank Rich, Denver’s drunken ambassador. Who could mind? We’re sitting in Club 404, a 53-year-old bar in the heart of Denver, a town that’s suddenly turned into America’s new-age sin city, a place where vice is very nice — if, in fact, it qualifies as…

A Peace of the Action

Back when Ivan Suvanjieff was a society columnist for exactly 87 days, Cherry Hills matrons “would rub their fake boobs on my arm,” he remembers. Today he’s rubbing shoulders with Nobel Peace Prize winners — “the Nobels,” he and partner Dawn Engle call them. As in, “The Nobels told us…

Alarm Clock

FRI, 11/4 “For white people,” says Oak Chezar, “seeing their own privilege is like fish seeing that they’re in water.” Chezar and her troupe of performance artists, Vox Feminista, plan to make audiences step back and reassess their complacency about — and complicity in — the abuses of race and…

Ghoul Crazy

SAT 10/29 Tom Noel is no stranger to Fairmount Cemetery, the final resting place of some of Denver’s most noteworthy names. Back when he was a grad student in history at the University of Colorado at Denver, Noel — aka “Dr. Colorado” — worked at Fairmount, Denver’s second-oldest cemetery, as…

Dirty Pictures

The lights dimmed, and there on the screen at the front of the room was a sight as obscene as anything that’s ever hit Judge John Kane’s court: the towering incinerator of Building 771 at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Glowing. To FBI agent Jon Lipsky, who’d been investigating…