Jefferson County just doesn’t get the message. When confronted with bad news, Jeffco inevitably decides to kill the messenger rather than contemplate the message. Which, almost as inevitably, is this: Someone screwed up. Again. The most recent screwup involves more leaked documents coming out of the Columbine investigation (the grand-champion…
The people have a right to know — but public officials have a slippery grasp on that basic tenet of democracy. On Monday, Attorney General Ken Salazar and Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas convened the first meeting of a task force designed to clear the air around Columbine –…
Somewhere down the slope was my father, happily unaware that I’d wrapped myself around one of Winter Park’s historic trail signs. We were carving out our own piece of history. Forty years before, my father had introduced me to Colorado, and skiing (not that the two can be separated), on…
The new year was barely a day old when a city truck appeared out of the pre-dawn murk on my northwest Denver street. Minutes later, it had left a calling card for one of my neighbors: a Denver boot, clamped to the left front wheel of the car. It was…
According to the Peter Principle, a business theory formulated by Canadian Lawrence Peters back in 1968, in a hierarchy, people tend to rise to the level of their incompetence. But in Boulder, that earnest, non-hierarchical community in the shadow of the Flatirons, people rise far higher than that. Like so…
Feelings, nothing more than feelings. It’s almost time to say so long to Argenbright Security, the screeners at Denver International Airport who put such enthusiasm into their work (“Busted!” October 11, 2001). Last month, the Department of Transportation announced that the federal government would no longer be doing business with…
Back at the turn of the last century, lower downtown was the jumping-off point for thousands of travelers who arrived in town by train and then set out to earn their fortunes — some honestly, some less so. A hundred years later, on September 29, 2000, Prince Ali Patrik Pahlavi…
Wes McKinley has never washed a vehicle. A horse, yes. But in the arid southeastern corner of Colorado where he lives, “washing a truck is a waste of water,” McKinley says. “A waste of precious liquid.” Out in Walsh, just sixteen miles from the Oklahoma border, they talk a lot…
“I’m not comfortable at this point becoming part of the story,” Brian Maass told Denver City Council’s DIA committee meeting Tuesday morning. Too late! The Channel 4 reporter has been a part of the story since well before Maass’s station actually aired his first report on DIA security last Thursday…
When visiting the National Western Stock Show, make sure your first stop is the booth selling replicas of Old West lawmen’s badges. Wearing one commands respect…and apparently demands free items. At this year’s Stock Show — the 96th incarnation of the annual event that fills Denver’s air with reminders that…
Those blue beacons lighting up the Denver skyline must emit mysterious waves that hypnotize everyone in sight. How else to explain why, when several states are raising holy hell about Qwest’s latest efforts to monitor your phone habits, interrupt your dinner and spill your private data, it’s been relatively quiet…
The families of the Columbine victims leave no stone unturned as they search for the truth. They keep looking under rocks, making dark discoveries — and then the worms start turning. The worms have been wiggling every which way since U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock threw out most of the…
On the evening of December 20, the lights will go down and the curtain will go up on the Eulipions Theater Company’s twelfth presentation of The Black Nativity. The play, written by Langston Hughes in 1961, uses the birth of Christ to build a bridge between African culture and twentieth-century…
Colorado got a glimpse of hell with Columbine. It also showed Coloradans what it takes to start making your way back from the abyss: money, and lots of it. And then still more money to manage the money. “It costs money to give money away,” says Phil Nash, director of…
Without all the flag-waving, nobody would have noticed the penises. After all, they’d hung in the Canyon Gallery of the Boulder Public Library for three weeks before the library received its first complaint about “Hanging ’em Out to Dry,” one of fifty pieces included in Art Triumphs Over Domestic Violence,…
Shhh! No complaining in the library! Or about the library. Last November, the Denver Public Library proudly announced it had been named the top library in the nation. Its new building had already snagged national awards, it had recently fended off the evil Dr. Laura (“The Doctor Is Out,” September…
In the middle of October, James Goodwin, a 34-year veteran of United Airlines who’d spent the last two years as chairman and CEO, sat down and composed a letter to his troops. As a rallying cry and a sign of confidence in this country, it was only slightly less inspiring…
For years, activist Adrienne Anderson has been a thorn in the side of bureaucrats who would rather bury the garbage of Colorado’s past than make it public. But this fall, that thorn came out smelling like a rose. In May 1997, less than a year after Anderson had been officially…
Andrew Hudson, press secretary for Mayor Wellington Webb, breezed through Denver International Airport security on Tuesday morning — but then, he’d arrived at the airport at 5 a.m., five hours before his scheduled flight. It would be the first time he’d flown out of DIA since the September 11 terrorist…
Touchy, touchy. Since I wrote last week about Denver International Airport’s overly enthusiastic, and absolutely inexplicable, frisking of females that insulted numerous travelers and stalled security-screening lines (“Busted!”), numerous readers have provided their own accounts. “I was one of those lucky females wearing a Victoria’s Secret underwire bra that set…
War is heck. After the terrorist strikes, we all recognized that profiling was not only politically expedient, but suddenly politically correct. We accepted, if reluctantly, that certain males of certain nationalities would be subjected to more stringent study at airports, a more thorough going-over at security stops. We never suspected…
The most common job for professional handymen these days? Fixing all those home-improvement projects that amateur handymen have botched in their own homes. “That’s probably 50 percent of our business, fixing things that people make a mistake on because it looks so darn simple,” says Andy Bell, president of Handyman…
