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…
Get me rewrite! Denver loves beating dead horses — especially dead Broncos. That’s what the city’s been doing all August, ever since the Denver Post decided to rewrite history by calling the team’s new pigskin palace “Mile High stadium” — despite the fact that there’s a perfectly good, if defunct,…
Once upon a time in lower downtown Denver, before anyone ever dreamed that there might one day be a hip, happening LoDo — or, in fact, ever dreamed that the rundown area of abandoned warehouses and pawnshops might one day be given the nickname “LoDo” — there was Larimer Square…
From my back yard — a polite term for “mess of weeds overlooking a highway interchange” — the history of the city stretches wide. When gold was found at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek almost 150 years ago, that discovery inspired the Rush to the…
A thousand miles of highway from where I’d left Montana that morning, the blue Qwest signs welcomed me back to Denver. From gazing at stars, I was now reduced to seeing stars over corporate Colorado’s continued incursions on the skyline (a vision no doubt clouded by my inability to get…
The Boulder City Council just banned circuses, five years too late. The circus came to Boulder on December 26, 1996 — the day that six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was reported missing — and it’s never left. Although the Ramsey action occasionally moves out of the center ring and into some lunatic-fringe…
Crested Butte is notorious for its nude ski days, its invention of the fat-tire bicycle — and its wildflower walks. This weekend, the old mining town is just the place to stop and smell the primroses. And the columbine. And the cinquefoil. Crested Butte is known as the Wildflower Capital…
First things first: The new Broncos stadium does not look like a diaphragm. A spaceship, maybe. A bedpan, sure. But a diaphragm? No way — unless it’s a diaphragm that’s just gone through your washing machine’s spin cycle, an activity not recommended by its manufacturer. The new Broncos stadium does…
