Paul Orosz was willing to pay for his crime. Like thousands of others who commute through Commerce City, the 33-year-old software engineer had been caught speeding by the city’s photo-radar system. “I saw a flash,” says Orosz, “and thought to myself, ‘What the hell?’ Then two weeks later I got…

Around the world in eighty days has been reduced to eighty seconds. That’s about the time it takes to call up a Boulder company’s Web site and take a peek at any one of the hundreds of real-time images it offers from Bourbon Street to Buenos Aires. Digital Camera Network,…

When you’re working 24-hour shifts on an ambulance crew, there’s always plenty of time to kill while waiting for someone to almost get killed. Upstairs at Columbine Ambulance headquarters in Littleton, the restless paramedics hang out in a day room that resembles a college dorm. On a typical morning, near…

Singer John Denver has his fans, but none of them is as devout as the Reverend Mark Boyer. Editor of The Mirror, a Catholic newspaper in Springfield, Missouri, Boyer has written a 132-page book, Seeking Grace With Every Step: The Spirituality of John Denver, that analyzes the religious themes in…

An hour before Frank Martinez’s first professional boxing match, his uncle is chain-smoking cigarettes while his mother, Irene, paces among the gathering crowd at the Great Room in LoDo on January 22, her fight program rolled tightly in her fist. But if these two could see the fighter their Frankie,…

Ken Fleck’s former career as an oil wildcatter in Kansas was a series of risky maneuvers–where do you drill and how deep? His present career as a calendar publisher may seem much more tame, but not the way Fleck does it. He’s taken the plunge into slick, specialty products like…

There are those who think that communes reached their popular peak in the Sixties, but a new style of communal living called CoHousing is springing up in Boulder. These residential developments, which combine private and public living spaces, have helped some people solve their growing feelings of social isolation. CoHousing’s…

The Denver Junior Police Band, once plagued by scandal, has returned after an eight-year hiatus and is again trying to keep kids off the streets by getting them out there pounding the pavement as a marching band. Originally struck up in 1937, the band grew to be more than a…

Six sophomores enrolled in German II file into room 208 at South High School and find their seats behind an array of microphones set up as if they were at a congressional hearing. There’s a television where the teacher usually stands. The kids chatter and chew on candy canes until…

Motorola ad campaign for its new high-tech Sport Radio walkie-talkie that pokes fun at the supposedly high cost of wilderness rescues has inflamed Colorado’s search-and-rescue squads. “You can’t find a decent rescue for under $100,000 these days,” reads a version of the ad in the December issue of Popular Science…

One of the most notable restrictions on the Oklahoma City bombing case, which has also been applied to the current civil case against O.J. Simpson, is the ban on live coverage inside the courtroom. But the indomitable spirit of capitalism, combined with the insatiable appetite of the press, has proved…

During the frigid days of winter, 23-year-old Matthew John Cole can’t help thinking about summer nights spent with his friends and family at the venerable Nor-West Drive-In in Broomfield. Unfortunately for Cole, many of his neighbors in that part of the Front Range are thinking of something newer and slicker,…

Frank Rich took his first drink when he was ten years old. “My dad came home from work with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” Rich recalls. “He put on a Hank Williams record, poured my older brother and I a drink, and I thought to myself, ‘Today I’m a man.’…

Denver’s Journal Graphics did a killer business last year thanks to the world’s fascination with the O.J. Simpson murder trial. But it took just one computer glitch this past summer for the local television transcription firm to lose two-thirds of its business and be forced to lay off thirty employees…

Dr. Paul Hamilton always chose his own path. Sometimes he created one out of thin air. Or sand. His son Skip recalls one such incident more than forty years ago in Egypt. Taking his family on an adventure, the Denver physician drove a station wagon into a stretch of desert…

In April 1994 rancher John Avery of southwestern Colorado noticed that one of his elk herd was ill. Now, more than two years later, Avery himself is feeling both sick and angry. His herd’s been quarantined, several elk have had their throats cut or have been shot to death, an…

For the past year, a Minneapolis housepainter has been using his weapon of choice, the fax machine, to bombard the public and media with thousands of fliers decrying Boston Chicken’s lack of environmental awareness. But don’t mistake Frank Erickson for just an environmentalist. He considers himself a modern-day crusader. Erickson’s…

Congress passed a Republican-sponsored bill last week that will cut down administrative costs for ski resorts and the U.S. Forest Service by untangling the complicated formula under which the resorts pay for the use of public land. The so-called Ski Fee Bill sparked opposition from Democrats on financial grounds. But…

Twelve years of research and close to $3 million of taxpayer money have made scientist Mark Laudenslager’s monkey project a sitting duck for national animal-rights activists. Opponents of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center researcher’s experiments on 120 macaques have picketed the medical center, written scores of letters demanding…