Badi Assad is a real 21st-century animal: A multi-tasker within a multi-tasker, she nimbly rips through difficult guitar runs while humming and tongue-clicking rhythms simultaneously. Oh, and did I mention that she sings, too? Beautifully? Assad, the little sister of famed classical guitarists Sergio and Odair Assad (and a Villa-Lobos…
What do you do after you lose a child? If you’re like Page and Tess Phillips, you make an attempt to ease the pain of other parents suffering through the illness of a child. When the Phillipses’ son, Cash, was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) and spent the last…
According to filmmaker and actor Ash Christian, I am a fat girl. So is he. As explained in Christian’s debut film, Fat Girls, anyone can be a fat girl, regardless of gender or body mass index. A fat girl is anyone who doesn’t fit in, who’s too quirky for the…
Shortly after Matty Brenner moved to Denver from Los Angeles, something unfortunate happened: At a motorcycle race, one of the racers lost control of his cycle coming out of a turn. The bike hit an embankment and flew into the crowd, pinning Brenner, breaking his hip and fracturing his femur…
Music evokes history. Songs remind us of a time, a place, a moment. Songs like Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” can take us back to the dark days of segregation, and “We Shall Overcome” recalls Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream for equality and peace. Tonight at 7 p.m. at the…
Bob Holme had a fantasy in mind when he came up with the idea for the Ruby Hill Rail Yard. He pictured some kid tearing up the Winter X Games ten years from now who wouldn’t have otherwise had a chance to start snowboarding. “To me, that would be the…
Judging by the title of her latest book, Memo to the President Elect, Madeleine Albright, who’s in town for an appearance tonight, is under no illusions that George W. Bush will listen to a single thing she says. Instead, she’s pinning her hopes for the future of United States foreign…
I have mixed feelings about psychologist, science writer, historian, founder of the Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer. I respect his work: His numerous books and columns for Scientific American use reason and a touch of humor to refute everything from intelligent design to Holocaust deniers, and…
Jerry Wartgow, who served as the superintendent for Denver Public Schools from 2001 to 2005, considers himself an optimist when it comes to public education. He’s certainly not a blind one, though. In Why School Reform Is Failing and What We Need to Do About It: 10 Lessons From the…
Well, here’s a race that tells it like it is: The Frosty’s Frozen 5 is just what it says it is, and a bit more. Featuring both five- and ten-mile courses, the second leg of the Winter Distance Series will be run regardless of frigid and icy conditions, through the…
Phil Bender has raided your grandmother’s attic. Bender’s Last Place exhibit at the Laboratory of Arts and Ideas highlights the barely recyclable stuff of culture, including old potato mashers, nutcrackers, matchbooks, wooden tennis rackets and quilted hot pads. After excavating our cultural flea market, he catalogued these forgotten objects like…
Prepare yourself for the return of the dinosaurs, the most awesome creatures ever to have walked the Earth. Thanks to the tireless efforts of some of the world’s best engineers, designers and scientists, these prehistoric beasts have returned to life. Okay, it’s only animatronic “life,” but it’s still impressive —…
It took nine years for Godzilla to rise up out of the ashes of Hiroshima and wreak his destruction on the good people of Tokyo in 1954. Here in America, it’s taken just over six years for the idea of an escapist disaster movie set on the streets of New…
Slide Show Yesterday, the National Western Stock Show took to the streets of downtown Denver with its annual parade. There were loads of longhorns, heaps of horses, copious cowboys, rafts of ranchers, and a jillion journalists to document their every move. But more noteworthy than the parade were the parade-goers…
Not too long ago, a dear friend of mine (Let’s call her something fabulous like… “Bianca”) called me up in hysterics. It seemed that her boyfriend of over a year (Let’s call him “Big Fat Jack Ass) had fallen out of love with her and decided it best to break…
Quick story: some friends of mine and I were at Six Flags Magic Mountain out in California. It was the late 80s, and we were freshmen in college, on our first road trip. We had, as college freshmen tend to have, plans and dreams. (More the latter than the former,…
This is some painful déjà vu. Was it not enough that it’s nearly 20 years later, and we still have a Bush in the White House? Do we really need to revisit American Gladiators? NBC apparently thinks so. The peacock network resorted to bringing back this product of the Reagan-era…
Having a child destroys your immune system to horror, real or imagined. Before the blessed event, you could laugh off The Exorcist, The Omen, or any of a thousand gory shockers with some wide-eyed tyke as either the prey or the spawn of Beelzebub. Afterward, you can’t even see the…
Since promising Armageddon in the leadoff bars of Straight Outta Compton, star-producer Ice Cube has been one canny career man. In recent years, he’s pulled up stakes in the foundering rap game and doesn’t seem to think twice about the cred damage that could come from pratfalling through PG family…
When I was twelve, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway totally screwed me over. After visiting the famed Brickyard and eagerly paying ten bucks to take “a lap around the track,” I was placed in a golf cart that putted around the asphalt at a not-entirely-death-defying 9 mph. This was not the…
Joshua (Fox)George Ratliff’s movie, a sort of satirical take on Rosemary’s Baby, came and went upon its release; seems no one got the joke about how parents (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga, in this case) are scared shitless of their own children — especially the titular Joshua, played by Jacob…
The All New Super Friends Hour: Season One, Volume One (Turner) American Carny: True Tales From the Circus Sideshow (Koch Vision) Cary Grant: 4-Disc Collector’s Set (Republic) Casablanca (Warner Bros.) Death Sentence (Fox) Eagle vs. Shark (Miramax) Evil Roy Slade (TMG) Golden Door (Miramax) Happy Tree Friends: Complete Season One…
