News

If you think the new bright-blue “Mustang” at Denver International Airport, with its bony ribs and glowing red eyes, looks terrifying while you’re speeding by on Peña Boulevard, then be glad you didn’t attend the June 12 dedication ceremony for the 32-foot-tall fiberglass beast, which was installed in February. The…

Clear Creek Annabel Lee, my purebred Chessie she-bitch, has successfully graduated from puppy kindergarten. Please feel free to express your congratulations in the form of emphatic atta-boy slaps on my ass. In addition to “sit” and “give me five” — tricks that I taught young Annabel myself — as a…

Laura Kriho was only four when the Democratic National Convention came to her home town of Chicago and all hell broke loose. “But I remember the aftermath,” she says, “and I had the song in my head.” The song was “Chicago,” which Graham Nash wrote a few years later to…

Mary Louise Starkey, head of the Denver-based butler school Starkey International Institute of Household Management, pleaded guilty in Denver District Court on Tuesday to assaulting Lisa Kirkpatrick, one of her former students. The case stemmed from a February 7, 2007, incident at the school in which Starkey, the city’s so-called…

Upon being hired by Channel 2 in 1990, TV-news videographer Jim Hucks was told to carry his camera with him wherever he went so that he could be ready at a moment’s notice to capture breaking news — and he took the directive seriously. When he attended modern-rock shows, which…

Dear Book Person, Ask any gifted, but not talented sixth-grader what Vincent Van Gogh did. “He cut off his ear and sold one painting in his lifetime.” What an underachiever! I cut off my arm during a psychotic episode. I was a promising stand up comic in Denver, twice voted…

Splitsville: The knot of protesters organizing around the Democratic National Convention got a lot more tangled Tuesday morning when a coalition of progressive groups formally presented itself as the Alliance for Real Democracy. This move deepened a division that started in May, when pacifist-leaning activist organizations and those with a…

For 25 years, until his death in May, comedian/poet/playwright Don Becker entertained audiences and held court in the creative community in Denver. Westword’s cover story this week by Adam Cayton-Holland explores Becker’s life and death. But to get a feel for what Becker was like onstage, watch this twenty-minute clip…

The folks at the Denver Zoo have found a great manipulative slogan to get crowds through the turnstiles this summer: “Every time you visit you help animals.” I spotted this ad on an RTD bus on Colfax this morning, and managed to snap this pic from my passenger-side window. Although…

After watching the above YouTube video, I’m not sure if I should be angry at Jim or feel sorry for Jim. He’s the Downtown Ambassador flack in the yellow polo shirt who told a group of 9-11 Truth conspiracy theorists they couldn’t hand out DVDs on the 16th Street Mall…

In the exciting world of online marketing, it takes plenty of everything — millions of e-mail addresses, lots of bandwidth, endless diet pills, stock tips, porn sites, ringtones, chutzpah and moxie — to succeed. And if it also takes a few million bucks here and there to settle with unhappy…

Update below: Wayne Laugesen and Rich Tosches are well-known figures in the Colorado Springs press: Laugesen (pictured) serves as the editorial-page editor for the Colorado Springs Gazette, and Tosches, a former Gazette columnist, writes regularly for the Colorado Springs Independent, the city’s longtime alternative weekly. But the pair probably won’t…

A June 17 More Messages blog revolves around a column written by Colorado Springs Independent scribe Rich Tosches about Colorado Springs Gazette editorial page editor Wayne Laugesen. In the piece, an activist accuses Laugesen of insensitivity and more in regard to comments he made in a series of e-mails he…

For the hard-charging capital crimes squad in the office of 18th Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers, the third time is the charm. After two unsuccessful death-penalty prosecutions, a jury returned a verdict of death on June 16 in the case of Sir Mario Owens (left) for the 2005 murders of…

The host committee for the upcoming Democratic National Convention will almost certainly miss the June 16 deadline for raising the estimated $40.6 million it said was needed to put on the big show in August; a Demver blog has more details. But all but lost amid the flurry of desperate…

Anyone in these parts who’s tuned in a Colorado Public Radio station lately has heard frequent mentions of the impending July switches involving two of the network’s metro-area signals; as outlined in this More Messages blog, KVOD, the operation’s classical-music purveyor, leaps from 90.1 FM to 88.1 FM, while KCFR,…

In celebrity-starved Denver, it’s no surprise that the PleasuresDudes have parlayed their late-night TV ads for a local adult-store chain into a certain star status peopled with parties and porn stars. But thanks to the web, the Dudes have gone global – and their fame earned them an invitation to…

The garden glove has been thrown. “Sounds like your thumb is anything but green, Patty,” Cloudclimber posted in a comment responding to my Denver Daisy, Day Fifteen entry. “I got 14 plants out of that little seed packet and am going to set them out tomorrow.” In that report, I…

Just when you thought air travel couldn’t get any more annoying, United Airlines has decided to start charging $15 to check your suitcase. Make that your first suitcase. Your second bag will cost another $25. Oh, and in the event of a sudden drop in cabin pressure, oxygen masks will…