So… you thought you could pick up a daily newspaper in Denver and not see a Colorado Rockies story on the cover? Think again. On October 30, two days after the Rockies were bested in the World Series by the Boston Red Sox, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver…
When a half-pound of ground, nicely fatty Angus beef is whacked onto the hot steel, it produces a flood of meat juice that caramelizes instantly into a crispy halo of blood and fat around the edge of the burger. It’s like meat candy, the delicacy you lose when a burger…
Place your bets, place your bets. Anyone’s a winner, anyone’s a loser. Especially these shows. Every season, there’s a TV dream that dies early. Someone’s pet project gets hit by the car of audience reaction, and has to be put down so it (and no one else) can suffer. So…
Every Monday morning, millions of Americans roll out of bed, wipe the crusties out of their eyes, pour themselves a cup of joe and enter into the dispiriting ritual of the work week. They suffer through the humiliation of gridlocked traffic, pay far too much to park the car they…
If politicians like anything better than flag-waving, it’s pennant-waving. Over the weekend Denver school board candidate Arturo Jimenez papered west Denver with these purple door-hangers. The back features a cut-out bat you were supposed to wave while cheering on the Rockies. Not much cheer followed; if you’re going to kiss…
Of all the people 50 Cent has rapped with over the years, Adam Schrager has got to be the most unlikely. Schrager, after all, is a Channel 9 reporter who specializes in political matters, not a cultural correspondent with a well-known reputation as a hip-hop head. Yet the two of…
This week we argue over who’s the bigger Rockies fan and let our flyover state inferiority complex get the better of us, much to the chagrin of Red Sox fan in the office…
Ah, yes, I remember now: that’s what it feels like to lose. It had been so long since the Rockies had dropped even one game – much less two in a row – I had forgotten the word for that queasy, tingling sensation that surfaces up from the top of…
Jeremy and Adam DeGraff, who perform under the name Slo Children, have certainly gone the extra mile to prepare for their Saturday, October 27, show at the D Note in Arvada. The pair of dark-humored acousticians recorded Born Ghost When Dead, an entire CD’s worth of original songs designed specifically…
This week, Joel Warner gives us some insight as to what it’s like to be a part-time stay-at-home dad and a full-time neurotic obessessive with fantasies of prehistoric predators eating his young. Read his feature about the baby products industry here. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday: Today something extraordinary happened:…
A nine-year-old boy named Three (profiled in the May 17 feature Motel Hell) thought that he had forever escaped the transient life of the shady East Colfax motels. He’d lived with his mother and little sister in the Dunes, the Sands, and the Kings motel over a good span of…
Were we not presently in an all-Rockies, all-the-time zone, the local media would no doubt be paying more attention to the trial of Vincent Margera, known to MTV viewers as Don Vito, the bulbous uncle of wild man Bam Margera on the series Viva La Bam. As noted in this…
This week, Joel Warner gives us some insight as to what it’s like to be a part-time stay-at-home dad and a full-time neurotic obessessive with fantasies of prehistoric predators eating his young. Read his feature about the baby products industry here. Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday: The doctor’s office doesn’t scare…
In 1986, Westword published its third Best of Denver issue, a celebration of the city that saluted everything from the Best Local Comic Made Good (Roseanne Barr, who’d been living in a trailer just a few years earlier and was now starring in her own sitcom) to the Best Bronco…
We are all products of our environment and it is scary to imagine what products stem from the environment of the sleazy East Colfax motels. But, in the face of homelessness, seven young boys and girls are being honored for the hardships they’ve overcome. The end of the East Colfax…
The first game of the 2007 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and YOUR Colorado Rockies started perfectly: With Fox’s Jeanne Zelasko giving Eric Byrnes shit for being a loud-mouthed douchenozzle. Byrnes committed the first broadcasting boner of the evening — and not the last — when he said…
I’m telling you right now, I’m not going to cry at the end of the World Series. No matter how it turns out. Sure, if the Rockies win I’ll be doing my silly celebration dance (which makes Jonathan Papelbon’s Riverdance look sane), and screaming wildly and jumping up and down…
In this space yesterday, I vigorously defended my fellow Red Sox fans’ honor against unfounded snipes by over-eager Rockies fans. The Red Sox are not the evil empire, I argued. Sure, we get a little crazy, a little annoying, but that’s love and it’s beautiful. Don’t hate us because we’re…
You’ve just spent most of the past four decades in one of the most thankless jobs ever: newspaper reporter. So what’s next? You attempt to land an even more thankless job: elected government official. That’s Charley Able’s mission, anyhow. The longtime scribe for the Rocky Mountain News is running for…
First, I have to watch that game. Then, this morning, I head to my driveway in search of newspapers that were missing yesterday, and my momentary elation at seeing them where they should be is promptly shattered by the main headline on the Denver Post’s up-front World Series section: “Darned…
“Dinger Bell,” Patricia Calhoun, October 18 Dino-Might! How about Beer-Barrel Man for the kids? I mean, it is Coors Field, filled mostly with yuppies; it’s not that much for kids. I’ll be glad when they hire some other idiot in a different clown suit so that you can tackle some…
Like the 24-hour flu or a sudden outbreak of gonorrhea, Rockies fever can strike when you least expect it. Two guys wearing Rox jerseys chest-bumping in the Safeway checkout line? Expected. Three blondes in the daycare parking lot gushing over how dreamy Matt Holliday is? Expected. But five post-office employees…
