Check Your Head

Eli Ashby was killed when a car hit his motorcycle. The sun is shining, the snow’s melting, and motorcycle engines are roaring — as are some pissed-off biker advocates. A bill introduced into the state House in January that would require minors under 18 to wear helmets while riding on…

Chile Today, Hot Tomorrow

If you are where you eat, a lot of people are Benny’s, since the Denver institution is usually packed with fans, including Leslie Fry, who offers this: Benny’s is my all-time favorite Denver restaurant. I have been there with family, friends, boyfriends, blind dates, out-of-towners, foreigners, children, grandparents, co-workers and…

More Messages: Leaping Tom

There have been plenty of changes within the Denver Newspaper Agency of late, and today brings word of another big one. Sources report that DNA vice president of marketing Tom Botelho is on a fast track to Gonesville. Botelho’s got a lot of history with the Denver dailies. As noted…

All Quacked Up

Mark Andresen Almost three years after Brian O’Connell sent his seventeen-year-old patient, Catherine “Cat” Elizabeth Bresina, into cardiac arrest at the Lutheran Medical Center emergency room, the Colorado legislature has finally decided to do something to regulate naturopathy in this state. On Thursday, February 15, the House Health and Human…

Peace Jam

For anyone looking to check out some spoken word tonight, February 22, head over to the Asbury Event Center at 3001 Vallejo Denver (the big hillside church in the Highland neighborhood) where Palestinian-born poet Suheir Hammad will be speaking and performing at a benefit show for KGNU radio and Cafe…

My Brother’s, Bar None

Here’s Kate’s take on the quintessential Denver restaurant: It would have to be My Brother’s Bar at 15th and Platte. My stepdad has been taking me there since I was six and we would play “I Spy” while waiting for our gooey JCBs; he’d sometimes let me have a sip…

Mezcalorado

Another smart response to “You Are Where You Eat,” this one from Steve Poquette of Parker, touting Mezcal: It should be a restaurant where you would proudly take friends and family from out of town (as opposed to business associates). It should be a restaurant that you feel embodies the…

Don’t Fence Me In

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales walked the buttoned-down halls of the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum in Florence yesterday, then announced that all was super at the federal supermax. No need for more staff or monitoring at the high-tech prison, a repository of terrorists and superfiends. No need for a new $20…

More Messages: Ganging Up

This week’s Message column spotlights Rocky Mountain News columnist Dave Krieger, who’s been trying to draw attention to Denver’s gang problem from an unlikely location: the Rocky’s sports section. Since he began his campaign, his paper has provided greater coverage to gang issues that aren’t directly linked to the murder…

Your Brain on Porn

Here’s a query posed by Doug Brown on the Denver Post blog: Is porn the new meth? With this question, Brown, who has staked out quite a beat at the daily as a pornography critic (find his July 2006 story on the “porn epidemic” here) brings up some very important…

Eat Up

What does Denver taste like? In Bite Me, I’ve been writing about my hunt for the quintessential Denver restaurant, and readers have served up plenty of food for thought. The following, from Scott, aka “The Mayor,” is particularly choice: There is nothing more Denver than the Executive Lunch at the…

The Transformers

Twenty years ago, young boys across America were obsessed with Transformers, a team of superhero robots that transformed into vehicles. But here in Denver, older boys were about to start a transformation of their own. “Rollin’ 30 Crips,” sixteen-year-old Michael Asberry called out to the group of teens gathered in…

Crusade

Since the January 1 murder of Denver Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams, the Rocky Mountain News’s Dave Krieger has devoted around half of his regular sports columns to the slaying, the gang-related activity that presumably spawned it, and/or the responsibility of athletes and team executives to stand up against the scourge…

Space Odyssey

Architecturally, the rectangular brick building at 1778 Gilpin Street is about as interesting as a three-story cardboard box. For apartment developer Grant Barnhill’s objectives, however, the aesthetic emptiness is the equivalent of a blank canvas. Last fall, while construction crews were tearing outdated carpeting and bathroom fixtures from the upper-floor…

When Mistakes Don’t Matter

The justice system isn’t very good at confessing its own crimes. Even when officials admit that mistakes were made, they rarely take the kind of action that might actually correct them. In the case of Krystal Voss, a 32-year-old mother convicted of child abuse in the death of her nineteen-month-old…

Letters to the Editor

“Ladies’ Plight,” Patricia Calhoun, February 15 Odd Man Out I laughed so hard reading “Ladies’ Plight” that I snorted beer out my nose. Steve Horner needs to get a life. I don’t mind bars buying drinks for ladies if it means that the bar won’t be the usual Denver sausagefest…

The High Price of Dying

The squish pundits and squash-eating liberals are once again questioning the wisdom of Colorado’s death penalty. But that doesn’t mean squat to Arapahoe County District Attorney Carol Chambers. Okay, so the death penalty as practiced here has claimed exactly one life since 1968 – that of the eminently qualified Gary…

Uni-tards

Some call it a natural evolution in adrenaline-fueled extreme sports; others would characterize it more of a athletic mutation — like that duck born with four legs. Either way it had to happen, eventually: extreme unicycling. The sport includes down hill mountain riding — dubbed “MUni” — or distance unicycling…

More Messages: Pot Shots

The murder of marijuana advocate Ken Gorman would have been shocking under any circumstances. He may have been controversial in some quarters, but he was actually a benign personality with an amusingly hippie-dippy sense of humor. In 2002, for instance, he released a CD entitled It’s a Cannabis Christmas, featuring…

More Messages: Back in Black

Supervisors at newspapers aren’t fond of mistakes in general — but they especially despise front-cover gaffes. For that reason, the powers-that-are at the Rocky Mountain News couldn’t have been happy with a screw-up related to the February 17, page-one launch of a black-history-month series that traces the roots of several…

Chi One On

Suddenly, Chi Bistro was being hailed as a restaurant featuring ‘American classics with a flavor of French Indochina’—which ought to have meant Cafe du Monde and cr�me caramel, pho, fish heads and pigs roasted and redolent of gunpowder and Zippo lighter fuel, but didn’t, of course, except for an Asian…

Granola Rap

Gangster rappers in South Boulder? Yup, the stone-faced white boys behind local hip-hop outfit 3OH!3 are truly ready to put the “G” in granola town. Just check out the video for their song “Holler Till You Pass Out” filmed at a Boulder elementary school. Favorite lines include: “Youse a punk…