Our long national nightmare is almost over… Tonight’s penultimate episode of American Idol means that millions of people who love high phone bills will finally be able to vote for their favorite among the ultra-popular Fox talent show’s finalists. There’s no telling whether Taylor Hicks and Katherine McPhee will ultimately…
The Colorado Rockies’ early-season success — at this writing, they’re atop the National League West — has apparently caused the nation’s largest newspaper to remember that the team exists. Among the guests on today’s edition of “The Press Box,” Z-560’s fine morning-drive show, was a baseball writer from USA Today,…
When MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton and his partners ponied up $1 billion for three California Bay Area newspapers formerly owned by Knight Ridder (and one ex-KR paper in Minnesota), he earned the enmity of a relentless foe: Bruce Brugmann, the editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, an alternative…
This afternoon, Rico Vecchiarelli stepped out of the sunlight and into the Denver City & County Building, where he was sentenced after pleading guilty to a Class 3 felony securities fraud. Vecchiarelli is the founder of American Championship Fighting (“The Fight Is On!”), a Denver-based mixed martial arts league that…
The hype surrounding the impending departure of Katie Couric from NBC’s Today reached a new low this morning — particularly for Denver-area viewers. Today’s 7:30 a.m. segment led with a clip of Couric interviewing two locals who’d just lost a loved one in the 1999 Columbine High School shootings: Craig…
The ghost of Ronald Wilson Reagan haunts the Marc Holtzman for Governor campaign headquarters on South Broadway. Images of the nation’s fortieth president beam from brochures, and framed photos of him hang on the walls. In most of the pictures, hovering somewhere near the Great Communicator is a mop-haired, bespectacled…
It’s not even 2 p.m., and the police are already after DeVante and Damani. The two have been split up for what seems like hours, and now they’ve met back up under a basketball hoop at 37th Avenue and Franklin Street in the hopes that De’Aries and Santiago will show…
For political junkies in need of a fix, ColoradoPols.com is a spike to the vein. The site is a popular online rendezvous spot where folks interested in dishing about campaigns can mingle with insiders whose candor is enhanced by anonymity. As is typical on blogs, most ColoradoPols users post under…
There will be no Midsummer Night’s Dream in Civic Center Park this summer — nor Cyrano de Bergerac nor any other of the dozens of free plays put on by Theater in the Park over the past sixteen years. The series that started when the French ambassador challenged Sister Cities…
New York City is an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord. The shops, the bars, the shows, the sights — it’s all laid out for you, much like the spread at a Country Buffet. And when you first walk into that Country Buffet, stomach empty, tastebuds curious, this chaotic orgy of options looks like…
The Fight Stuff A sporting chance: Props to Luke Turf for the excellent articles on mixed martial arts in the May 11 issue. It’s about time the sport received some publicity, especially when you consider that mixed martial arts and, more specifically, the Ultimate Fighting Championship began in Denver and…
Back in 1994, Vernon Bellecourt and the national American Indian Movement asked the University of Colorado to investigate whether Ward Churchill obtained tenure through deception, “billing himself as an American Indian writer, scholar and artist,” Bellecourt told Westword. He added that the university should get rid of “this man whose…
May is “sweeps” month, when ratings help determine advertising rates for TV stations — and according to a knowledgeable insider, Channel 7’s newscast numbers, particularly at 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., aren’t pretty. Granted, disaster can be averted if the rate of viewership increases over the next two weeks or…
Frankly, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a lousy book, with ridiculous characters (really — an albino monk into self-abuse?), page after page of tedious exposition, and dialogue so clunky and unbelievable that it makes Jonathan Livingston Seagull seem like the height of realism. Yet the tome’s provocative premise…
Denver author (and former Rocky Mountain News staffer) J.R. Moehringer’s star began to rise following the publication of his best-selling memoir, The Tender Bar — and judging by this morning’s episode of Good Morning America, he currently shares a constellation with some mighty bright lights. In a segment about sons…
On May 8, KHOW talk-show host Peter Boyles called for “a day without newspapers” because of his displeasure at coverage of the immigration controversy in the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post. A day after this declaration, and mere hours after he got into a self-described screaming match with Rocky…
Zacarias Moussaoui is heading for Supermax, the federal prison in Florence. At 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. today, Alan Prendergast will discuss Supermax with KCFR’s Ryan Warner on Colorado Matters. For a collection of Prendergast pieces on prison, see our “Crime and Punishment” archives…
Last week, Lawrence Argent was out scrubbing down his sculpture called “I See What You Mean,” but better known as the Big Blue Bear. Since the piece debuted last July outside the Colorado Convention Center, it’s quickly become the city’s most popular public artwork — although the piece’s popularity wasn’t…
Mike Nickels was closing up shop when he saw a crack deal going down right outside the door. “I can’t have drug deals going on out there,” says Nickels, owner of the Twisted Sol tattoo shop at 1405 Ogden Street. “I’ve got soccer moms bringing their sixteen-year-old daughters down here…
“Kick his ass! I want to see some blood!” a woman shouted from her front-row seat at the two men circling inside a cage. “Fight like a man, not like a bitch!” “Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight,” chanted the crowd gathered for the American Championship Fighting bout at the Denver Coliseum…
Colorado Springs’s High Plains Messenger is both an Internet newspaper and a fiscal experiment. “There’s nothing like what we’ve done in the United States so far,” says Joseph Coleman, the site’s co-creator and resident moneyman, “and that can be dangerous. But if things go well, and we think they will,…
At any given time, a handful of community gardens across the city are under fire. Like the endangered Emerson Street Community Garden on Capitol Hill, plots located on privately owned land are vulnerable to developers eyeing the spaces for new construction or future parking lots. But the Fairview School Garden…
