Maybe the City of Denver isn’t as backward as Marc Ecko and his attorney, David Lane, thought it was. The pair threatened to sue the city for First Amendment infringements if officials didn’t overturn the anti-graffiti ordinances in time for a proposed graffiti festival. Maybe Lane got busy with all…
In the April 27 Message column, Channel 9 news director Patti Dennis explained why her station didn’t offer any advance coverage of an April 19 student walkout to protest immigration policies; approximately 2,500 young people left school to participate. According to her, she feared that “we would become part of…
The afternoon of April 26, MediaNews Group head Dean Singleton made official a secret almost as poorly kept as Tony Snow ‘s appointment as White House press secretary. MediaNews, with financial backing from the Hearst Corporation, had purchased three newspapers based in the California Bay Area — the San Jose…
“And another thing,” La Liga Latina de Béisbol president Jose Acosta tells the sixty or so team representatives assembled in a small room at the Bladium on a Saturday evening in early April. “If anyone sees or knows Rolando Castillo, tell him that he is suspended for eight games.” Last…
Looking like something out of a light-beer commercial, the two white thirty-something men spend their lunch break getting in some practice swings before their fast-pitch softball league starts up for the season. After smacking standard yellow, dimpled batting-cage balls all over the place, one decides to up the ante. “Hey,…
The better part of a week ahead of time, editorial employees at the Denver Post were informed that their presence was required at one of two meetings scheduled for April 18 — but they weren’t told why. The mystery at the heart of this invite generated dire speculation, and those…
On Monday, the state Senate approved House Bill 1201, which would put close to $20 million annually into Colorado’s tourism-promotion budget. But while the Senate and House versions of the measure must be reconciled before the bill moves to Bill Owens for his signature, the governor and fellow business boosters…
Hip-hop fashion mogul Marc Ecko has enraged Denver’s political establishment, drop-kicked the beehive of ornery neighborhood groups, and flipped the bird to Denver Partners Against Graffiti. But Denver City Council president Rosemary Rodriquez and her gaggle of property owners — who hoisted pickets reading things like “No tagging, no graffiti,…
On a folding chair along the sidelines is where soft-spoken Denver Nugget DerMarr Johnson spent most of his season. But with the playoffs under way, Johnson, who can surprise with explosive off-the-bench performances when it matters most, says he’s hoping for some big minutes against the Clippers. The road from…
Of the many types of vandals in the world — the blackout-drunk-smashy-smashy vandal, the politico-Gandhi-graffiti-be-the-change-you-want-to-see-in-the-world vandal, the pump-don’t-work-’cause-the-vandals-took-the-handles vandal — perhaps the oddest is the street-sign-interior-design vandal. While most people eye an octagonal red sign at an intersection as a helpful warning to come to a stop and possibly avoid…
No Walk in the Park Food for thought: I usually look forward to Adam Cayton-Holland’s column for quirky humor, damning critique and guaranteed laughter. But the April 20 What’s So Funny actually had a different effect: It got me off my butt and down to the Gathering Place with $200…
“I didn’t start out to do what I’m doing,” says John Scherer, CEO and founder of Video Professor Inc., one of Colorado’s most incongruous success stories. He insists that he wound up starring in the commercials and infomercials that have made him a familiar figure among the nation’s insomniacs “because…
“Chief Hosa Lodge, the handsome stone pavilion built by the city in Genesee Mountain Park, has opened its doors this summer under a new management,” announced the June-July 1921 issue of Municipal Facts, an informative, if slightly propagandistic, publication once put out by the City and County of Denver. In…
When the Denver Botanic Gardens released its summer concert schedule last week, one name was conspicuous in its absence. Marc Cohn, fresh from a performance at that outdoor venue, was shot on August 7, 2005, at 14th and Stout streets. According to police, Cohn ran afoul of a carjacking –…
Like me, most of my friends are the first Colorado natives in their families. Our parents are all transplants, attracted to Denver from every imaginable corner of the United States, drawn by the sense of opportunity, the allure of the West, the fact that you can get drunk quicker at…
The Seven-Year Bitch Where the Columbine growl: Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “Hiding in Plain Sight,” in the April 13 issue: Let’s see. Since 1999 we have seen 3,000 people toasted by al-Queda on 9/11. We have seen 210,000 slaughtered on our highways. Yet seven years after Columbine, you are still talking…
In the debate about whether Video Professor’s marketing procedures are all they should be, one question is seldom asked: Are the products John Scherer keeps asking everyone to try actually any good? To find out, I decide to test them on a subject who, in his own way, is almost…
Cradling a sawed-off shotgun in his lap, Eric Harris glares into the video camera. He takes a pull from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and winces. Then he talks smack about the pathetic losers involved in school shootings in Oregon and Kentucky. “Do not think we’re trying to copy anyone,”…
Jon Vaupel had been cooling his heels in a federal immigration detention facility in Aurora for three months when the guards finally told him to pack it up, that he was being released. What they didn’t tell him was that he was being released to deputies from Adams County, where…
Last weekend was shaping up to be a big one at the Denver Pavilions, which is now billing itself as an “urbanist” destination. After a private party the week before, Jazz @ Jack’s — a longtime fixture in the Platte Valley — was going to unveil its larger, much snazzier…
What the fuck was Michael Brown thinking when he decided to go on The Colbert Report on March 28? Survey says: He wasn’t thinking. Matter of fact, the ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief is getting pretty famous for not thinking, an oversight reflected in everything from his infamous musings about…
You’ve seen them: slick, highly produced commercials about the oft-delayed construction of a new, 730-foot digital tower on Lookout Mountain. The spots declare that viewers in the Denver metro area are being denied free, over-the-air HDTV by recalcitrant residents who have refused every compromise offered to them by the eminently…
