If you want to add something special to your holiday toast, try a wine produced by the Winery at Holy Cross Abbey in Cañon City. At around $15 a bottle, it’s a good deal for the wallet — and for the Colorado Department of Corrections: The grapes used to make…
Off Limits was a bit shocked to receive a Christmas card from Focus on the Family last week, since we haven’t been big boosters of James Dobson. But we decided to think of it as a classy move in the spirit of the season — especially since the card was…
Gather ’round, children, it’s time that you hear a What’s So Funny holiday tale full of wonder and cheer. It’s not every day that What’s So Funny gets to wax all daily columnist and stuff insipid doses of Hallmark happiness down your throat in an attempt to harvest some sort…
The Rocky Mountain News and the American Indian Movement of Colorado are a match made in hell. The Rocky’s been consistently critical of Colorado AIM’s position regarding Denver’s annual Columbus Day Parade and has printed enough words attacking longtime AIM provocateur Ward Churchill to fill a Harry Potter book. Meanwhile,…
The Blame Game Child’s prey: I just finished reading Alan Prendergast’s “Catch-16,” in the December 8 issue, and I feel sorry for this girl’s parents. I find children like Kaeleigh (and, yes, she’s a child) annoying and disrespectful. Kaeleigh claims she’s more “mature” than her peers. Quite the contrary, Kaeleigh…
It was only late October, but a kind of holiday excitement coursed through the Altvater household in southeast Aurora. Kaeleigh had called. Kaeleigh was coming home. Her mother, DeEtte, was thrilled. She and her younger daughter had been locked in conflict for years — over school, chores, house rules, all…
The book on Philip Anschutz is that he can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse — or, for that matter, water into wine. In four decades of hyper-aggressive entrepreneurship, Denver’s richest evangelical Christian — the banks say Diamond Phil is worth upwards of $7 billion these days –…
>In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a simple peasant imprisoned in the Siberian gulag after being unjustly convicted of political crimes, rises above the unbearable monotony and torture of prison life, proving that humanity can overcome even the harshest of conditions. Inmates…
In every person’s childhood, there’s a special moment that stands out from the rest like a corpulent cheerleader. For some, it was the day they defied the hapless music teacher by saying, “I will no longer play this neophyte recorder like these unskilled philistines. For I am a far more…
On December 6, when the Denver City Council’s technology services committee approved the selection of Deproduction, a local nonprofit, to manage the community’s public-access television channels, they granted the wish of Tony Shawcross, its executive director — but they may not have done him any favors. With bureaucrats and representatives…
Let There Be Lights The clause that refreshes: Regarding Kenny Be’s “Jesus Clause,” on the cover of the December 1 issue: It was wonderful to see Kenny Be’s Worst-Case scenario back in Westword. I applaud his poking fun at the Parade of Lights organizers. The Downtown Denver Partnership caved in…
Standing alone in the crowded hallway outside Denver Juvenile Court, Tiffany McAdam folds her arms tightly across her chest to calm her shaking. She is waiting for the hearing in which Judge Dana Wakefield will rule on the fate of her four-year-old son, Martin — the boy whom police took…
The front entrance to Herman’s Hideaway looked like a hippie revolving door on a recent Friday night. A steady parade of dreadlocked white people danced to the music of Lion SoulJahs for fifteen to twenty minutes, then filtered into the shuttle bus waiting patiently out front in the loading zone,…
The Denver Dumb Friends League has charged the owner of a Denver-area horse rescue with six counts of neglect, alleging that animals in his charge have suffered and died for lack of proper care. Bill Stiffler, founder and president of Friends of Horses Rescue and Adoption, has brushed off similar…
As 2005 dawned, Steffan Tubbs’s career was moving ahead quite nicely. A correspondent and sometime anchor at New York City’s Fox-owned WNYW-TV, he seemed to be on a fast track to bigger things — perhaps even a network gig. So when he told his WNYW colleagues that he was ditching…
Food Coma New and unimproved: I could not agree more with Jason Sheehan’s “Cornered,” in the November 10 issue. I practically grew up in Johnson’s Corner. My stepmother was a baker there, baking those wonderful cinnamon rolls for fifteen years, all through the ’80s and into the early ’90s. My…
To Be or Not to Be? Worse comes to Worst: The absolute worst-case scenario is that Kenny Be’s weekly insight into local news will no longer be in Westword. I noticed his Hip Tips are still around, but where is the full-page cartoon? I look forward to Worst-Case Scenario each…
East Colfax Avenue might be enjoying a renaissance, but not everything in the Bluebird District is shiny and new. The Goosetown Tavern is finally adding a patio, and the railings separating it from the sidewalk are pieces of the much-loved 15th Street Viaduct that once ran through lower downtown. “It’s…
I have a goose. Well, my parents have a goose. But What’s So Funny thinks in terms of inheritance, and what’s theirs is mine; ergo, I have a goose. Ergo. Her name is Penelope, and she lives in the back yard. Neighborhood children often gather at the fence, poke their…
Geoff McFarlane and Mark Lynn are hung over. They were boozing last night at a charity event, and now they’re paying for it at lunch with a “hangover triangle” of water, OJ and coffee. But despite their ages — McFarlane is 22, Lynn is 21 — they’re not just a…
What passes for life inside the Colorado State Penitentiary didn’t suit Kevin Fears and Timothy Russell. So both inmates put an abrupt end to their long sentences — by killing themselves. At the state’s supermax prison, prisoners spend 23 hours a day in their cells and are shackled when escorted…
When Chronicle Books agreed to publish 2005’s Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth, its author, new Denver Post dining critic Tucker Shaw, had no problem with including a picture of himself in the package. As he concedes, “I didn’t expect to take this turn in…
