Cure for the Common Coal Temperature’s rising: Alan Prendergast’s “Carbon Loading,” in the October 27 issue, was informed and intelligent. It’s good to see an in-depth article on energy issues. We’re all so dependent on fossil fuels, yet their effects are largely invisible, so we ignore the problem. We simply…
It’s an annual rite of fall, right up there with hot cider, Columbus Day trash-talking and Mike Shanahan’s vow to take one game at a time. Between the time the first aspen turns and the probable Halloween slush storm, you can count on Xcel Energy to announce a humongous hike…
The drive for wind power in Colorado got an unexpected boost this month after Xcel Energy announced it was seeking 30 percent hikes in electricity rates because of higher prices for natural gas. (This week, Xcel stated it would seek only a 19 percent increase.) For the first time, the…
“For those of you who made it into Colubrae House, congratulations,” says stone-faced Professor Bloodthorne, head of Colubrae, as he begins his lecture on potions. “For those of you who didn’t, well, nobody’s perfect.” This snide comment wouldn’t seem out of place coming from Professor Severus Snape, the dubious Harry…
All eyes were on Mike Hoover. The 33-year-old autistic man had a typing machine propped in front of him and his mother at his side. The room was silent as Hoover reached his left arm toward his mother’s right hand and pulled it to the keyboard. Leaving his thumb and…
You recognize their stiff shuffle, their coated eyes. The oozing and groaning. You’re paralyzed by the realization that you are in lower downtown — and it’s after last call! You begin to sweat, searching for an escape. But it’s too late. They lurch out from the doorways of Polly Esther’s,…
Looks like you were right about me, Old Man Abernathy, you toothless son of a bitch. I am no farmer. My potato gleaning yielded but ten sickly spuds; my wheat fields were disastrous. My innumerable rows of corn served not as a promising tract of bountiful maize, but as a…
Channel 9 investigative reporter Deborah Sherman knows that complaints come with the territory. But even though she’s spent the past sixteen years as a journalist, and nearly two as a member of the 9News I-Team, she’s never experienced anything quite like a state official’s reaction to her recent piece about…
Mall in the Family Governmess: Many thanks for Jared Jacang Maher’s timely “Malled,” in the October 20 issue. The fierce competition between cities for sales-tax revenue is not confined to the northern metro area, however, as my city, Lakewood, tries to steal shopper dollars from Wheat Ridge, Golden, Arvada and…
“I at least thought we were going to get a couple of down votes,” says Eric Rieken, one of hundreds of residents who packed a Westminster City Council meeting to protest a proposed 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter. “But they pretty much discounted everything we said.” Like many newcomers to Colorado, Rieken…
After half a decade of triumphs and tribulations, Breakdown Book Collective is closing up shop. A fluctuating stream of funding and volunteers sustained the activist group’s space for radical literature, lectures, music and community, but there are pitfalls to organizing anarchists and running an anti-capitalist business. The irony isn’t lost…
Last Saturday, New Mexico artist Luis Jimenez was supposed to install his monumental “Mustang” outside the Jeppesen Terminal at Denver International Airport — just eleven years after the sculpture was originally slated to be stabled there. But that deadline, like so many, came and went. “It’s close; progress has been…
Mother of pearl, it’s been one shitstorm after another this week at What’s So Funny. Seems like I can’t even blink without some player from the Nuggets blowing up my cell, begging for tips for the upcoming season. I just have to be like, “K-Mart, listen, you’re so money and…
Most of Gabriel Elizondo’s colleagues at KMGH-TV/Channel 7, where he served as an assignment editor, were supportive when they learned last May that he’d taken a job as a programming producer with Al-Jazeera International, a spinoff of the controversial Arabic network. Still, he concedes, “When an e-mail came out in…
What a Croc! Unsafe at any speed: Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “A Really Big Shoe,” in the October 13 issue: We have seen the future, and it’s cheap, ugly, and insanely popular — but there was one adjective missing from the cover headline: “dangerous.” I was a reluctant fan of Crocs…
I am surrounded by hundreds of plastic shoes. They are big and absurd and vaguely sinister, like boxing gloves designed by Crayola. They come in a riot of brutally cheerful colors usually reserved for daycare centers and Popsicles: lime, pink, purple, red, chocolate, fuchsia, coral, emerald, sage, pearl white, canary…
The stench of Vail’s wealth was getting to Anthony Prince. Luxury surrounded the twenty-year-old. He saw it on the slopes and in the parking lots, on the tourists wearing designer clothes and diamond rings, on the menus of the gourmet restaurants. Prince and his friend, nineteen-year-old Luke Carroll, worked at…
If people want to know what stubby-fingered former Coloradan Karl Rove whispered in the ear of James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and current Coloradan, about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, maybe they should talk to another famous export from this state: John Wells. On Sunday night, the…
As the clock ticked down on the twentieth century, people prepared for the absolute worst. A simple timekeeping error called Y2K was about to crash all computers and implode the entire planet, thrusting the world into eternal darkness and ending life as we had come to know it. There was…
Appearances aside, many national news programs seen in these parts are less live than Memorex. Network morning shows and evening newscasts originating in the East Coast air in the Mountain time zone on a two-hour tape-delay basis unless developing news forces a change — and a recent glitch involving Channel…
Patriot Games Borderline behavior: I appreciated the combination of Patricia Calhoun’s pieces in the October 6 issue. Compare what the Martinezes (“United They Stand”) have done for this country with what the Minutemen (“Blow Hards”) say they are doing down on the border. Who are the real patriots? I’ll vote…
He said his name was Columbus, And I just said, “Good luck.” — “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” Gun control. Iraq. Charles Darwin. Social Security. Affirmative action. Left. Right. FEMA. Gay marriage. Al-Qaeda. Racism. George W. Bush. Gas prices. There. That should do it. Anybody reading that list who doesn’t feel…
