Perhaps you’ve noticed “Land of the Lost Scooters,” the newest art installation along Speer Boulevard. If not, just follow Erik Koskinen and the small taillights of his 1979 Vespa with the black and blue paint job. After many years in the working world, Koskinen is getting a degree in dentistry…
Don’t mess with the milkman — especially not if the Royal Crest Dairy driver is Shannon Whitehead. At about one in the morning on Tuesday, September 27, the 27-year-old was just starting his route when a fellow driver radioed in a request for a re-supply of apple juice. The call…
The only funny clown is a dead clown. Because it’s so ironic. If some guy were to ask me, “Hey, What’s So Funny, how would you define irony?” I wouldn’t say, “An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.” I’d just say, “Dead clown.”…
Randy Miller, the president, publisher and editor of Boulder’s Colorado Daily, has spoken to Westword on numerous occasions since purchasing the paper in 2001 — most recently in March, when the Daily introduced a free-delivery Sunday edition. But following the September 26 announcement that the 113-year-old Daily had been sold…
Wanted: Dead or Alive Uncle scam: Although I am very disappointed that Westword has not devoted coverage to the fiasco that is the war in Iraq, I enjoyed the one-two punch of Michael Roberts’s “Wanted” and J. David McSwane’s “An Army of Anyone,” in the September 29 issue. Now why…
Sergeant Rodney Shivers is a camouflaged blur as he bursts into the entryway of Pomona High School, an oversized attaché in his hand. After surveying the terrain on this early September day, he heads toward a glassed-in trophy display opposite the school’s cafeteria, which is rapidly filling with teens impatient…
For Private Kevin Shane Heitman, the completion of Army National Guard basic training last month was a day of sweet reward. After what he describes as “six months of hell,” Heitman was done with basic training and advanced infantry training, ready to be a soldier. Boot camp had been the…
Bill Stiffler sits on the front porch of his office, his sun-crisped face shaded by the wide brim of his white cowboy hat. He’s watching over the ten acres that are home to Friends of Horses Rescue and Adoption, the nonprofit he started in 2001. A decade earlier, he had…
Billy was having a great time at Dulcinea’s 100th Monkey on September 14. Local jam band Polytoxic was on stage, and the ebullient 22-year-old student was doing the flail on the dance floor. And not by himself this time, but with two girls! “I was feeling really great,” he recalls…
Last Friday, while media hacks clambered over one another as well as fleeing evacuees in a mad-dash effort to add invaluable hurricane footage to their highlight reels — if their hair’s blowing wildly, then they must be, how you say, entrenched — President George Bush decided his presence in his…
Bandanna on the Run Mall in the family: Regarding Jared Jacang Maher’s “Cruisin’ With Mom,” in the September 22 issue: The Aurora Mall’s management and merchants can kiss my 52-year-old, white, hairy ass! My family stopped shopping there a year ago, after my son was accosted by a tin badge…
A bullet ripped into Brad Braxton’s body but left him standing, waiting for the next bullet to end his life. He put a hand on his gut wound and tried to keep his balance so that he could die standing up. The second bullet never came. The shooter ran. Brad…
On the last Saturday in June, eighteen-year-old Timothy Kemp was headed home after a visit to Six Flags Elitch Gardens. It was Gay Pride weekend, and the bus he usually caught at 16th and Broadway had been rerouted to Colfax and Logan. That shady corner was hopping at 11 p.m.,…
“I said, “Are you gonna let me take a spin on your ride?'” a teenage youth shouts to a security guard riding by on a Segway. Sporting tattoos and a Carmelo Anthony jersey, the teen cocks his head and pauses, as if he actually expects the guard to let him…
By last year, the Regency Hotel had fallen a long way from the days when it served as Elvis’s crash pad. Under Art Cormier, the former owner of Smiley’s Laundromat, the once-elegant hotel had turned into a layover for day laborers and a major nightspot for Mexican immigrants — legal…
A quintet of twenty-somethings will throw down — and maybe throw up — on behalf of Hurricane Katrina survivors this weekend. The tenderhearted tipplers have concocted the Katrina Relief Drink-a-Thon set for Saturday, September 24, at Lodo’s Bar and Grill, where they’ll toss back their favorite cocktails for charity. “This…
I count rabbits. That’s not the name of the latest coming-of-age indie darling to stun the packed, B.O.-scented screening rooms at Cannes. It’s just something I do. For the most part, I’ve abandoned the OCD behavior that I exhibited as a child. I no longer name and catalogue inanimate objects,…
Hurricane Katrina can’t be said to have ushered in a new golden age of journalism, since the lethal weather system struck the Gulf Coast mere weeks ago, and the press’s commitment to the story already shows signs of waning. Still, the generally impressive work done by national correspondents has trickled…
The Bottom Line Comic relief: I just wanted to congratulate Westword on adding more comics — and by locals! Although no one will ever replace Kenny Be in my heart, I laughed out loud over both Overheard Conversations and Rebels of Reality in the last issue. Ethan Wenberg can fling…
“I feel for these people, because we were there as refugees.” That’s what Trinh Chu has been telling clients — she asks the non-Vietnamese to call her Trina — at Top Nails, the Aurora salon she owns with two of her sisters. This morning, Trinh is sitting Indian-style on a…
Genesis: Focus on the Family packed them in like sardines. At $35 a head, more than 1,500 teens, parents and youth-group leaders had converged on Colorado Springs from 21 states, Puerto Rico and Canada for the two-day Dare 2 Dig Deeper apologetics conference, aka the “Big Dig.” A few dozen…
“I’m going to go home and walk my dog and hug my wife, and maybe get a good Mexican meal and a stiff margarita and a full night’s sleep,” Michael Brown, Colorado’s most infamous export, said last Friday after he was pulled out of Louisiana. “And then I’m going to…
