Newspapers are generally good at reporting about lawsuits involving major businesses within their circulation area, but they can be notably less thorough when they or their affiliates are in the judicial crosshairs. The Denver Post deserves credit, then, for running a September 15 report about an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission…
Before it’s over, maybe they could match him up against a ’58 Edsel. Or the Hindenburg. Or Michael Dukakis. Something. Because Zippy Chippy, whose papers say he is a thoroughbred racehorse, has never won versus his own kind. In eleven long years of trying (and sometimes not trying), the thirteen-year-old…
Butt Seriously, Folks Gasping at straws: I want to thank Laura Bond for “Smoke Detector,” in the September 16 issue, and especially thank Anne Landman for dedicating her life to stamping out smoking. As someone who finally stopped — after thirty years! — I know what a hard habit it…
The girls are twenty feet off the road, climbing stealthily up an embankment to get a better look at grazing elk. Their woodcraft isn’t sneaky enough, though, to evade the iron gaze of Gregg Burgess, who pulls his four-wheeler to the side of the road, steps out and beckons to…
Memo to Denver’s aspiring megalomaniac masterminds: Your ideal lair is currently on the market for a cool $1.4 million. “Massive 45,000+ sq. ft. of underground floor-space; high chain-link fence around central complex; 2 high capacity deep wells in power dome,” reads the listing on broker 20th Century Castles’ website. Mountain…
In the City and County of Denver, apparently waste can be cost-effective. Of the $132.4 million spent on the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building, $10.7 million went to furniture. Walking through the shrine to our former mayor, it’s abundantly clear how some of that money was spent. The airy…
According to Wayne Laugesen, a columnist for the Boulder Weekly, there are times when members of the press need to stop observing and start participating. “Let’s say you have a child who’s standing, panicked, frightened and crying, on railroad tracks,” he allows. “There’s a train coming down the tracks, and…
Next time you’re in the market for a pair of guinea pigs, a Ford pickup or a bag of jalapeño peppers, tune in to radio station KFKA in Greeley for Saturday morning’s Swap Shop show. You might even wind up buying something on a whim — like the black faux-fur…
Profiles in Discourage Cadillac jack: Regarding Jared Jacang Maher’s “Catch and Release,” in the September 16 issue: We purchased a Cadillac Escalade EXT truck for our son back in May 2002. Between then and this July, he was stopped by Colorado police agencies — Denver, Commerce City, Thornton, Adams County…
Anne Landman is addicted to cigarettes. She’s never actually smoked a whole one, but she can’t stop thinking about them: how they’re made, how they’re marketed, what’s in them, who buys them, who makes sure they’ll always be for sale. “People think I’m obsessed, a one-issue person,” Landman says. “It’s…
Mike Walker recently got bumped by the cops — again. This time it went down on a Friday afternoon as he was heading home from school with his boy Brandon. The eighteen-year-old northeast Denver natives were treading steady down tree-lined 29th Avenue toward Williams Street when a District 2 Gang…
Although the space at 2200 Champa Street was empty for seven years, there was always hope that somehow, someday, someone would bring back Muddy’s Java Cafe, the coffeehouse that helped two generations of Denver youth define themselves. But now that hope’s dried up. The building was purchased last year by…
Plenty of info consumers believe that the press regularly slants the news in one direction or the other, but definitively proving this thesis isn’t easy. Left-wing readers of the Bernard Goldberg tome Bias, which contends that most outlets are liberal, may find the author’s arguments to be merely anecdotal. Likewise,…
Dreamers live in a fantasy world. So what do you call a person who dreams of impossible things and then does them? Tom “Chico” Chicovsky. When Chico and his twin brother were nineteen, they and a friend decided to sail across the ocean after their freshman year of college –…
Town Without Pretty Code read: Westword used to be the newspaper for those of us who didn’t necessarily take on the values of mainstream society — who have chosen to live life “in the slower lane.” Then I see Kenny Be’s September 9 Worst-Case Scenario, “Erie, But True,” depicting Old…
Death came for Sonja DeVries with a red blur in her rearview mirror. At 7:20 p.m. on Sunday, July 18, nineteen-year-old Sonja was driving eastbound on Alameda Avenue in her 1983 Toyota Corolla. The light at Holly Street turned red, and DeVries came to a full stop. The speed limit…
When Marvin Heemeyer and his D9 dozer blazed through Granby on a mission from God, he ignited the passions of a nation — or at least a lot of how-many-crazies-are-there-living-in-Colorado questions. Websites such as www.killdozer.us celebrated the man with a plan, and entrepreneurial types duped the unsuspecting public into buying…
Boulder high school teacher Ramsey Brookhart remembers the night Michael Jackson unveiled the moonwalk for a television audience in 1983. “I was at my grandma’s house in Littleton,” he says. Jackson’s stunt held the then-seven-year-old spellbound. “It’s the perfect attention-grabber,” he explains. “That’s why Michael Jackson did it.” And that’s…
In 2002, Steve Cyphers, who’d spent the previous dozen years as a high-profile correspondent for ESPN, left broadcasting in favor of a teaching job at Holy Family Catholic School in Grand Junction that paid 13 percent of his former salary (“Trading Places,” November 14, 2002). This month, Cyphers returns as…
Since going dark-blue-with-white-horse from the neck up, the Denver Broncos no longer sport that big orange “D” on their helmets. But if Mike Shanahan wins big in the biggest gamble of his coaching career, it is “D” that will be inside his players’ heads this year. It will be “D”…
An Unhealthy Interest Physician, heal thyself: Bravo! Alan Prendergast’s “dissection” of the finances of the new University of Colorado Health Sciences Center at Fitzsimons (“Throwing Fitz,” September 2) was exactly the sort of story I rely on Westword and, in particular, Mr. Prendergast, to deliver. While everyone else is wringing…
When Robert “Chip” Schooley arrived in Denver from Harvard fourteen years ago, the rate of survival among Colorado’s AIDS patients was grim. The people in his waiting room had a one-in-six chance of dying within a year. “At the time, there wasn’t much of an AIDS program anywhere between St…
