Sometimes a person needs to drink two cold beers, fast. The only sensible place to do this is the Lake Avenue Inn in Eastlake. Eastlake is completely surrounded by the much larger suburb of Thornton. While Thornton is a twilight zone of housing developments, strip malls and four-lane speedways, Eastlake…
Most of the time, Alex Stone, a reporter for KOA radio, has nothing but news on his mind. According to Jerry Bell, KOA’s news director, “Alex is as hard-core as you can get. He’s got all the police scanners and stuff in his house and in his car, too, and…
Hey, Bleary Eyes. How you holdin’ up? For connoisseurs of tackle football, the final two weeks of the old year and the first month of the new always provide a festival of violent collision unrivaled by the morning rush hour on I-25 or the running of the bulls in Pamplona…
Crisis? What Crisis? Older and wiser: Your January 2 issue was a great way to start the new year! I was feeling really old when I woke up in 2003, but after overdosing on twenty-something angst in the “My Quarter-Life Crisis” essays, I know that while I may be getting…
I Dont Think Ill Go to My High School Reunion By David Kawamoto I don’t think I’ll go to my high school reunion. I’m not interested in who’s married and who’s going bald. Who quit smoking and who still lives at home. I don’t want to know that my shy…
Stabbings and beatings are common. Drugs are plentiful — although ingesting them sometimes has unforeseen results. A restraint chair comes in handy, as does the occasional warning shot from Tower III. And whatever you do, don’t mess with inmate Ramirez. Those are some of the impressions of the Limon Correctional…
A big brown cloud was 2002, A stinky year for all but a few. Yet things look no better for 2003, Making us wish to cower or flee. Before you learn how bad it is, Resolve to take this cheering quiz. 1. The Denver Public Library, in its quest to…
Even as studios push prestige pictures like Gangs of New York and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for Oscar contention, Abby Winter and Laura Peterson are adding a little snark to the festivities. For the past eighteen months, the Capitol Hill-based duo have been offering decidedly opinionated movie…
The weight room’s clank, fists hitting leather, a muffled yell from the oldest continuously operating pick-up basketball game in Denver — the Twentieth Street gym sounds just as I remember. I haven’t been here in almost five years, but nothing has changed. The minute I open the front door, my…
Boo-Hoo for 2002 Worse comes to worse: Your December 26 Year in Review issue convinced me that 2002 was the worst year since…2001. Here’s to better news in 2003. Francie Howell Denver Dem bones: Regarding Ernie Tucker’s Year in Review quiz: It was so significant that the money and the…
In a year of record lows, Denver could report a new high point — several, in fact, since the Mile High City had grown three feet taller in some places, according to the National Geodetic Survey. Those findings, made in the 1990s but just now showing up on maps, indicate…
Terry Lynn Barton “I did it,” Terry Lynn Barton told one investigator. “It was a stupid thing.” And with those words, the 38-year-old U.S. Forest Service employee became one of the few people in the public eye to honestly appraise — if only for a flash — their fuelish actions…
Hundred-year fires, 200-year droughts, the worst economy in a decade and the collapse of all of Colorado’s pro-sports franchises (as well as the semi-pro Nuggets): This past year was an all-consuming pain, a bonfire of the vanities, an Elvis-sized inferno that belongs on the ash heap of memory. But before…
Imagine a 264-pound panther with the grip of a power wrench, a chess master’s cunning and the smash-mouth instincts of a middle linebacker. Imagine him in a green U.S. Army uniform. Put it all together, and you’ve got Dremiel Byers — the best heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler on the planet. Never…
Up Against the Wal-Mart How low can you go? Bravo to Stuart Steers for helping bring to light what Wal-Mart is really about (“The Wal-Mart Crusade,” December 12). For two years, I’ve been trying to get friends and family to realize that Wal-Mart is bad for the American economy. To…
Bleeding from his behind, Fidel Ramos had this crazy notion that he should be taken to a hospital. Not a prison infirmary, but a real hospital, with an emergency room and doctors and such. His keepers at the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center, a maximum security prison on Smith Road,…
Last April, Alvin Jones got the message on his answering machine: a prison chaplain, telling him to call a certain nurse. That’s how he found out that his brother Nathan had died. The story of his death, as found in public records, would scarcely fill a paragraph: Nathan Earl Jones,…
Kenneth Jessen is a student of the eccentric. The 64-year-old retired engineer turned writer has delved into the lives of such characters as Indian Eater Big Phil, who allegedly ate two of his wives, and gunslinger Jack Slade, who shot one of his enemies between the eyes, sawed off his…
As a Florida schoolboy, Gary Nurkiewicz used to take his dad’s Nazi propaganda films for show- and-tell. “They’re 16-millimeter, so it was easy enough to just throw them on the classroom projector and go for it,” he says. Four decades later, Nurkiewicz realized that the reels he’d nonchalantly lugged around…
“Insure your soul with Jesus Christ — avoid hell,” reads a handwritten note on one of Stephanie Schultz’s Colorado Insurance Professionals business cards. The businesslike red, white and black cards — their printed information supplemented with scrawled messages of hell or salvation (“No Jesus — Know Hell; Know Jesus –…
Not far from the three wise men, a man holding a sack of money stands on a high desert studded with rocks and yucca. Like everyone else in the scene, he’s headed to see the Christ child. “Recognize him?” asks Father Marcus Medrano. “That’s Satan. To me, this is not…
The decision of columnist Tina Griego to leave the Denver Post in favor of the Rocky Mountain News — a move discussed in this space last week — thrilled the folks at the News. But Post staffers in general were considerably less excited by the change, with a handful of…
