Fuelish Behavior Do you need a hug? I generally flip through Westword to see how much it can annoy me. The need for bad puns in 80 percent of the headlines and the uncanny and self-serving ability to stretch minimally interesting topics into novelette lengths (topics that often could be…
She tried to tell them about Michael Garrett. But nobody listened. She tried to tell them how it was, the threats and the cocaine and all that. How he broke into her house one night after she’d kicked him out for good. How she’d lived in fear ever since, wondering…
John is a 36-year-old homeless man who has lived on and off the streets for years. Like many of Denver’s homeless people, he knows that one of the biggest daily battles is simply proving that he exists. Yet the most-accepted means of validation — a Colorado driver’s license or state…
It’s easier to get out of United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum — ADX, as the maximum-security prison in Florence is known — than it is to get inside. If you’re a publication, at least. As recently as this summer, Westword was banned in accordance with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’…
The current U.S. advertising climate is widely considered to be the chilliest in years — maybe even decades. So it’s just this side of startling to discover a businessman whose recent attempts to buy commercial time from Denver radio conglomerates that gladly took his cash in the past have been…
On a recent morning, Bill and two of his buddies make the drive from Littleton to Evergreen to do a little game harvesting — buffalo, to be specific. The shooter, Bill, arrives last. He walks down to the pen and peers inside the chain-link fence to scope out the quarry…
The Grass Is Always Greener Space case: Regarding Stuart Steers’s “Park Place,” in the August 15 issue: What makes Denver special for so many of us who can only visit occasionally are the parks, boulevards and leafy streetscapes. By contrast, a city like Phoenix, a mecca of libertarian know-nothingism, has…
Five-year-old Alex looks like the happiest kid in the world. His smiles, captured forever in photos proudly displayed around his mother’s cubicle, aren’t forced for the camera. But Alex’s smiles might not have been so genuine had his mom continued to cling to her mistrust of his dad. Until a…
A dozen years ago, Pamela Stuart-Mills Hoch was in a very troubled marriage. Already verbally abusive, her husband finally assaulted her physically in December 1989. Hoch went to the police, and her husband was arrested and jailed overnight. Hoch had been very close to her four children, but after she…
To save the caucus or squash it: That will be the question this November. Every two years since 1912, Democrats and Republicans have gathered in their neighbors’ living rooms or in schools and meeting halls across Colorado to set their parties’ platforms and choose candidates for the state’s primary election…
It’s a good thing Leonard Carlo’s head is almost as big as his mouth. Whenever the 67-year-old former tavern owner locks horns with authorities, which seems to happen a lot, he pays a visit to his favorite tattoo parlor and gets another anti-establishment slogan inked on his hairless dome. In…
Back in the late ’80s, when this city was still smarting from another super-sized Super Bowl humiliation, a national news correspondent noted that Denver had never been number one in anything but air pollution. Although the Environmental Protection Agency finally gave Denver’s air a clean (or close enough for the…
On August 8, news organizations in Denver received a fax topped with a grabby logo reading “Koleen Brooks: Defender of all that is right…and having fun doing it!” Following this pronouncement was a description of Playboy pinup Brooks (“the internationally famous single mother and controversial former mayor of Georgetown, Colorado;…
With the Rockies banging around in their familiar fourth-place hell and the bewildered Nuggets awaiting the Eye Chart Era (that’s B-Z-D-E-L-I-K, Doc, and let’s see here, looks like: T-S-K-I-T-S-H-V-I-L-I), local fans find themselves yearning for some real sport — the invasion of Iraq, say, or the start of football season…
There Auto Be a Law Hacks and flacks: Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Take a Memo,” in the August 15 issue: Wow! How refreshing it is to read a real piece of journalism that is based on the truth. It is so frustrating and discouraging to see the public-relations machines of these…
From an old brick building overlooking the South Platte, Susan Baird is quietly redesigning Denver. Peering over maps and diagrams of pipelines, she traces the routes of long-forgotten creeks and gulches and imagines a lush trail running through a battered industrial zone. Under her steady gaze, downtown streets disappear underground,…
Denver pioneered the idea of buying parkland in the mountains long before Boulder or Jefferson counties launched their vaunted open-space systems. The city owns 14,000 acres, most of it in Jefferson County. Denver’s relationship to its mountain park system is much more complicated than its suburban counterparts, however. Since the…
Denver’s parks range from tiny pockets of greenery to acres of open space. Every resident has a favorite among the more than 300 parks in the system; here are snapshots of four of them. Bluff LakeWhen Stapleton Airport closed, parks officials were shocked to discover a ribbon of wildland running…
Oscar Paniagua called himself El Mensajero de la Verdad, “The Messenger of Truth,” and claimed he could place people’s prayers directly in the lap of the Lord. Today, that could be a short trip for him. Paniagua, who left behind a slew of victims when he fled Denver almost two…
As anyone who’s been within eyesight of a working television knows, this week marks a quarter-century since Elvis Presley toppled off a Graceland toilet and landed in rock-and-roll heaven. But the exhaustive reports about the Pelvis’s life and legacy appearing on Today, Good Morning America and plenty of other national…
At Denver Water’s annual employee car show, God is in the detailing. “She’s a garage queen,” says Jerry Trujillo of his 1931 Ford Roadster. Trujillo’s a paving coordinator at the water department, and his off hours are few. Nevertheless, through years of effort and heavy reliance on the kindness of…
A radio station’s success is determined not only by the number of ears listening at any given time, but by the ages of the people attached to them. Programmers pinpoint specific demographics under the theory that particular advertisers will gladly open their wallets in order to reach them; the majority…
