The name of Denver’s latest sports team came as good news to Bill Stearns, proprietor of www.sodastuff.com, a Web site devoted to soft-drink memorabilia. “It’s crazy,” he says. “People keep calling for Orange Crush T-shirts; for years they’ve been doing this to me. To people in that area, the Broncos…
Although he’s been retired for years, former Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway has certainly scored his share of headlines lately. But two of the stories behind them have hit him like a blitzing linebacker. On June 4, Big John was clotheslined by a Denver Post article (penned by gossip columnist…
Look: The children are coming in from recess, and it’s clear that the fractious ten-year-old everyone calls Rockie needs more counseling — maybe even another personality transplant. Rockie still fails to heed his teachers. He doesn’t play well with others. As usual, the poor kid’s flunked his midterms and will…
The Nutty Professor Rocky Mountain highballs: What can I say? Patricia Calhoun’s “Conspiracy Nuts,” her July 4 column “in search of the lost boys of summer,” was just about the funniest thing I’ve read in months. In a PC world where everything seems so dire at times, I can always…
Synchronicity, or a clinking, clanking, clattering collection of calliginous junk? While by no means the definitive road map to maximum synchronicitude, the following timeline pinpoints a few of the more interesting overlaps between The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon. Follow, follow, follow, follow. 2:10: Little Dorothy…
Their story usually goes like this. Juan is a disabled ex-Marine living on a monthly check from the Department of Veterans Affairs. His wife, Brenda, is a homemaker who occasionally takes in babysitting money. They have three children — two girls and a boy. They think the house is beautiful,…
The sharks are biting at Colorado’s Ocean Journey. Not the sharks inside the fish tanks, but the sharks along Seventeenth Street, who are circling the aquarium even as it bleeds red ink. In March, a tearful Doug Townsend, head of the aquarium, told the public that it would close on…
David Touff helped to build Denver — but he doesn’t remember that. Alzheimer’s changed his landscape, turning familiar sights into unexplored sites. Each trip out of the house became a journey into a strange new world. Dancing on Quicksand: A Gift of Friendship in the Age of Alzheimer’s, by first-time…
To people standing in the hot sun on the morning of July 1, Mayor Wellington Webb’s final State of the City address seemed almost as long as his three terms as mayor. By the time the Denver Municipal Youth Band had played (twice, including the Rocky theme “Eye of the…
From the beginning, proponents of the joint operating agreement between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News maintained that although the papers’ business departments would be mingled under the pact, their voices would remain separate and independent — and thus far, that’s proved to be the case. But the…
Summer in Colorado means long, sunny — and sweaty — days in one of the fittest states in the country. Chiseled, sinewy men and women, with body-fat percentages roughly equivalent to the number of doughnuts consumed daily by the average Midwesterner, struggle to decide whether to go mountain biking, running,…
Trial by Fire Tourism terrorism: Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Our Fair City,” in the June 27 issue: First the fires hit Colorado. Then Zacarias Moussaoui wants to move his trial to Denver. What’s next? Bubonic plague-carrying prairie dogs taking over the grounds of the State Capitol? Colorado may not get many…
Some calamities begin with a letter, others with a phone call. An argument. A drink. A wrong turn. In the case of Sunserea McClelland, catastrophe comes at her from behind one snowy spring morning. She never sees it coming. Seconds later, her whole world turns upside down. All changed, changed…
These are not good times for patients who depend on Denver Health Medical Center. Because of bad economic times, more people are without insurance, which means more people rely on Denver Health, whose primary responsibility is to provide health care to Denver’s poor and uninsured residents. But because of increased…
In his Saturday, June 22, column, Rocky Mountain News editor/publisher/ president John Temple pronounced, “The front page is our newspaper’s face” — an unfortunately timed metaphor, given that just two days later, a News cover photo of a fire victim appeared to put a testicle right in readers’ faces. The…
Newspapers love advertising — that’s a universal publishing truth. But Out Front Colorado, Denver’s best-known gay-oriented newspaper, was far from thrilled with an ad submitted by the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) committee of the National Lawyers Guild — so much so that the biweekly refused to print it. In…
The crowd didn’t riot. No one set himself on fire in the parking lot. There wasn’t a speck of angry talk about hiring a hit man to whack out Claudio Reyna or Clint Mathis. In fact, as the biggest game in the history of U.S. men’s soccer came to its…
Lots of Luck His passion is in tents: Regarding Laura Bond’s Backwash in the June 20 issue: Who thought a DIA-looking tent plopped in the middle of a parking lot next to the highway was a good idea? Who decided to pitch the Cirque du Soleil tent right next to…
This fall, the Jefferson County School District will open a new academy. Even with all the variations that public schools have seen in recent years, this one should be unusual. “It will be a unique program,” promises John Adsit, director of alternative schools for the district. “We’re inventing it. We…
May 28 was a classic Memorial Day-weekend Saturday in the metro area. It was a day to spend time with the family in the park or take in a Rockies game at Coors Field. It certainly wasn’t a day to be inside a stuffy second-floor office in Aurora, waiting for…
Tim Seastedt had a feeling about bugs. Under the proper conditions — and given enough time — perhaps insects could succeed where farmers, ranchers and biologists have been failing for decades: at beating back diffuse knapweed, one of the nastiest, most invasive plants in the West. Five years after Seastedt…
The tourism-and-hospitality industry didn’t stay angry at Governor Bill “Nuclear Winter” Owens for long. On Monday night — just eight days after Owens told the nation that “all of Colorado is on fire” — HOSTPAC, the Colorado Restaurant Association’s political action committee, held a reception in the governor’s honor to…
