The Denver Post was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for its treatment of the Columbine High School shootings and wound up as the lead dog in a joint operating agreement with the Rocky Mountain News — but in recent years, the paper has been seen by many observers as flabby, boring…
The Funk and Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary — which should know better — defines “baseball” as “a game played with a wooden bat and a hard ball by two teams of nine players each…the object of the game being to make as many runs as possible within nine innings of…
Cell Hell He’s got our number: I’m here to say thank you for Patricia Calhoun’s “A Hard Cell” observations in the September 26 issue. I, too, believe cell phones are a menace to our societal well-being. Bravo to Calhoun for putting her beliefs in print and on the air via…
Meredith Behm is a drug addict. When it’s time to get high, she disappears from her job, says goodbye to her mother, kisses her daughter as she drops her off at school, and vanishes for days. She winds up wherever the drugs are. During most of the past two years,…
It’s a bright spring afternoon, and dozens of people are gathered in the courtroom of the Denver Drug Court. One by one, they are called to a podium at the front, where the judge gives each participant a diploma and a handshake, as well as an opportunity to make a…
Budgetary news is pretty bleak in most cities these days, so it’s no surprise that Mayor Wellington Webb has been tightening the belt. But in one section of his proposed $769 million budget for 2003, the mayor went beyond mere tightening: He plans to ax the city’s entire Asset Recovery…
Yeah, yeah, so Republican incumbent Wayne Allard and Democratic challenger Tom Strickland — the major candidates in “the closest Senate race in the nation,” according to Tim Russert and a recent MSNBC poll — faced off on Meet the Press Sunday morning, looking alternately sincerely lunkheaded (Allard) and sleazily lawyerish…
Here’s what’s left of Pizza Time takeout: a small, greasy room full of men, their backs facing the door, almost all of them representing a former competitor. In less than 24 hours, every piece of kitchen equipment — including the pizza ovens and the giant exhaust fan — will be…
Before long, Channel 2 will begin sending out a digital TV signal across Denver — good news for the relative handful of local viewers who have the proper equipment but no cable or satellite service. Yet the rationale under which the station was granted permission to mount a digital antenna…
“God made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”– Eric Liddell, 1924 Olympic sprinter, as quoted in Chariots of Fire, 1981 Oy. Here it is, the Days of Awe, the most important time on the Jewish calendar — a somber, introspective time when the faithful atone for…
The Wheel Thing Taken for a ride: I just read Harrison Fletcher’s “Wheels of Misfortune,” in the September 12 issue, and I have a few comments. Latinos come to this country to work and make a new life, which is almost impossible at home. Over time, some become quite successful…
Next week is going to be big for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. After seventeen months of renovation, the museum’s new west atrium will open, with windows four stories high looking out onto City Park Lake, the downtown skyline and the breathtaking mountain vista beyond. At 6:30 p.m…
They’re portraying it as a classic David and Goliath match-up: the little guys who drive people to the airport for a living versus the big corporation they once worked for. But the former SuperShuttle drivers who broke off from the shuttle giant and started their own service are proving to…
When the Reform Party of the United States gathered for its national convention ten days ago, the group was a sliver of its former self, the rowdy renegade third party founded by Ross Perot in 1995 after the Texas billionaire received almost 20 percent of the vote in his 1992…
Pockets of open land sometimes appear just over the Adams County line. Bordered on the north by I-76, with a dense clump of Westminster off in the distance, this section of north Denver is a barren stretch of used-car dealers, scrapyards and cornfields. Some of its occupants look set in…
Walt DeHaven, the new vice president and general manager at Channel 4, doesn’t mind sprinkling his no-nonsense reputation with a little sensitivity. During an interview on September 10, he chatted quietly about two of his aunts, who died on the United Airlines flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field last…
Now that football season has kicked us in the butt and the state’s major teams, with the exception of Colorado’s Buffaloes, have jumped out to good starts, it’s time for readers to test their knowledge of local gridiron history — and to predict the future. Herewith the Official Colorado Football…
Street Smarts Crack in the sidewalk: While reading David Holthouse’s “Between Rock and a Hard Place,” in the September 5 issue, I involuntarily shuddered. Earlier this year, my partner and I were looking to purchase a home in that same neighborhood. Like Mary, we were tired of the boring, homogenized…
They arrive before the sun, traveling from Longmont and beyond to the corner of Champa Street and Park Avenue West. The small man carrying two plastic grocery sacks stuffed with clothes. The adolescent boy wearing a pressed white shirt and perfectly parted hair. The old woman huddling inside a plaid…
As an aspiring 26-year-old writer with a dark past, Mark Jordan figures he has plenty to tell the world. He has stories about bank robberies, for instance, and the many episodes of violence he’s seen in eight years of prison life. And how federal authorities have been trying to coerce…
On the last day of August, in a vast, white wasteland, beneath a blazing, bone-bleaching sun, Jesus did combat with Satan, kung-fu style. The battle began by chance, at the 2002 Burning Man festival, when a twenty-something man costumed as Jesus crossed paths with a stranger in a Satan suit…
One of the displays at this year’s Colorado State Fair was a jaw-dropping “H” removed from the usual 4H fare. “Hippie Homie House,” the runner-up in the domestic arts, dollhouse division, offered a psychedelic commentary on both the flower-power children of the ’60s and the hip-hop generation of today. “The…
