News

Bad News Bear Trouble’s bruin: Your “Bear Facts,” in the August 23 issue, was in extremely bad taste. A reason, if not the reason, bears are moving to lower altitudes is to find food. There are various reasons for this: development, and a late spring snow that killed their higher-altitude…

It’s the middle of the day, but more than a dozen employees of House of Blues Concerts have gathered in the small conference room of the company’s Greenwood Village offices. It’s party time. Again. In-house festivities have become commonplace around here lately. On June 20, Barry Fey announced that he…

Like most people in the live-music trade, Doug Kauffman, Jesse Morreale and Chris Swank, the three partners behind the promotion firm Nobody in Particular Presents, are colorful, argumentative, shoot-from-the-lip types. But not these days. Ever since August 6, when NIPP filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Denver against…

Joseph Adams has flashbacks sometimes. In those moments, he practically relives the time he spent in a prison cell in Kuwait, the beatings and interrogations, the terrible feeling of not knowing when or if he would see his family again. But the bad memories are only part of it. They…

This past month, Colorado has witnessed an unprecedented migration of bears into urban areas — a veritable ursineapalooza as bears rummage through suburban backyards, fish in wading pools and slurp through Pepsi-Cola plants. “People are encroaching on bear habitat,” the DOW’s Scott Hoover told NBC on Sunday. “They are going…

A Weld County landscape firm that declared bankruptcy in April has continued to hire Spanish-speaking immigrants and to pay them with worthless checks, say former employees. Applied Landscaping Solutions, which works extensively in Longmont and Broomfield, has racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. In addition, Boulder County…

When former Colorado attorney general Gale Norton was President George Dubya Bush’s surprise pick to be the nation’s new Interior Secretary, enviros quickly labeled her “James Watt in a skirt.” Watt, the controversial Interior Secretary under Ronald Reagan, was a man who had as much of a penchant for putting…

Stadium Blanket Coverage Flag on the play: Enough already about the new stadium! In your August 16 paper, I had to read about it in Patricia Calhoun’s column, and in Michael Roberts’s media column, and even in Off Limits. About the only place there wasn’t a discussion of the new…

In mid-June, Farrell “Mack” McMahon of Garden City, Missouri, woke up, smoked the first of many cigarettes, and came to a decision. Then he went into town and had his hair cut for the first time in ten years. Long white locks fell to the floor, along with the remains…

In April, Derek Empey, vice president of development in the San Diego office of the Morgan Group, released an intriguing memo to his co-workers. A sort of Sun Tzu’s Art of War for hawkish developers, it’s titled “How to Play the Game: 10 Lessons Learned From Infill Developments.” Lesson number…

Losing a queen isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a chess player. “My friend told me about this big guy, Gary, who was playing speed chess on the 16th Street Mall,” says Carey Jenkins, a math major at Metro State and last year’s chess club president at the…

Last week, President George W. Bush fired off the latest shot in an eleven-year-long court battle that could determine the scope of federal affirmative-action programs for years to come. But, surprisingly, he supported current programs and urged them to continue, going against previous statements to the contrary. The case involves…

The five most important words in Denver newspapering this past week were not “who, what, why, where and when,” as they should be, but “Invesco Field at Mile High.” That’s because the city’s broadsheet, a paper originally known as the Denver Evening Post, has decided to call the place the…

For a talk-show host working at a station with ratings more anemic than one of Dracula’s victims, KNUS’s Jimmy Lakey has plenty of both defenders and detractors — and the best place to catch up with the very different things they say about him is DenverRadio.net. The site, created five…

Down the Drain Bowled over: Patricia Calhoun’s “Flush With Success,” in the August 9 issue, was a sad commentary on the state of the news business in this town. True, it was ludicrous that the Giant Flush at the new stadium — whatever anyone chooses to call our Bowlen Bailout…

Two weeks ago, John Meyer came across a man with a clipboard outside Toddy’s, a grocery store in a busy strip mall on the edge of downtown Berthoud. The man was collecting signatures of registered voters. Petitions are nothing new in Berthoud; lately, the town seems awash in them. Last…

Tim Seastedt is at war. His enemy is a drifter, voracious and cruel, striking fast and furiously. By 1997, it had already ravaged more than three million acres of rangeland in the West and fought off assaults by ravenous goats, chemical agents and flamethrowers. Then Seastedt arrived on the scene,…

Two years ago, Russell Johnson ventured into a meadow in Cherry Creek State Park and was swallowed by one of Colorado’s worst weeds: leafy spurge. “It was everywhere,” he says. “Waist high.” The other day, Johnson, an Arapahoe County weed specialist, returned to the same spot. This time the weed…

Colorado’s Ocean Journey will find out this week whether its request for taxpayer support will sink or swim when the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District announces its decision on the aquarium’s eligibility. Whatever the outcome, SCFD boardmembers can safely say they didn’t bow to political pressure — from Ocean Journey…

Colorado congressman Scott McInnis has made quite a splash recently, jumping headfirst into the media frenzy over Representative Gary Condit and missing intern Chandra Levy. As anyone with a pulse knows, the married Condit had apparently been playing House with Levy before her disappearance, then lied to the police about…