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A promotional postcard for this year’s Starz Denver Pan African Film Festival features a thuggish-looking white boy with headphones around his neck. Clad head to toe in hip-hop garb, he is a sign of the urban style that is ubiquitous not only in high schools, shopping malls and playgrounds across…

Jim Dahl had a drunken dream. A dream to organize the biggest pub crawl ever — and then hold it along Colfax Avenue, Denver’s most liquid asset. “There are a lot of new bars that have opened and that are doing well,” says Dahl, whose day job is with a…

Growing up, most kids played some variation of Butt Ball. Though decidedly gay-porno-sounding in retrospect, the game was pretty innocent, even if it did fixate on players’ asses. Not sexually, though: The goal was simply to inflict the most pain possible. It was fun, people. Damned fun. Kids would gather…

Do you know that a civil war has been raging in the African nation of Uganda since 1988? Are you familiar with the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel militia that restocks its depleted ranks by kidnapping Ugandan children — approximately 20,000 of them over the past decade-plus? Have you heard…

Last Writes The easy way out: Thanks to Michael Roberts for “Death Wish,” his Message in the March 31 issue. I hate almost every take on Hunter Thompson’s death that I’ve read. He’s no hero for his final act. This was one last pimp — only to the whole world…

As we know, theres no crying in baseball. No crying when the first six batters all smash ropes off you and by the bottom of the second, your earned-run average looks like the dinner tab at Mortons. No crying when the left-field bleachers are so sparsely populated you can hear…

“And this is the Black Lung,” said Mrs. Carlson, brushing that same invisible strand of hair from her face. We were in sixth-grade science class, had just finished the filmstrip series Happy Hormones and You and were headed toward the dreaded book-on-cassette Ann Landers Talks Teen. But first we had…

What you need to know up front about Jack the monkey is that he doesn’t instantly get along with everyone he meets. Like many people, really, Jack needs to spend a little time with you before you truly earn his trust. Perhaps Jack’s owner should have considered this before he…

In academia, the rule has always been “publish or perish.” Or, if your name is Ward Churchill, publish — then perish. Institutions of higher education wish to appear as esteemed as possible in the public eye, so they demand results from the people they employ. You want tenure, professors? Then…

In an essay in the hagiographic March 24 issue of Rolling Stone devoted to Hunter S. Thompson, director Bob Rafelson wrote of seeing Thompson’s body before it was removed from the author’s Woody Creek home following his February 20 suicide. Afterward, Rafelson’s wife asked how Thompson looked. “Surprised,” he replied…

It Was the Best of Times… Readers’ digest: Always enjoy your Best of Denver issue — discovering new places to eat, people-watch, shop, etc. Almost as enjoyable is reading the readers’ choices. A few always stun me, and this year is no exception: 1) Best Hair on a Media Personality…

A cheerleader in her black, gray and white uniform was talking with a gangster in blue behind Montbello High School one afternoon last September. The girl, Janeisha Lewis, had a solid GPA and a goal of joining the Navy; she carried her pom-poms in a duffel bag over her shoulder…

When staffers go through the Ski Train at the end of each run from Winter Park to Union Station, they find backpacks, boots and cell phones. Lots of cell phones. “And everyone has ‘Mom’ programmed in,” says Jim Bain, Ski Train president and CEO. “So don’t lose your phone, because…

Ben Kronberg knew something was up when nobody would let him go to the gym. His brother was hanging out at his apartment, as was the twin sister of his girlfriend, photographer Anna Newell, and they were adamant that he not work out. “I didn’t know what their problem was,”…

I’ve never been a good test-taker. I get nervous during an exam, overthinking the simple questions and replaying entire episodes of DuckTales in my head during the difficult ones. Sometimes, for no real reason, I’ll just have a good cry. In high school, when the AP tests fell on top…

When longtime newspaperman Randy Miller took over the Colorado Daily in 2001, the venerable Boulder publication was in shaky financial shape — but what a difference four years make. Today’s Daily is a much more mainstream paper than it was during its radical ’70s and ’80s heyday, and a more…

Alma Mutter Course correction: In her March 3 “Collision Course,” Patricia Calhoun neatly skewers the University of Colorado from all directions, and rightly so, I suppose. But at a certain point, I guess I start to feel a little sympathy for my poor beleaguered alma mater. Okay, I admit it:…

If it was 11 p.m. instead of 11 a.m. and the students were toting keg cups of Icehouse rather than buckets of cleaning solution, the scene could have been mistaken for a total rager. Two hundred college kids packed the old Sigma Pi house, everyone sweaty, spilling out on the…

Last week, in a splendid illustration of the intertwined relationship between booze and campus life, the University of Colorado hosted an alcohol-education program at Coors Events Center. When a speaker asked how many people had attended an anti-binge drinking presentation before, everyone in the audience of roughly 700 students raised…

Commerce City is a strange place to go in search of your identity. Last fall, Yvonne Lucero was driving north on Brighton Boulevard, past the rendering-plant spires leaking steam and stench, thinking about how to confront her impersonator. Are you Yvonne Lucero? she would ask. The 26-year-old nursing student wondered…