Off Limits

Just when you thought the My Twinn dolls were dead, dead, dead, they’ve come back — Chucky-like! — for a return engagement. And for the sake of little girls everywhere, let’s hope that this sequel is more successful than Bride of Chucky. Earlier this year, the Greenwood Village-based company responsible…

An Athlete Dying Young

Tony Dispense grew up small, which is how he gained the lifelong habit of trying harder than just about anyone else. This was especially true in sports. When he played tennis, he’d stay out late practicing his strokes. While mountain biking, he seemed to push just a little more than…

Letters to the Editor

What a Circus! An elephant never forgets: The August 5 Worst-Case Scenario, “The Greatest Shun on Earth,” was really not funny and showed that Kenny Be missed the point. It also came at a time that was detrimental to Initiative 100 just prior to the primary election. I thought a…

End of the Line

Fletcher Stumph will drive a Greyhound bus between Steamboat Springs and Salt Lake City for six more days. After that, the route, along with 260 stops in thirteen northern states, will disappear. The price of gas is up and ridership is down — that’s what Greyhound management says, and Stumph…

Off Limits

Eighty-three-year-old icon Blinky the Clown, who was born Russell Scott, was all snoofly last week when Victor Bencomo found him at Blinky’s Antiques and Collectibles, his tiny shop on South Broadway. Bencomo had dropped by to beg the former star of Blinky’s Fun Club, which was canceled by Channel 2…

The Message

On a recent episode of HBO’s Real Time, comic Bill Maher suggested that the young woman who accuses basketballer Kobe Bryant of raping her last year is named “Looney McSlut.” Amid audience laughter, he added, “I think it is, actually. They weren’t supposed to release it, but…” Thanks to Maher…

Really Long Shot

The slightly crooked basketball hoop in his family’s Congress Park back yard holds many memories and meanings for Kevin Fletcher. Dribbling a ball under that basket one hot afternoon last week, Kevin thought about the times his driveway suddenly turned into the gleaming floor of the L.A. Forum. About the…

Letters to the Editor

A Read-Letter Day Free love: These days, people are ungrateful for just about everything, and I’ve pretty much learned to accept it by now. But sometimes, like when there is blatant disrespect for a free newspaper (as in last week’s Letters column), I just have to say something. Westword may…

Outfaxed

Mike Zinna is feeling giddy. After years of battling Jefferson County officials, whom he’s accused of everything from financial malfeasance and moral bankruptcy to bad hairdos, he figures he finally has the bastards nailed. What he has are surveillance videotapes unmasking the people who’ve been sending him anonymous faxes from…

Slow Ride

When Hunter Weeks’s mom was in the Peace Corps, she traveled Africa by thumb, hitching across the Sahara Desert with just a girlfriend and a map. That was the mid-’60s, a decade before her son — and heir to her wanderlust — was born in Scottsdale, Arizona. “That was her…

Roll Call

Forget red and blue America. The real division is between red and green Colorado. Both of the states GOP candidates for U.S. Senate emphatically chose green chili as their hands-down favorite (no decision on whether they prefer Colorado- or New Mexico-style), while each of the Dems went con carne all…

Off Limits

Colorado earned the title “The Holdout State” at last week’s Democratic National Convention, after thirteen Dennis Kucinich delegates decided to stand by their man. And while Marilyn Megenity, maven of the Mercury Cafe, didn’t hold back in the Beantown reports she phoned in to Off Limits (excerpted below), she, too,…

For Better or Curse

For Cat Collins, program director of hip-hop heavy KS-107.5, figuring out which words his station can air isn’t as easy as it used to be. “The line is gray,” he says, “and it moves around.” Maybe so, but ever since singer Janet Jackson suffered a wardrobe malfunction that revealed a…

Uphill Racer

Only a handful of newsworthy memories survive from my early teens. But out of the momentous headlines of that time — Vietnam, Watergate — one of the clearest is of a child’s contest: The Soap Box Derby scandal from the summer of 1973, 31 years ago this week. Jimmy Gronen,…

Letters to the Editor

Who’s Your Buddha? Stress for success: Peace out, Westword! First you have that wild cover on Let Out, then you get all blissed out with Laura Bond’s positive story on Buddhism, “Across the Buddhaverse,” in the July 29 issue. Although I liked Laura’s article, Westword is better when you’re bad…

Across the Buddhaverse

WHY AM I TALKING? On this damp summer morning, the question beams out from bulletin boards and bathhouse doors all over Shambhala Mountain Center. It’s a rhetorical question, of course — a Xeroxed Zen koan. Because right now, no one is talking much at all: The bumper stickers on cars…

Outfaxed

Mike Zinna is feeling giddy. After years of battling Jefferson County officials, whom hes accused of everything from financial malfeasance and moral bankruptcy to bad hairdos, he figures he finally has the bastards nailed. What he has are surveillance videotapes unmasking the people whove been sending him anonymous faxes from…

This Buddha’s for You

On Sunday night at five o’clock, about fifty people fill the worn, brown pews at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church on Ogden Street. They’re surrounded by stained-glass windows colored with Christian images — but the church altar bears a Buddhist shrine, not a cross. And at the beginning of the…

Law and Order

Beth McCann, Mitch Morrissey and John Walsh can all agree on one very important thing: If this election were Celebrity Deathmatch, Colorado Attorney General/U.S. Senate hopeful Ken Salazar would beat the crap out of high-flying New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Maybe that’s because Salazar has home-court advantage with all…

Off Limits

Scandal? What scandal? University of Colorado Buffs coach Gary Barnett says he’d “like to officially not acknowledge the word ‘scandal,'” in connection with his team’s sexual shenanigans — and now, with former CU strong-safety Sean Traylor’s new invention, any evidence of scandalous behavior will go right down the drain. Because…

The Message

Back in the era when information traveled at a rather leisurely pace, news sources could usually afford to wait for publications to correct errors — but not anymore. “Today we have a situation where media outlets are monitoring each other’s coverage,” says Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the Denver District Attorney’s…

Solid Gold

Once upon a time, not long ago, the Denver Nuggets were the sorriest franchise in the National Basketball Association. The laughingstock of the league. A garbage can for discontented, used-up and incompetent players. They were objects of scorn in their own city — like Brian Griese and the Denver boot…