Big Digital Brother

Around the world in eighty days has been reduced to eighty seconds. That’s about the time it takes to call up a Boulder company’s Web site and take a peek at any one of the hundreds of real-time images it offers from Bourbon Street to Buenos Aires. Digital Camera Network,…

Sticking Point

A “tribal knife” being advertised in a Sunday newspaper supplement distributed around the country as the artwork of U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell is about as genuine as its faux-turquoise pommel. Campbell, who acknowledges creating the basic design of “The Cheyenne Buffalo Knife” several years ago for the Franklin Mint,…

A Miner Feat

On the walls of Henry Pohs’s basement are more than 1,000 underground mining artifacts, as precisely arranged as any museum collection. Here you’ll find everything from clay lamps used in the Roman catacombs to rare pieces from a 1917 St. Louis mining convention. This well-lit subterranean space–a contrast from the…

Clinical Depression

January 15 was a big day at the Salud Family Health Center in Commerce City, one of the government-funded, front-line primary-care clinics that treat more than a third of the state’s poor and indigent medical patients. After months of planning, the clinic was opening a new office. The expansion, which…

Off Limits

Limp noodles: Stymied in his attempts to broadcast live from Pasta Jay’s restaurant, Geraldo Rivera nonetheless showed up right on schedule in Boulder, where on Monday he interviewed Ramsey family spokesman Pat Korten–his clients are “up there at the top of the potential suspect list,” the full-time flack allowed–and hosted…

RBI=MC

That hint of springtime you feel in the air can mean only one thing. The attention of red-blooded sports fans in these parts will soon turn to the fluid dynamics of air flow, plausible stress-strain cycles at fixed impact velocities and (everybody’s favorite up in the Rockpile) the Navier-Stokes Equation…

Letters

She’ll Vouch for That Regarding Stuart Steers’s “Readin’, Writin’ and Rabble-Rousin’,” in the February 20 issue: The panic of Boulder parents when confronted by the middle-school philosophy is understandable when one looks at Dean Damon’s previous adventures in Denver Public Schools. He engineered the middle-school model in Denver first. Despite…

Sealed Fates

Not so very long ago, a Colorado kindergartner was murdered, her body violated in the most awful, intimate way before it was discarded. Her name was not JonBenet Ramsey. Under a peculiar Colorado statute, you might not know her name at all–except that the disappearance of Ashley Gray from her…

Readin’, Writin’ and Rabble-Rousin’

Stephanie Hult, 1960s feminist and anti-war activist, says she’s misunderstood. Her numerous enemies portray Hult, now the president of the Boulder Valley school board, as the spiteful leader of a band of right-wing elitists who want to destroy the Boulder Valley school system. But Hult says she’s every bit the…

What Hit Us?

Now that NBC’s Asteroid has leveled much of Denver (which stood in for Dallas and Kansas City), it’s time to sift through the smoking rubble and unearth some more of our state’s memorable celluloid moments. Hollywood fat cats come here because they like the mountains and because it’s cheaper to…

Tee Time for Norm?

The City Park Golf Course has long been a jewel of Denver’s parks system. These days it’s looking more like a political sand trap. Most of the attention surrounding the city’s beleaguered municipal golf system in recent weeks has focused on the dispute over whether to raise greens fees for…

Off Limits

The sound and the furry: It wasn’t just that Boulder police chief Tom Koby’s uniform looked so unused that mothballs might have fallen out of his pockets during last week’s news conference on the JonBenet Ramsey case. Something else didn’t quite fit the picture of a metro police chief. The…

The Lure of the Siren

When you’re working 24-hour shifts on an ambulance crew, there’s always plenty of time to kill while waiting for someone to almost get killed. Upstairs at Columbine Ambulance headquarters in Littleton, the restless paramedics hang out in a day room that resembles a college dorm. On a typical morning, near…

A Bleak Landscape

Denver may be about to lose an art collection that was a fixture in the Capitol Hill neighborhood for nearly twenty years. The Turner Museum was housed in a home at 773 Downing Street until last year. Its founder, Douglas Graham, owns hundreds of lithographs and other works by the…

Johnny on the Spot

He doesn’t remember much from that night at the Bossert Hotel, except that someone kept refilling his glass with champagne, and he could see from the windows that the whole length of Montague Street was clogged with delirious people. “We had to take turns going outside and waving to them,”…

Better Shred Than Read

What did Boulder do to deserve this? That’s a stupid question. Next question. Okay. So why did Boulder call a rare news conference last Thursday, introduce it as a “briefing” and then let Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter launch into a half-hour, Mayberry-meets-Naropa soliloquy that covered everything from his…

Letters

Fetal Attraction I just finished reading Steve Jackson’s February 13 feature, “The Fight of Their Lives,” on Dr. Warren Hern, and felt compelled to comment on it. I first encountered this amazing man in his anthropology class last fall at the University of Colorado-Boulder. I was fascinated by his account…

The Fight of Their Lives

The plainclothes cops, their shoulder holsters bulging beneath suit coats, confer quietly with a knot of uniformed state troopers outside the old Supreme Court chambers. Here on the second floor of the State Capitol, the air is as heavy as the moment before a summer thunderstorm. Mike Newell, Denver detective-turned-security-consultant,…

Do Not Adjust Your Set

The members of the Greater Metro Cable Consortium know Tele-Communications Inc. has a habit of making surprise announcements. But even veteran TCI watchers weren’t ready for the bombshell dropped by company spokeswoman Margaret Lejuste during a group meeting last December. “She simply said, ‘The rebuild has stopped,'” recalls Norman Beecher,…

Off Limits

To market, to market: Funny, but we could swear that just a month ago Mayor Wellington Webb said he didn’t think Stapleton was an appropriate place for a new football stadium. Late last week, however, in light of reports that the proposed November vote on a taxpayer-subsidized replacement for Mile…

Little Grain Men

Expect an increase in the number of pranksters, scientists and new-age tourists fooling around in Colorado wheat fields this summer. Crop circles, those nifty geometric patterns of flattened plant stalks that infest the English countryside, are moving this way. Actually, it’s the belief in the mystery and power of crop…

Thanks a Lot, PAL

For 28 years, Denver’s Police Athletic League has honed the athletic skills of inner-city youth and taught them the value of competition and fair play. But when it comes to locking up city park sites for its ballgames, PAL doesn’t mess around; the well-connected group has no interest in competing…