John Hickenlooper’s political career was launched when the then-barkeep campaigned to keep the name “Mile High Stadium” at the new football palace the taxpayers were building for Pat Bowlen and the Denver Broncos. Hick didn’t win that one: The stadium district overseeing the project sold the naming rights to Invesco,…
Dear Mexican: Can you please confirm the fact that there are doctors, lawyers and other professionals living in Mexico? I’m a Mexican-American woman living in Chicago who had a heated discussion about that topic. My friend who is a teacher at a local school was of the opinion that there…
Former Westword staffer and Denver native Julie Jargon is now a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, on the restaurant beat, and proving with every story just how interesting the restaurant industry can be. Last week’s front-page story, “A Fan Hits a Roadblock on a Drive to See Every Starbucks,”…
Yes, we know the class of 2009 is graduating into a world that does not give extra credit for spelling skills, or fact-checking. As proof, Boulder Valley School District handed out 395 diplomas to Monarch High grads with the wrong town listed for the school — it’s in Louisville, not…
Farewell, Diamond Shamrock: Tony’s has opened at 950 Broadway, and we may have eaten our last convenience-store burrito. That’s because Tony’s stocks homemade breakfast burritos, as well as dozens of other ready-to-go food items — and, of course, many more prepared dishes and packaged ingredients that just need a little…
It wasn’t just the decisive win that made last night’s Nuggets victory so gratifying. And it wasn’t the fact that Denver looked so good — if very, very wet — on national TV. What was particularly sweet about this chapter in the Cinderella story is that the Nuggets were never…
Argyll might bill itself as “a gastroPub,” but it doesn’t see itself as a neighborhood pub — not unless you consider all of Denver just one big neighborhood. I live several miles and fifteen minutes from Cherry Creek (and that’s if the lights on Speer are synchronized), and last night…
“Do you believe in waterboarding?” The question was not from President Barack Obama or former vice president Dick Cheney, who are all over the news today for their comments on torture and terrorism yesterday. It was posed by former senator Gary Hart, who long before 9/11 was warning of the…
“Denver Stories” is a genius marketing move: Every May, Curious Theatre Company picks four local celebs (or what passes for a celeb in this town), has a local playwright create a short play about them, and then produces all four on one evening that turns into a giant fundraising event…
Dear Mexican: My wife and I have an argument going about pirates. And since you are the source for all things Mexican, I’d thought I’d ask: While I know there were Spanish and Portuguese pirates back in the early 1600s and 1700s, were there ever any Mexican pirates? Not pirates…
Steve Horner, please go back to your corner. Or at least give the besieged Colorado Civil Rights Commission a break and concentrate on alleged injustices in Minnesota, where you’re now living. You know where to file in that state: Back in 1993, you made your first complaint to the Minnesota…
John Hickenlooper didn’t even know he had a cousin named George until one day in 1991, when a fellow in town for the Denver International Film Festival went over to the Wynkoop Brewing Company for a beer. Hickenlooper isn’t a very common name, and those who carry it tend to…
The tipster poured her story into my ear, a long, involved tale of bureaucrats behaving badly. “I’ll talk to the writers and see if we can get that in the paper,” I told her. “Oh, I don’t care about the paper,” she said. “I want it on TV.” Since I…
George Hickenlooper has spent the last several months with Jack Abramoff, the jailed influence-peddler who’ll be the focus of his next film, which stars Kevin Spacey. For his last effort, the filmmaker used a much less experienced crew of actors: the staff of Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, who just happens…
I’m looking over the Platte Valley at the sliver of the “Travel by Train” sign I can still on Union Station through pricy lofts and office buildings constructed over the last few years. And some day there will be a lot more of them, if current plans for the revelopment…
This morning, the 2009 class of North High School will rehearse for tomorrow’s graduation ceremonies at the Colorado Convention Center. The entire graduating class. That’s because on Tuesday, Denver Public Schools put a halt to North principal Ed Salem’s plan to prohibit about 50 out of 180 graduating seniors from…
Ken Gordon was term-limited out of the Colorado Senate in 2008 — but he’s not going quietly. In fact, he’s started a new blog, where he offers this thesis: “I believe that the American people fundamentally misunderstand their form of government and their place in it.” As proof, he offers…
Dear Mexican: My wife is from Michoacán state. We’ve bought a home in the small town of her birth. I love everything about the quiet little place. Even her mother is kind to me, as if I were her son. The food is incredibly good. The puerco is killed that…
School Daze Against all odds, Michael Ballez will be graduating from North High School this year. Those odds include: the classmates who’ve dropped out, one by one, until only a handful of the kids he started with as a freshman remain in school. The pressures he’s faced — and fought…
Shortly after midnight on Saturday, May 9, all state employees received this e-mail from Julie Postlethwait in the Department of Personnel & Administration: “This past Wednesday, Governor Ritter took time out of the last week of a busy legislative session to acknowledge all you do for our State; he officially…
At 12:34 a.m. on May 9, an e-mail from Julie Postlethwait, PIO for the Colorado Department of Personnel Administration, arrived in the in-boxes of all state employees: This past Wednesday, Governor Ritter took time out of the last week of a busy legislative session to acknowledge all you do for…
Timing is everything. Early on, as president-elect Barack Obama started filling his Cabinet, Ken Salazar’s name kept surfacing — but so did word that what the first-term senator and former Colorado Attorney General ultimately wanted was a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and in the meantime, he was perfectly…
