Last January, Denver considered itself such a “world-class” city that John Oglesby, director of the parking management division, announced an ambitious scheme to boost revenues by adding parking meters, raising rates and extending meter hours from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week — in keeping with Denver’s…
I am not a hugger. In fact, I am hugging-impaired. I come from a long line of women who, in photographs, stand identically, crossing our arms in a clear “no-trespassing” sign. I am working on this, but not particularly effectively. “You have an aversion, a reluctance to hug,” notes one…
The last time the big guns of the National Rifle Association came to town, the blood spilled at Columbine was barely dry. Mayor Wellington Webb had urged the group to cancel its annual convention set for Denver in early May 1999, and when the NRA came anyway, Governor Bill Owens…
You don’t need to listen to Congress’s only veterinarian to realize that all of the muck being thrown around in Colorado’s race for the U.S. Senate is nothing but manure. According to pollster Floyd Ciruli, voters are so turned off by the mud being flung in the multimillion-dollar media campaigns…
First Denver introduced Johns TV, the Channel 8 show featuring the least attractive supporting cast ever seen on television. Now it’s gone and prohibited frequent bedding changes. If it weren’t for the fact that the same Denver Water list banning promiscuous sheet-washing also rules out “washing impervious surfaces (sidewalks, driveways,…
On Sunday, Qwest Communications International announced that it will erase close to a billion bucks in alleged revenue from its books in an attempt to satisfy not just investors, but congressional investigators currently grilling company executives. A billion bucks, gone like that. But Qwest can take some consolation in the…
The Denver Police Department is the gang that couldn’t file straight. Its intelligence bureau should be renamed The Stupidity Bureau. Six months after the American Civil Liberties Union stumbled upon the existence of the DPD’s secret surveillance records of citizens — the so-called “spy files” — the bureau still can’t…
When I moved to Denver, some of the town’s top cops were tooling around in Caddys provided by Elvis Presley, the about-to-burn-out star to whom they’d provided not just security, but honorary police status, complete with badge and uniform. The Denver Police Department was just a decade removed from its…
On September 3, you can learn whether you’re on the city’s most exclusive list: a roster of people and organizations in the Denver Police Department’s intelligence files. Some of those on Denver’s second most exclusive list — the cast of characters considering a run for Denver mayor in 2003 –…
Last month, State Farm sent a memo to its Colorado agents and employees. The subject was Alan Prendergast’s June 27 Westword story, “Hidden Damage,” which followed the insurance travails of Sunserea McClelland — and the trial that resulted in her winning a $1.8 million jury verdict against State Farm in…
Around the Fourth of July, Alison “Sunny” Maynard opened a letter from the Independence Institute. “Congratulations on your candidacy!” think tank president Jon Caldara told the Green Party candidate for Colorado attorney general. “To assist you in learning about the many issues facing Colorado, you are invited to a ‘Candidates’…
The biggest danger we face this July Fourth is not illegal fireworks, not the terrorist threat, but a menace even now confronting us at picnics and in parks across this sweltering city. The lost boys. Those elusive private parts intent on escaping the confines of men’s shorts and going so…
“In the name of Allah,” begins the handwritten pleading filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on April 26, “I, slave of Allah, Zacarias Moussaoui, by self representation for every rational vital reasons set in the memorandum accompanying this motion, move for immediate order directing that…
Last year, Rick Ashton, the director of the Denver Public Library, strongly suggested that all 500 DPL employees read Who Moved My Cheese?, the still-chart-topping, still completely inane business book that describes how two littlepeople, Hem and Haw, follow mice in their hunt for cheese, and in the process learn…
As you waited in supermarket checkout lines with your hotdogs and chips this past Memorial Day weekend, you could have picked up the Globe and found out how Frank Gifford was banned from his bedroom by Kathie Lee; you could have studied J. Lo’s barely clad backside; you could even…
Plutonium lasts forever…or close enough. Certainly the stories surrounding Rocky Flats, the now-defunct nuclear-weapons plant sixteen miles northwest (and that means upwind) of Denver, are never-ending. The most controversial current chapter involves the six tons of weapons-grade plutonium scheduled for transport to South Carolina, so that the last phase of…
They speak from the bookshelves. “What’s going on?” murmurs Greg Lopez, the Rocky Mountain News columnist killed in a hit-and-run six years ago, when he was just 35. Some of his best columns — and there are many — are collected in a volume whose name echoes Lopez’s trademark greeting,…
Denver remains the Sally Field of cities. “You like us, you really like us!” we cry out in gratitude whenever anyone pays us the slightest bit of attention. Best city for pets? We’re there. Best city for bikes? Ditto. Biggest laundromat? Then-congresswoman Pat Schroeder offered that sop back in the…
Somewhere down the slope was my father, happily unaware that I’d wrapped myself around one of Winter Park’s historic trail signs. We were carving out our own piece of history. Forty years before, my father had introduced me to Colorado, and skiing (not that the two can be separated), on…
The new year was barely a day old when a city truck appeared out of the pre-dawn murk on my northwest Denver street. Minutes later, it had left a calling card for one of my neighbors: a Denver boot, clamped to the left front wheel of the car. It was…
According to the Peter Principle, a business theory formulated by Canadian Lawrence Peters back in 1968, in a hierarchy, people tend to rise to the level of their incompetence. But in Boulder, that earnest, non-hierarchical community in the shadow of the Flatirons, people rise far higher than that. Like so…
Wes McKinley has never washed a vehicle. A horse, yes. But in the arid southeastern corner of Colorado where he lives, “washing a truck is a waste of water,” McKinley says. “A waste of precious liquid.” Out in Walsh, just sixteen miles from the Oklahoma border, they talk a lot…
