Wake-Up Call: FU, Senator Brophy

According to state senator Greg Brophy’s blog, “he’s been called one of the most conservative members of the legislature and a Prius driving, bicycle riding, eco freak. You decide.” But first read this, and you might come up with a couple of other descriptors. On April 24, he recounted the…

Wake-Up Call: Mason Tvert on the money

If the Colorado Legislature can tie a debate on the death penalty to the dismal economy, no reason California can’t do the same for a discussion of legalizing marijuana. “Well, I think it’s not time for (legalization), but I think it’s time for a debate,” Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said Tuesday…

Swine flu has got Know Nothings at a fever pitch

Dear Mexican: Is it true that most Mexicans are carriers of the swine flu due to the fact they eat a lot of chicharrones, or is it the fact that your women are so pig-like? I knew that Mexicans have muy shitty diets, but now we have to worry about…

Wake-Up Call: Charles Cousins made his mark

It’s impossible to travel through Five Points without thinking of Charles Cousins. His signs are everywhere — offering this property for rent, announcing that his company manages another. But Cousins, who passed away Monday morning at the age of 91, left his mark in so many other ways. The history…

The Week Ahead: A threepeat for East

Yes, the Nuggets are advancing, but Colorado can already claim a real winning team: the East High Constitutional Scholars, who just won the We the People contest in Washington, D.C. — for the third year running. The high schoolers are already preparing to make it four in a row, but…

Wake-Up Call: When pigs fly, the good go to Boulder

With two cases of swine flu (the “other white flu”) confirmed in Colorado and bumbling Vice President Joe Biden calling for quasi-quarantine, it could be time to go to your bookshelves and dust off that copy of The Stand, Stephen King’s 1978 novel. In this epic (it was re-released, uncut,…

Swine flu name makes pig fans sick

After pork producers and Israeli officials complained about the name “swine flu,” world health authorities have come up with a new name for the pending pandemic: “the other white flu.” Variations on that joke have been flying around the Internet for days, but to Brian Gansmann, who was on the…

Wake-Up Call: Andrew Speaker’s no-fly zone

Andrew Speaker, Denver’s accidental tourist, has some sense of timing. Speaker, the focus of our last international health-scare when he went on the lam, and in the air, after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and warned not to fly, this week filed suit against the Centers for Disease Control for invasion…

Request these songs while you drinko por Cinco

Dear Readers: As you drinko por Cinco on May 5, please hold on to this column listing songs that mariachis will gladly play instead of having to glumly strum through the umpteenth “La Bamba” and “Guantanamera.” The following eclectic choices (and reasoning) came from hundreds of suggestions submitted by wabs…

This state’s souvenirs suck. Why can’t we Buy Mile High?

At Greetings From Colorado, a store on the A concourse of Denver International Airport, don’t expect to find many actual Colorado greetings. Yes, there are cards from Leanin’ Tree, the Boulder-based Western art emporium that Edward P. Trumble founded back in 1949; and gilded aspen-leaf jewelry created in this state;…

Wake-Up Call: Mall in the family

At Monday’s tourism rally, Governor Bill Ritter urged us to “Rediscover Colorado” this summer. I started by walking the length of the 16th Street Mall at lunch yesterday, and found that this seventeen-block stretch — touted as the most successful pedestrian mall in the country and one of this town’s…

Wake-Up Call: High on the Mile Haiku City

Verse came to worse last night at the Central Library, where close to a hundred people gathered for last night’s Fresh City Life poetry reading inspired by “Mustang,” Luis Jimenez’s blue horse sculpture out at Denver International Airport. We were in the depths of the basement, but spirits soared as…

Wake Up Call: The week ahead — when worse comes to verse

Before we were panicked about swine flu and twisted by torture-memo leaks, we were terrified by the Devil Horse, Luis Jimenez’s killer sculpture that stands guard outside Denver International Airport, its red eyes shooting deadly lasers at unsuspecting passersby. Or are those glowing orbs actually illuminating this town’s deep well…

Wake-Up Call: A week of goodbyes

I’m looking out my back window over the Platte Valley, across the highway and the river and the railyards to Union Station, and thinking that I’ll never see the Ski Train pull up again. After close to seventy years, the last twenty of them under owner Phil Anschutz, the train…

Wake-Up Call: There goes the neighborhood!

One of Denver’s greatest draws is its strong network of neighborhoods, dozens of neighborhoods, each filled with advocates rooted to their particular patch of turf, but also to the city at large. And even in these depressing times, there’s good news coming from them. The EZE Mop Shopping District, a…

Wake-Up Call: End of the line for the Ski Train

My first look at Colorado was from a train. When I was a kid, my family was part of a group that would pile onto the Denver Zephyr in Chicago late on a winter afternoon. While the parents sat up all night in a coach car, our cadre of kids…

Smother love: Happy 100th, Stella Cordova

Back in 1967, Stella Cordova was working as a cook at Chubby Burger Drive-In at 1231 West 38th Avenue when its owner, Bill Gray, asked if she wanted to buy the place. Even though she had a big family and little money, she took him up on his offer, paying…

Wake-Up Call: Making connections

With just a week to go until InDenverTimes decides whether to pull the plug or revise its business plan, news comes of yet another paid, online newspaper venture. This one is Journalism Online, another brainchild from Steven Brill, who brought us the magazines American Lawyer and Content (a now-defunct journalism…

Wake-Up Call: An idea ready for take-off

While Mayor John Hickenlooper was outlining some of the ways that Denver is speeding up projects to stimulate the local economy, DIA aviation manager Kim Day yesterday announced plans for a 500-room hotel at the airport, which will be built right by the anticipated FasTracks stop. The hotel project could…

Who says Mexicans have to eat Mexican food?

Dear Mexican: In an earlier column, you mentioned that conservatives can’t have an argument against illegal immigration without it degenerating into a diatribe against culture. Here’s an argument that has nothing to do with culture. In California, we now have a severe water shortage. I work for a municipal water…