25 Toys for Folks Over 25

Let’s be honest, your friends… well, they’re not “grown-ups.” Sure, they’re technically adults, but they know how to have fun. Here are 25 awesome toys to entertain, torment and tantalize your favorite big kids. — Chelsea Ide & Michelle Mathews of the Dallas Observer…

Mike Shanahan the Mastermind?

Early on in the season, Denver Broncos coach Mike Shanahan reminded everyone that coaches can effectively “ice” a kicker. And with that, he ruined football. Ok, maybe he didn’t ruin the game, but that move has since become more played out than Peaches this season. We used to worship the…

Best of Denver Winners 1992

In 1992, Westword published its ninth Best of Denver issue, a celebration of the city that saluted everything from Best Last Stand (the Denver Zephyrs, about to be supplanted by the Colorado Rockies) to Best Bail Bondsman (Duane Chapman, before he became known as “Dog”) to Best — and Sometimes…

CU Finally Decides to Cut Its PR Losses

On December 5, the University of Colorado Boulder announced that it would pay a total of $2.85 million to two women, Lisa Simpson and Anne Gilmore, whose claims of having been sexually assaulted in 2001 launched what became popularly known as the CU recruiting scandal. The decision finally closes a…

Denver Post Names Two New Metro Columnists

The Denver Post has been on a columnist search ever since word leaked that longtimer Diane Carman would be moving on — the topic of this blog. Moreover, Post editor Greg Moore made it clear in the October 25 Message that he was hoping to find a strong internal candidate…

Letters to the Editor

“Hot for Teacher,” Adam Cayton-Holland, November 29 Teacher’s Fret As a former Graland alumna (alumnae? — I didn’t take Latin at Graland), I found Adam Cayton-Holland’s take on the whole sex-scandal situation almost dead-on. I feel his indignance about many former classmates. It’s been twenty years, and I’ve stayed in…

Coors Cancels Christmas (Brew)

Coors hasn’t canceled Christmas, but after two decades, the brewer is no longer making its seasonal Winterfest beer for the public, choosing to focus instead on a winter beer from the company’s Blue Moon brand. The news brings the same mixed sentiments that accompanied the retirement of Jesse Helms: hard…

Denver’s Diversity Training’s Got the White Stuff

First of all, City and County of Denver, I want to thank you for coming to me in this, your hour of need. Okay, okay, so it was actually the Diversity Advisory Committee (the less-fun DAC) of the separate Career Service Authority that made the impossibly awful diversity training video,…

Death Sentence

Late last January, David Isberg took a urine test at a hospital to figure out what was wrong with him. The 42-year-old inmate had started peeing blood while serving a three-year sentence at Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington for marijuana possession. But before the results came back, Isberg was…

Helping Journalists Take the Jump

Managers at the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News value veteran journalists for their experience, their wisdom and their institutional knowledge — and for the way they improve the bottom line when they leave. The Rocky submitted a buyout proposal to longtimers earlier this year, and the Post has…

Life Skills Offers Last-Chance High

Justin Martinez missed school — again — on November 2. But this time, the nineteen-year-old’s absence was excused. He had to go to Pueblo to see his father. In the morgue. Justin’s parents had split when he was just a kid. Justin and his brothers stayed with their mother in…

Late Shift

Christina Clinkscales sued Justin Jahn in August 2006, claiming the former Breckenridge bellman had sexually assaulted her a year earlier, when she was eighteen (“Out of Bounds,” November 29). Justin, who maintains that the sex was consensual and who earlier was found not guilty of sexual assault in criminal court,…

The Early Bird Catches….Hell

Today the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida in Tallahassee upheld the Democratic Party’s right to enforce its primary rules — and spanked the Florida delegation for pushing up its state vote to early January “We’re pleased the court ruled in our favor, recognizing the constitutionally…

In Praise of the Columbine Killers

“I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in…

The Talented Lady Buffs

The 2007 lineup for the CU Buffs women’s basketball team roster includes Brittany Spears and Whitney Houston. We wish them luck in spite of this…

Save Mister Splashy Pants!

It’s whaling season again and Greenpeace and the more zealous Sea Sheperd Conservation Society (profiled in this great National Geographic piece by Denver writer Peter Heller, which he later expanded into a book) are surely steaming their way to the Antarctic Ocean to stop the Japanese whaling fleet. But back…

The Travis Henry Formula to Beating a Drug Suspension

Be honest: You thought Travis Henry’s career as a Denver Broncos running back was deader than Napoleon, didn’t you? After all, as local attorney Harvey Steinberg told the Rocky Mountain News, nobody wins NFL appeals on third-strike drug cases like Henry’s, which revolved around a positive test for marijuana that…

The California Experiment

If you wiped California off the face of the planet, just made it disappear—left behind no car or SUV, politician, person or cow—you’d eliminate only about 1.6 percent of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. Keep California and lose Texas, and you’d more or less double the benefit…

You’re Getting Warmer

The Kyoto Accord began the race to halt global warming. On its 10th anniversary, why are we barely past the starting gate? I remember so well the final morning hours of the Kyoto conference. The negotiations had gone on long past their scheduled evening close, and the convention-center management was…

Step Up the Fight Against Global Warming

Dozens of alternative newsweeklies across the country have joined together on the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol, in league with the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in Washington D.C., to publishing stories all at once, with national and local content, about global warming and the significance of the Kyoto agreement…

Ice Cream and Prison?

There’s no ice cream in prison. But Ice Cream and Activism seeks to combine the two tonight at the cafeteria at Regis University, where a panel discussion will begin at 8 p.m. concerning the issue of juveniles serving adult sentences in prison. (Read a whole slew of stories about the…