Trading Spaces

Their home may be old — it was built in 1902 on what was then just prairie — but it certainly isn’t falling apart. Scott and Kirsten Hamling’s white two-story farmhouse at Sixth Avenue and Olive Street is actually quite stately and beautifully landscaped. But that hasn’t stopped neighbors from…

Hickenlooper and Better Denver Spell Trouble

Check out this hot little snippet of civic cheerleading, available for your perusal any time at www.betterdenver.com. But be forewarned: It just might blow your mind! When we invest in our infrastructure, we save millions of taxpayer dollars down the road. Much like making preventive repairs on your home, 1A…

Two Rockies Fans Take One for the Team

It was so loud in Coors Field that even those close to the scoreboard in left field, where fireworks had begun, could barely hear the mortars over the din of the crowd. The Rockies had just won a four-and-a-half-hour National League wild-card game against the San Diego Padres, launching the…

Ward Churchill Butts Heads With a Reporter

Where Professor Ward Churchill goes, controversy follows — and so, usually, do charges, counter-charges, confusion and contradictions. If the truth is out there regarding an October 2 class taught by the former University of Colorado-Boulder staffer, during which a Churchill devotee allegedly manhandled a reporter, it’s currently being obscured by…

Baby Bargains Dishes Dirt

“Welcome to the high temple of baby-gear consumerism.” Alan Fields spreads his arms to encompass the entirety of the Babies “R” Us superstore in Westminster — a cavernous expanse saturated in pink, purple and yellow and filled with two-story-high shelves stuffed with play yards and diaper bags, bouncy seats and…

Baby Train

At closing time on a recent Sunday evening at the Westminster Babies “R” Us, the front doors are locked, the Sunny D is cracked open, and the superstore begins its monthly “Babies, Bellies and Booties” seminar — an after-hours class that helps expecting parents sign up for a baby registry…

Million-Dollar Babies

Denise and Alan Fields have encountered a lot of ludicrous baby gear while writing and updating Baby Bargains, the number-one baby-product book in the country. So when they say a particular product is one of the most outrageous they’ve discovered, you know they mean business. Here are a few of…

The Best of Denver Winners from 1985

In 1985, Westword published its second Best of Denver issue, a celebration of the city that saluted everything from the Best Cheeseburger at My Brother’s Bar to the Best Bronco (John Elway, now in his second year with the team), to another future landmark, the Best Addition to the Skyline…

Day Three: Wherein I Learn Way Too Much About Your Mom

Monday Tuesday Wednesday: I’m reading outside the Tabor Center when a woman comes up and sits next to me, immediately retrieving her phone from a childish pink purse with her freckled, yellowed hands. There are 20 other spots to sit, but she chooses the one next to me, the only…

The Ultimate Rockies Fan: Does Such a Thing Exist?

Let the national media and every blogspot pundit list the reasons why Rockies fans don’t deserve the sheer elation we’re experiencing at the moment. Let them say the Simpsons has been around longer than our beloved team. Let them opine that Denver has no home-grown fanbase because the town is…

Q&A With Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Richard Russo

The piece in the October 18 Westword about author and screenwriter Richard Russo, who visits the LoDo Tattered Cover on Monday, October 22, merely scrapes the surface of the interview on which it’s based. Enjoy the entire Q&A below. Russo, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2001 novel Empire…

The Media’s Bad Case of Rockies Fever

This morning on the Fan, host Mike Evans beseeched Rockies boosters to knock off the “Hooterville stuff” — the sort of crazed, over-the-top blather than makes it abundantly clear to folks outside the area that both the team and its fans are in previously unvisited territory. Now if only reps…

Visions of the Rockies’ Future

Here’s my impression of you begging me to write a blog about the Colorado Rockies: Adam, everyone is writing so much about the Rockies we really want to hear your perspective! We remember you championing them in print long ago this season; also, we remember your many tales about supporting…

Day Two: Wherein I Become A Tycoon

Monday Tuesday: Woke up a wee bit late today – but luckily it’s slow enough that I can continue to drink my coffee and read the news online. The first job of the day happens to be a strange one, a round-trip cowboy hat delivery. As absurd as it sounds…

All Bets Are Off

After September 11, I told everyone I knew to invenst in defense stocks. I had no cash at the time. Google and Chipotle both had IPOs that I knew would hit huge. I had no money at the time that I didn’t spend on beer and Mexican food. I knew…

How The Colorado Rockies Became America’s Team

This is how the Rockies win the National League pennant. With class. No chest-beating, no trash-talking, no tear-them-down-to-get-us-going stuff. Just baseball. And teamwork. And no small bit of heart. And I know that’s just stuff that writers write about teams who win. Sometimes, it’s even true. For the Rockies, for…

CU’s Solar Team Takes Another Hit, But Keeps on Trucking

The University of Colorado team at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon in Washington DC is on a roller coaster of mini victories and defeats as the game heats up. This morning, the ride left people feeling uneasy, if not queasy. Yesterday, they took a mediocre 10th place when…

My Gift to You, Rockies Fans

What could be more surprising than the Rockies being in the World Series? Paris Hilton joining a nunnery? O.J. Simpson admitting that he not only killed his wife but also JonBenet Ramsey? Dick Cheney showing up at a session of Congress wearing a turban? Whatever your answer, the Rockies made…

Day One: Wherein You Learn Why We’re Cooler Than You

Monday: Couriers have only three moods while working: Angry – as in you just got this rush job that your dispatcher forgot about and you’re forced to complete this miracle. These moments are filled with finesse, when you see a courier slide through a tiny little needle of a thread…

The Denver Press Club’s Gridiron Show Versus the Rockies

Months ago, Sunday, October 14, probably seemed like an ideal date for the Gridiron Show, the Denver Press Club’s highest-profile shindig of the year. After all, it fell during the Denver Broncos’ bye week — meaning that politicians and media figures of the sort who are annually cajoled into participating…

Champagne Dreams

In my best moments, I like to think of myself sitting alone at the bar with a fine, fluted glass, like James Bond just ten seconds before the girl walks in. In my worst, I fear I’m more like one of Candace Bushnell’s cosmo-skanks, getting giggly and paralytic after too…