During my long, murky and still uncompleted career as a University of Colorado student, I worked and quit (i.e., my supervisor told me to quit before I was fired) many jobs on campus. The most memorable? Orientation leader. The two-day orientation program run by CU’s Office of Orientation is designed…
Visitors to the Denver Tech Center headquarters of Altitude Sports & Entertainment, a new network owned by millionaire investor Stan Kroenke, might expect it to resemble Athens a couple of weeks prior to the start of this year’s Summer Olympics. After all, Greek organizers were still desperately trying to complete…
A Rocky Road Raiders of the lost art: All those debating who was on the swift boat when it did what should look at Patricia Calhoun’s column about Jon Lipsky, the FBI agent who led the raid on Rocky Flats (“True Lies,” August 19). He is a true American hero…
Within minutes of my getting together with Jared Polis, he almost kills me. Twice. My near-death experiences take place toward the end of April, after Polis, an idiosyncratic Boulder businessman, politician and philanthropist just shy of his 29th birthday, picks me up at Westword’s offices on the way to Coors…
In Brazil, this skateboard is famous. Here, it’s locked up in a Denver Police Department evidence room. The board is chipped and dented and scuffed. On its underside is a hand-painted fire ant struggling beneath the weight of a pink rose petal twenty times its size, plus Bible verse Matthew…
Just when you thought the My Twinn dolls were dead, dead, dead, they’ve come back — Chucky-like! — for a return engagement. And for the sake of little girls everywhere, let’s hope that this sequel is more successful than Bride of Chucky. Earlier this year, the Greenwood Village-based company responsible…
Tony Dispense grew up small, which is how he gained the lifelong habit of trying harder than just about anyone else. This was especially true in sports. When he played tennis, he’d stay out late practicing his strokes. While mountain biking, he seemed to push just a little more than…
What a Circus! An elephant never forgets: The August 5 Worst-Case Scenario, “The Greatest Shun on Earth,” was really not funny and showed that Kenny Be missed the point. It also came at a time that was detrimental to Initiative 100 just prior to the primary election. I thought a…
Fletcher Stumph will drive a Greyhound bus between Steamboat Springs and Salt Lake City for six more days. After that, the route, along with 260 stops in thirteen northern states, will disappear. The price of gas is up and ridership is down — that’s what Greyhound management says, and Stumph…
Eighty-three-year-old icon Blinky the Clown, who was born Russell Scott, was all snoofly last week when Victor Bencomo found him at Blinky’s Antiques and Collectibles, his tiny shop on South Broadway. Bencomo had dropped by to beg the former star of Blinky’s Fun Club, which was canceled by Channel 2…
On a recent episode of HBO’s Real Time, comic Bill Maher suggested that the young woman who accuses basketballer Kobe Bryant of raping her last year is named “Looney McSlut.” Amid audience laughter, he added, “I think it is, actually. They weren’t supposed to release it, but…” Thanks to Maher…
The slightly crooked basketball hoop in his family’s Congress Park back yard holds many memories and meanings for Kevin Fletcher. Dribbling a ball under that basket one hot afternoon last week, Kevin thought about the times his driveway suddenly turned into the gleaming floor of the L.A. Forum. About the…
A Read-Letter Day Free love: These days, people are ungrateful for just about everything, and I’ve pretty much learned to accept it by now. But sometimes, like when there is blatant disrespect for a free newspaper (as in last week’s Letters column), I just have to say something. Westword may…
Mike Zinna is feeling giddy. After years of battling Jefferson County officials, whom he’s accused of everything from financial malfeasance and moral bankruptcy to bad hairdos, he figures he finally has the bastards nailed. What he has are surveillance videotapes unmasking the people who’ve been sending him anonymous faxes from…
When Hunter Weeks’s mom was in the Peace Corps, she traveled Africa by thumb, hitching across the Sahara Desert with just a girlfriend and a map. That was the mid-’60s, a decade before her son — and heir to her wanderlust — was born in Scottsdale, Arizona. “That was her…
Forget red and blue America. The real division is between red and green Colorado. Both of the states GOP candidates for U.S. Senate emphatically chose green chili as their hands-down favorite (no decision on whether they prefer Colorado- or New Mexico-style), while each of the Dems went con carne all…
Colorado earned the title “The Holdout State” at last week’s Democratic National Convention, after thirteen Dennis Kucinich delegates decided to stand by their man. And while Marilyn Megenity, maven of the Mercury Cafe, didn’t hold back in the Beantown reports she phoned in to Off Limits (excerpted below), she, too,…
For Cat Collins, program director of hip-hop heavy KS-107.5, figuring out which words his station can air isn’t as easy as it used to be. “The line is gray,” he says, “and it moves around.” Maybe so, but ever since singer Janet Jackson suffered a wardrobe malfunction that revealed a…
Only a handful of newsworthy memories survive from my early teens. But out of the momentous headlines of that time — Vietnam, Watergate — one of the clearest is of a child’s contest: The Soap Box Derby scandal from the summer of 1973, 31 years ago this week. Jimmy Gronen,…
Who’s Your Buddha? Stress for success: Peace out, Westword! First you have that wild cover on Let Out, then you get all blissed out with Laura Bond’s positive story on Buddhism, “Across the Buddhaverse,” in the July 29 issue. Although I liked Laura’s article, Westword is better when you’re bad…
WHY AM I TALKING? On this damp summer morning, the question beams out from bulletin boards and bathhouse doors all over Shambhala Mountain Center. It’s a rhetorical question, of course — a Xeroxed Zen koan. Because right now, no one is talking much at all: The bumper stickers on cars…
Mike Zinna is feeling giddy. After years of battling Jefferson County officials, whom hes accused of everything from financial malfeasance and moral bankruptcy to bad hairdos, he figures he finally has the bastards nailed. What he has are surveillance videotapes unmasking the people whove been sending him anonymous faxes from…
