The rules of life don’t change much. Never buy loose diamonds from a man in lizard-skin cowboy boots. Remain faithful to your beloved. At a mile and an eighth, always consider Eddie Delahoussaye’s horse. Once past the age of twelve, never, ever request an autograph–not from John Elway, not from…
It is always at the least practical time–with black-ice season just around the corner, with kids requiring hauling to school activities, with a heightened awareness of passenger safety–that anyone who is truly hooked on motorcycles suddenly needs a fix. I want a new bike, and I want it now. Although…
Giving Thanks This Thanksgiving I will remember Patricia Calhoun and everyone else who can see through the various parasitic cons, dupes, stooges and pimps. The dictionary definitions of “freedom” and “equality” do not say anything about exceptions and duplicity. Freedom is not being sheep, lockstep parrots, puppets or ventriloquists’ dummies…
As Tuesday’s sunrise spread vintage Broncos colors across downtown, it looked like a city transformed. Which, of course, it is. From the bluff alongside I-25, you now gaze over hundreds of housing units popping up in the Platte Valley, the almost-finished facade of Ocean Journey and the cranes carrying pieces…
Bob Bettenberg’s stories–and there are a lot of them–have the tempo and anticipation of a joke building toward a punchline, the sentences clipped and the narrative always in the present tense: “Guy walks into a bar…” Except in Bettenberg’s case, that is how the stories actually begin, and they are…
Conversations stopped and heads turned as Joanne Cordova walked a along the fifth-floor corridor of the Jefferson County courthouse. She smiled at those who met her gaze, though she was trembling inside. She’d seen them nudge each other, thought she knew what they whispered as she passed. Used to be…
The Denver Police Department wants its officers to start being more polite. After a slew of complaints about cops using ethnic slurs and intimidating language, the department drafted a new regulation for its updated October operations manual. The one-sentence regulation, labeled RR-138, reads: “Officers shall not use any language or…
Dianne Tramutola-Lawson no longer slings French verbs for a living, but the former Lincoln High language instructor still has the occasional teacherly impulse. As she boards the bus in southeast Denver on a sodden, foggy November morning–her bus, mind you, chartered with a personal check for $500–she can’t resist addressing…
Snow biz: Revenues fell last year at the Winter Park ski resort. But more troubling to the corporation that runs the place might be the continued interest in its operations by Denver city auditor Don Mares. Though Denver has ceded day-to-day control of its mountain wonderland to the bluebloods at…
When the Ash Grove Recreation Center “For People Over 50” in southeast Denver closed on September 4, the 1,200 seniors who relied on the facility were told they’d have a new recreation center within a few weeks. They heard the same promise in October. And in November. But the seniors…
Pile your bowl high with Flutie Flakes and get a load of this. Among the thirty National Football League quarterbacks who held starting jobs at the beginning of September, eighteen are, for one reason or another, out of the picture right now. In San Diego, errant Washington State rookie Ryan…
Lucero’s is the kind of place you have to be looking for to find, which is understandable, since there are no signs on the building, unless you count the black spray-painted scribble of a street gang. Which most people don’t. Instead, most people follow their noses, which lead them along…
No Paean, No Gain Regarding Robin Chotzinoff’s “What’s Your Status?” in the November 12 issue: Just another paean of praise for Chotzinoff and her talent for deflating the pompous (the New York Times, for instance), for reporting with accuracy and compassion (the farmers she asked the Times’s absurd question about…
The Sunday worship service at Christ of the Canyons church in the small southern Colorado town of Cokedale took a decidedly secular turn one morning this past August. A process server came into the church and tried to deliver papers to Dave Groubert, a church elder who also runs a…
Back in late October, Gary Boyce didn’t seem like a man headed for a whipping. Settling into a red leather chair in his “Denver office”–the boardroom-swank Churchill Room at the Brown Palace–Boyce was the picture of cowboy calm while discussing the two initiatives he and his water-development company, Stockman’s Water,…
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease eats holes in your brain and causes you to stagger, twitch, cry out in your sleep, lose control of your bodily functions, go mad and die. The disease may have been hidden in a hamburger you ate in Europe ten years ago, a corneal transplant or your own…
The City of Glendale got ripped last April by bar and strip club owners who felt that the city was trying to put them out of business with strict live-entertainment ordinances. Amid calls for Mayor Joe Rice’s head, a group called the Glendale Tea Party dispatched strippers to register voters…
Politics makes strange bedfellows: Since Colorado Democratic chair Phil Perrington shut down his party’s party relatively early (who could blame him, after a TV reporter didn’t understand Perrington’s “Dewey” reference when he alluded to Harry Truman’s come-from-behind surprise 1948 victory?), for real election-night antics you had to head south to…
Win SOme, Lose Some Talk about sore losers! Patricia Calhoun needs to get over herself: The Broncos got their new stadium fair and square (“Let Us Pray,” November 5). Just because Calhoun is out of step with the majority of Denver-area voters (what a surprise!), she wants to play the…
Prepare yourself. I’m about to drop some impressive names. Well, two of them, anyway. 1. Jane Smiley. Author of A Thousand Acres and Moo. Famous writer and writing professor. 2. The New York Times. I am too old to be overly impressed by two such symbols of the writing world…
Leon is late, as usual, and Lloyd is early, as usual, and they both know this about each other, but it seldom changes their estimated times of arrival. This is the way they are, and they seem to like it fine. When the ex-con meets the corporate executive, which is…
The Lakewood office where Dr. Mary Hansen practices psychology has just two rooms. The tiny, mauve-toned waiting room holds four plain chairs and a table covered with issues of Reader’s Digest, Woman’s Day and a recent Esquire, with Mr. Rogers on the cover. There’s no receptionist asking clients to fill…
