Hate State Sets New Record: 365 Days of Rage!

Colorado was all the rage in 1997. We had road rage. We had Ramsey rage. We had ragin’ Caucasians. We raged against the injustice of it all when John Denver splashed into one more drink off the California coast. We were frazzled, irked, incensed, piqued, miffed and generally ticked off…

Strange but True

It was a sad state of affairs. Their Mother, “Butt Breath,” Could Not Be Reached for Comment “Dumb Face,” a female grizzly bear at the Denver Zoo, died of cancer at age 26. She was survived by her brother, “Fat Mouth.” The Lost World For the third year in a…

Men (and Women) Behaving Badly

They may be fools, but they’re our fools. BILL McCARTNEY Occupation: Hot-for-Jesus love machine Coach Mac wasn’t content to have other guys get together in big, sweaty masses and talk about how bad they’d been to their women. He had a deep need to punish himself, too–and he gave himself…

A Year of Games

First and last, 1997 marked the golden anniversary of Jackie Robinson, hero. Otherwise, the sublime and the ridiculous kept bumping into each other. Tiger Woods, age 21, chewed up the Masters field by a record twelve strokes, while Mike Tyson chewed on Evander Holyfield’s ear. Jeff Gordon dominated the Winston…

Letters

That Was Zen, This Is Now If I lived in Boulder, I wouldn’t worry so much about what’s being built on the land as what might be in the water. Judging from everything from the Ramsey case to Eric Dexheimer’s “Karma Crash” (great article!), in the December 18 issue, something…

Aisle Be Seeing You

It’s 10 p.m. and two weeks from Christmas, and a father and his two young boys are standing before the monster-sized gumball machines at the front of the store. “No, you can’t get any of that crap, goddammit,” the man says through his teeth. “You haven’t even bought your presents…

The Horse Soldier

There are no moments of luxury in the life of a horse-abuse investigator. It’s a world of hiding in bushes with video cameras, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes while staking out some lonely pasture, looking for signs of animal mistreatment. Danger? How about escaping from a rake-wielding horse owner or…

Fight the Power

A group of Highlands Ranch homeowners is not exactly thrilled with the hum of progress and has filed suit against Public Service Company of Colorado, saying that the company should bury its noisy power lines. The lines were recently upgraded to provide added juice to Park Meadows mall and the…

Off Limits

Dem bones: Henry Solano, Colorado’s U.S. Attorney and a former Roy Romer cabinet member, may be headed for Washington. He’s been nominated as the Department of Labor’s next solicitor general, the agency’s No. 3 job, which would put him in charge of hundreds of lawyers. If his nomination is confirmed…

Bombs Away

A lawsuit filed by a Colorado state agency against the U.S. Department of Defense to try to force removal of unexploded munitions from the former Lowry Bombing Range could send shock waves throughout the West. Officials of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment say they were forced to…

All Choked Up

The millions of working stiffs who fork over their hard-earned dollars for tickets to football, baseball, hockey and (in some cities) real, live NBA basketball games are justifiably fed up with the sour culture of American sports–in which spoiled athletes and high-handed owners pretend they’re rulers of some tinpot dictatorship…

Letters

The Hard Cell Although I had heard of the paranoia that corporations are taking over corrections institutions, it was actually only a fleeting thought in my consciousness until I read Alan Prendergast’s “Just Hop on the Van, Man,” in the December 18 issue. I didn’t realize how far this had…

A Family Affair

In some guardianship cases, the court can be overly intrusive, interfering in natural relationships while guardians rake in the money. And as a recent case in Arapahoe County demonstrates, not all problems lie within the Denver system. Ginny Rogliano and her sister, Joan, were appointed their mother’s guardians in 1995…

Changing of the Guard

Letty Milstein didn’t believe she needed a guardian to look out for her best interests. All the feisty, opinionated 82-year-old widow really wanted in the spring of 1996 was to spend her remaining years in the home she’d occupied with her husband, Jules, for more than three decades, in the…

Karma Crash

Betty Gibbs carefully aims her Isuzu Trooper down a steep dirt road carved out of the side of Fourmile Canyon. It is snowing, and the narrow path has become slippery; with hair-raising dropoffs to the south, drivers must cooperate to negotiate the route safely. But as an oncoming Volkswagen van…

Just Hop on the Van, Man

When William Minnix was arrested in Ohio last summer, he thought he knew what to expect. He knew he would be extradited to Colorado to face a charge of violating his parole on a felony theft conviction. He also knew that the 1,000-mile trip back to prison, shackled in a…

The Long and Winding Road: A Prisoner’s Diary

The following are excerpts from a diary kept by William Minnix, a convicted felon transported from Ohio to Colorado last July by Transcor America to face a charge of parole violation. Minnix claims the trip covered twenty states in twenty days. May 27: Arrested in Cincinnati, OH. June 20: Extradition…

Closing Time

Sam’s Land doesn’t look like a historical treasure. The building’s stucco exterior is crumbling, the crinkled tin roof needs attention and the neon tubes on the sign out front hang like broken old bones. But to preservationists in Golden, the rich past of this fading relic is no secret. Built…

US West’s Secrets

To the customers of utilities like US West have the right to know how well the company is serving the public? And with the local telephone market starting to open up to competition, should consumers have access to the service records of all local telephone providers? These questions have come…

Off Limits

Room service: Since Denver’s finally selling off the old DA’s building at Speer and Colfax (pending a final Denver City Council vote next Monday, and assuming no one else gets his shorts in a knot over the sweet deal cut with a Hispanic group), you’d think the city was swimming…

You Show Me Your Modem …

If you see the guy in the next cubicle typing frantically during his lunch break, it may not be because he’s trying to meet an important deadline. He may just be hooked into a worldwide sex network based in a drab suburban Denver office building. Men from around the world…

The Toast of Greeley

To get a feel for this thing–for the magnitude–imagine that your Denver Broncos were to win consecutive playoff games against Pittsburgh, New England and Kansas City, all of them on the road. Then try to imagine Elway and company facing heavily favored Green Bay in the Super Bowl–on their fourth…