To Surge and Protect Thank you, thank you for Patricia Calhoun’s “Autumn of Angst,” in the December 11 issue. Assholes are everywhere; Denver just happened to have a surge. Stupidity breeds stupidity, but we are still a great town with great people. Jill Strunk via the Internet Big Brother Is…
Movie special-effects maestro Phil Tippett has won billowing praise for the jaw-dropping digital transformations that turned models of alien bugs into the fearsome insect armies of Starship Troopers. But the 46-year-old founder of Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California, is his own most astonishing piece of transformation. If he’s at the…
There are many things Californians love about Colorado–the mountains, the skiing, affordable real estate. But while Californians have to visit or move here to sample those delights, there’s one Colorado pleasure they may soon be able to enjoy without ever leaving home. Colorado’s relatively cheap power supply, a by-product of…
Last March a 35-million-year-old stingray fossil found in Wyoming became a television star and a symbol of all that is wrong with private fossil hunters. Now a national organization of fossil hunters and collectors has mounted a rebuttal campaign and threatened a lawsuit, arguing that a National Geographic TV show…
On a recent afternoon, eleven members of the Territorial Daughters of Colorado convene their final monthly meeting before the winter holiday break. They have a full program: the officers’ reports (the checking account stands at $543.07), the minutes of the October meeting (approved), a membership update (nothing to report), food…
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas: No, not because the City and County Building resembles a rancid birthday cake, its garish lights illuminating the world’s most bizarre–but secular, and thus lawsuit-proof–nativity scene, with the Two Wise Snowmen flanking the stable holding Baby Jesus. And not because the dailies…
It’s 11 a.m., give or take, and Ed Phillips has just arrived for work, carrying a bag of King Soopers pastries and a vinyl suitcase bound with a belt. He opens the door, which sets off a ringer and a set of lights in the back furnace room. Phillips’s assistant,…
Two things happened to Carrie Lucas when she was teaching middle-school science on the Pacific island of Saipan that radically changed her life. The first, she says, was positive: “I just knew then that I had a calling to the ministry.” The second was considerably different: Lucas contracted a rare…
Westword staff writer Alan Prendergast has been awarded the Morton Margolin Prize for Distinguished Business Reporting from the University of Denver. Prendergast was honored for his February 22, 1996, story “Out for Blood,” which described Boulder biotech firm Somatogen’s efforts to tap into the $5 billion international blood-transfusion market. Named…
After studying plans for Montrose’s new library, religiously conservative residents of the Western Slope town fear that their children will be checking out hellish images instead of heavenly reading material. An October 20 library board meeting was packed with residents decrying the planned use of four gargoyles on the exterior…
If we can believe Lawrence Funderburke, the Sacramento Kings’ resident apocalyptician, the world is coming to an end in the next five or six years. Funderburke bases his prediction on biblical prophecy and says his primary regret is that his career will be cut short. Meanwhile, NBA commish David Stern…
One day in mid-November, a San Francisco radio station called my office. “We hear Denver’s overrun by skinheads,” a reporter said. “Can we get a quote?” How about: “Baloney.” On the last day of November, a cabbie heading downtown from DIA reported that the skinhead violence had spread to a…
The Mouse That Roared I appreciated Alan Prendergast’s article on the Preble’s mouse, “Of Mice and Men,” in the November 27 issue. Too often the mainstream media seems to be very biased in favor of growth and development in Colorado. I am a Colorado native and think projects like Highlands…
The eastern-plains town of Grover has never been bashful about its drinking. Tammie Byner recalls the time her mother was roped by a drunken cowboy while walking down Main Street during the annual Earl Anderson Memorial Rodeo. Revelers have been known to topple clean off the Pawnee Buttes that tower…
On a brilliant October afternoon at the future site of the Parade of Homes at the former Lowry Air Force Base, the only new structure standing is a tent set up for a press conference. Construction workers from the site take a break to join the small crowd waiting for…
Hawaii, uh-oh: While the rest of us shiver in the December chill, our tax dollars are working overtime keeping a dozen state officials warm–in Hawaii. One of the beached bureaucrats, state representative Nolbert Chavez, a Democrat from Denver, even bragged at a recent neighborhood meeting that he’d be enjoying a…
The pain-ridden journey of a disabled construction worker who took four people hostage last year at Focus on the Family’s headquarters in Colorado Springs came to an end last week. An El Paso County jury convicted Kerry Dore on thirteen felony counts, including first-degree kidnapping. Dore now faces a mandatory…
Before we get into our discussion of the McLaren F1–the fastest, most expensive and least air-conditioned street-legal car in the history of automotive science–let’s look at a couple of equally eccentric makes and models designed with the enthusiast in mind: If he or she looks around a little, the eagle-eyed…
It’s hard to escape the good vibrations at the Louisville offices of Sounds True, a distributor of spoken-word tapes that has recently branched out into music. The company health-insurance plan covers acupuncture, massage therapy, even mountain bikes. A pack of dogs roams the premises. Incense burns. Feelings count. “We won’t…
It seems like an all-too-familiar tale of the electronic age: A woman goes online, stops by an Internet chat room and falls for a guy thousands of miles away. She thinks it’s love, while he’s in it for less noble reasons. After months of torrid correspondence, they meet; it is…
A kiss is still a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh. And the allegations of sexual harassment leveled against a prominent educator at the University of Colorado continue to multiply as time goes by. It’s been two years since secretary Jennifer Miller filed a lawsuit against the CU Board…
That airplane banner flying overhead Monday, proclaiming the unfairness of Denver Post management to all of downtown Denver, wasn’t the only sign that Denver Newspaper Guild negotiations are under way. The stickiness of those negotiations, which affect up to half the employees of Denver’s two daily newspapers, also explains the…
