News

Tom “Naked Upper Lip” Martino A little bird recently informed me that she’d heard Tom Martino — aka the Troubleshooter — on his radio show going on about how he would like to try stand-up comedy. I didn’t know how to take this. Lots of people say they’d like to…

Former Westword photographer Brett Amole, son of late Rocky Mountain News scribe Gene Amole, got some nice media exposure when CNN ran a KUSA local TV news story about Boulder’s June 14 naked bike ride. The daytime jaunt, part of World Naked Bike Ride — , or World Naked Bike…

Denver Post business columnist Al Lewis recently received an offer he couldn’t refuse. The folks at Dow Jones Newswires asked him to write a national column for the service — an enormous coup given the current state of the newspaper industry. The position allows him to maintain his home base…

“Star Wars,” Jason Sheehan, June 5 UF Uh-Oh Jason Sheehan is one who wants to believe, and I remember how disappointed my nine-year-old was when she learned the truth about Santa. The flaws inherent to the, ahem, reasoning that goes into the modern religion of UFOlogy are more obvious today…

If you think the new bright-blue “Mustang” at Denver International Airport, with its bony ribs and glowing red eyes, looks terrifying while you’re speeding by on Peña Boulevard, then be glad you didn’t attend the June 12 dedication ceremony for the 32-foot-tall fiberglass beast, which was installed in February. The…

Clear Creek Annabel Lee, my purebred Chessie she-bitch, has successfully graduated from puppy kindergarten. Please feel free to express your congratulations in the form of emphatic atta-boy slaps on my ass. In addition to “sit” and “give me five” — tricks that I taught young Annabel myself — as a…

Laura Kriho was only four when the Democratic National Convention came to her home town of Chicago and all hell broke loose. “But I remember the aftermath,” she says, “and I had the song in my head.” The song was “Chicago,” which Graham Nash wrote a few years later to…

Mary Louise Starkey, head of the Denver-based butler school Starkey International Institute of Household Management, pleaded guilty in Denver District Court on Tuesday to assaulting Lisa Kirkpatrick, one of her former students. The case stemmed from a February 7, 2007, incident at the school in which Starkey, the city’s so-called…

Upon being hired by Channel 2 in 1990, TV-news videographer Jim Hucks was told to carry his camera with him wherever he went so that he could be ready at a moment’s notice to capture breaking news — and he took the directive seriously. When he attended modern-rock shows, which…

Dear Book Person, Ask any gifted, but not talented sixth-grader what Vincent Van Gogh did. “He cut off his ear and sold one painting in his lifetime.” What an underachiever! I cut off my arm during a psychotic episode. I was a promising stand up comic in Denver, twice voted…

Splitsville: The knot of protesters organizing around the Democratic National Convention got a lot more tangled Tuesday morning when a coalition of progressive groups formally presented itself as the Alliance for Real Democracy. This move deepened a division that started in May, when pacifist-leaning activist organizations and those with a…

For 25 years, until his death in May, comedian/poet/playwright Don Becker entertained audiences and held court in the creative community in Denver. Westword’s cover story this week by Adam Cayton-Holland explores Becker’s life and death. But to get a feel for what Becker was like onstage, watch this twenty-minute clip…

The folks at the Denver Zoo have found a great manipulative slogan to get crowds through the turnstiles this summer: “Every time you visit you help animals.” I spotted this ad on an RTD bus on Colfax this morning, and managed to snap this pic from my passenger-side window. Although…

After watching the above YouTube video, I’m not sure if I should be angry at Jim or feel sorry for Jim. He’s the Downtown Ambassador flack in the yellow polo shirt who told a group of 9-11 Truth conspiracy theorists they couldn’t hand out DVDs on the 16th Street Mall…

In the exciting world of online marketing, it takes plenty of everything — millions of e-mail addresses, lots of bandwidth, endless diet pills, stock tips, porn sites, ringtones, chutzpah and moxie — to succeed. And if it also takes a few million bucks here and there to settle with unhappy…

Update below: Wayne Laugesen and Rich Tosches are well-known figures in the Colorado Springs press: Laugesen (pictured) serves as the editorial-page editor for the Colorado Springs Gazette, and Tosches, a former Gazette columnist, writes regularly for the Colorado Springs Independent, the city’s longtime alternative weekly. But the pair probably won’t…

A June 17 More Messages blog revolves around a column written by Colorado Springs Independent scribe Rich Tosches about Colorado Springs Gazette editorial page editor Wayne Laugesen. In the piece, an activist accuses Laugesen of insensitivity and more in regard to comments he made in a series of e-mails he…

For the hard-charging capital crimes squad in the office of 18th Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers, the third time is the charm. After two unsuccessful death-penalty prosecutions, a jury returned a verdict of death on June 16 in the case of Sir Mario Owens (left) for the 2005 murders of…

The host committee for the upcoming Democratic National Convention will almost certainly miss the June 16 deadline for raising the estimated $40.6 million it said was needed to put on the big show in August; a Demver blog has more details. But all but lost amid the flurry of desperate…