The cover of today’s Denver Daily News places the headline “Mayor Targets Graffiti” over a story about the anti-graffiti summit scheduled to take place on Wednesday at the Denver Botanic Gardens. The article leads with the $2.5 million figure the city estimates it spends on graffiti cleanup, and includes several…
If the increasingly pathetic saga of John Mark Karr proves anything, it’s this: A media obsessive can stretch his fifteen minutes of fame to twenty, or even half an hour, if he can manage to portray himself as a victim of the media attention he seeks yet claims to despise…
“Final Salute,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning opus about the Marine Corps’ approach to casualty notification that was written by Jim Sheeler (pictured), was published in the Rocky Mountain News on November 9, 2005. But the story, which also earned a Pulitzer for photographer Todd Heisler, remains at the forefront of the…
Try this blog on for size: It’s the first installment of The Cat’s Pajamas, Amy Haimerl’s blog on fashion. The best part about fashion is its magic, its power to transform. To make you taller, stronger, smarter, wittier. The right dress, the sharpest heels, and you feel larger than life…
The chains around Terra Ramirez’s feet clanked on the wooden jury box as she was escorted into Denver District Court today for her sentencing. Terra (left, above) was facing up to fifteen 15 years in prison for her role in a drive-by shooting in the summer of 2005. Judge Christina…
The October 12 edition of the Message concerns the process by which political advertisements are approved for airing on local TV stations. The general managers of these outlets are the folks best able to answer questions on the topic, but in the end, only one person in this position –…
Paul Fiorino’s got a gripe. He’s an unaffiliated candidate for governor whose name will appear on ballots in November; his spartan website can be accessed here. Nonetheless, the majority of media organizations won’t give him the time of day. “I feel discriminated against, frankly,” he says. “I feel like someone…
With my review of Steuben’s now off the stands (read the October 5 “American Idyll” here) and all questions of owner Josh Wolkon’s American obsessions and searches for provenance and origin answered, we can get down to the truly important matter raised by his menu: namely, where is the best…
You’ve got to hand it to Pat McCullough of Celtic Events: A more honest man never lived. The kindly and adorable fella with the killer brogue is the first to admit that he “took it in the shorts last July when an unusual three-day rain soaked everyone who were not…
Fast on the heels of the announcement on Wednesday of this year’s National Book Award nominations (my favorite, for the record, is Peter Hessler, for his scrupulous and fascinating Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present) comes our own homegrown author f�te: the Colorado Book Awards, to be…
There are toys, and then there are the classics. LEGO blocks stand staunchly, a zillion towers strong (all of them handbuilt by families around the world over a period of several decades), on the immortal side of the gate, simply because absolutely everyone loves them: boys, girls and especially obsessive…
This week’s Message column deals with the process by which political ads reach the airwaves at local TV stations. But at two Denver outlets, the sort of fact checking that’s done by folks on the business side is supplemented by further scrutiny from journalists in the editorial department. As such,…
Swarmed by reporters outside the Boulder Justice Center this past August, Michael Tracey was in his element. After a long hiatus, the national media was back on the case, the unsolved 1996 murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey. It’s a case that Tracey, a University of Colorado journalism professor…
No denying it: Political commercials aired in advance of elections bring in plenty of revenue for television outlets. But to earn this income, TV types must leap through more flaming hoops than a circus dog. After outlining the paperwork challenges, governmental requirements and unwanted refereeing that are part of the…
David Grinspoon is looking for something. Usually he’s searching for aliens, but today it’s for a biography of his thirteen-year-old self printed in the now-defunct Kids Magazine. “It reads something like, ‘In addition to writing and drawing, David, who is thirteen, enjoys playing the guitar, reading science fiction and building…
Since the rise of the Internet, whenever the subject of “kids these days” comes up, someone inevitably points out that the kids just have too much information to deal with. It’s the go-to excuse. Heinous SAT scores? Well, what did you expect, what with all that information being forced down…
Denver has been a true cowtown these past three months, with life-sized fiberglass bovines standing, staring and chewing their cud all over town. The four-legged phenoms in the CowParade head back to the barn on October 18 (and will be auctioned later for charity). But part of the herd is…
Just for Kicks Sole on ice: Regarding Joel Warner’s “Sole Survivor,” in the September 28 issue: It’s amazing that in this day and age, there are folks who will spend a week’s salary or more for some foreign-made goods (sneakers) to collect and catalogue. All to subsidize the obscene endorsement…
The Loveland City Council is thinking about relocating a nude sculpture to the bottom of Lake Loveland The slightly nuder-than-life-size bronze artwork known as “Triangle,” created by sculptor Kirsten Kokkin, is currently located on East First Street at Sculptor Drive. Members of the nearby Abundant Love Lutheran Church hate to…
It began in a strip club and ended in Federal court. Phillip Mallory, more commonly known around Shotgun Willie’s as “Doc Phil,” was arrested in July 2004 for allegedly trading painkiller prescriptions to strippers in exchange for them having sex with him on film. (Click here for Westword’s article on…
Only the kind of deep-rooted cynicysm found in the souls of suburban developers can explain how one could plow over a magnificent Aspen grove in favor of cookie-cutter McMansions and then name the resulting subdivision something like The Grove at Aspen Ridge. The same kind of logic would dictate that…
Yesterday, the Internet grapevine sprouted some particularly strange fruit involving Woody Paige, the veteran Denver Post sports columnist who put his print career on hold a couple of years back in order to ink with ESPN. A note on a website called SportsJournalists.com declared that Paige “is returning to the…
