Well, gang, it’s been one hell of a year, and What’s So Funny is officially spent. Really, we’re fucking exhausted. Beat. Sapped. Expended. Out of gas. It’s gotten so bad that we’ve simply started listing synonyms in an effort to make this column long enough to declare it finished –…
Just after midnight, the bus broke down outside Salina, Kansas. It was George Walker’s 24th birthday, but he wasn’t thinking about cakes or candles or celebrations or anything like that. He was thinking that he’d been on the Greyhound for almost two days, all 325 pounds of him stuffed into…
“My candies won’t make you fatter, only sweeter,” reads a sign tucked into the corner of American Country Candies’ one-room factory in Fort Collins. Lie. It’s against the fundamental makeup of candy — the candy’s essence, even — to not be fatty. But Andrea Kennedy looks like she hasn’t indulged…
Nothing says “happy holidays” like an ass-whose-ass-gets-glued-on-the-toilet tale. Inspired by Bob Dougherty’s harrowing experience when he sat down in a public restroom at a Louisville Home Depot (“The Butt of the Joke,” December 15), John Redding sent Off Limits the following rendition of “The Night Before (Behind?) Christmas,” a poem…
What’s So Funny was angry when the clerk at the ticket counter informed him that the plane to San Antonio was full and that he would not be able to switch out his middle seat. He muttered his way through security, sure that he would find himself sandwiched between some…
The day after the Denver Post published his goodbye (sort of) column, Woody Paige is in what’s become his element. Road-tripping ESPN staffers at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas are hustling him from the temporary home of Cold Pizza, the ESPN2 morning staple on which he’s a regular, to an…
Fanning the Flames Broncs cheer: On behalf of all Broncos fans not fortunate enough to live in Denver, shame on Adam Cayton-Holland for helping to destroy the magic and home-field advantage that used to resonate throughout the old Mile High (What’s So Funny?, December 8). It’s bad enough that he…
No one in City Park had ever seen anything like Alvin Maxie. In the summer of 1970, fresh from a twelve-year stint in the U.S. Army, he came rolling through town on a green British motorcycle, wearing knee-high moccasins and a Davy Crockett-style cap. Other black bikers hung out in…
Where’s one of the best places to shop in Denver if you shun crowded malls and bustling Wal-Marts? Why, Denver International Airport, of course. USA Today, along with Executive Travel magazine editor Janet Libert, recently ranked DIA one of the ten best airports for shopping, thanks to its “locally made…
If you want to add something special to your holiday toast, try a wine produced by the Winery at Holy Cross Abbey in Cañon City. At around $15 a bottle, it’s a good deal for the wallet — and for the Colorado Department of Corrections: The grapes used to make…
Off Limits was a bit shocked to receive a Christmas card from Focus on the Family last week, since we haven’t been big boosters of James Dobson. But we decided to think of it as a classy move in the spirit of the season — especially since the card was…
Gather ’round, children, it’s time that you hear a What’s So Funny holiday tale full of wonder and cheer. It’s not every day that What’s So Funny gets to wax all daily columnist and stuff insipid doses of Hallmark happiness down your throat in an attempt to harvest some sort…
The Rocky Mountain News and the American Indian Movement of Colorado are a match made in hell. The Rocky’s been consistently critical of Colorado AIM’s position regarding Denver’s annual Columbus Day Parade and has printed enough words attacking longtime AIM provocateur Ward Churchill to fill a Harry Potter book. Meanwhile,…
The Blame Game Child’s prey: I just finished reading Alan Prendergast’s “Catch-16,” in the December 8 issue, and I feel sorry for this girl’s parents. I find children like Kaeleigh (and, yes, she’s a child) annoying and disrespectful. Kaeleigh claims she’s more “mature” than her peers. Quite the contrary, Kaeleigh…
It was only late October, but a kind of holiday excitement coursed through the Altvater household in southeast Aurora. Kaeleigh had called. Kaeleigh was coming home. Her mother, DeEtte, was thrilled. She and her younger daughter had been locked in conflict for years — over school, chores, house rules, all…
The book on Philip Anschutz is that he can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse — or, for that matter, water into wine. In four decades of hyper-aggressive entrepreneurship, Denver’s richest evangelical Christian — the banks say Diamond Phil is worth upwards of $7 billion these days –…
>In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a simple peasant imprisoned in the Siberian gulag after being unjustly convicted of political crimes, rises above the unbearable monotony and torture of prison life, proving that humanity can overcome even the harshest of conditions. Inmates…
In every person’s childhood, there’s a special moment that stands out from the rest like a corpulent cheerleader. For some, it was the day they defied the hapless music teacher by saying, “I will no longer play this neophyte recorder like these unskilled philistines. For I am a far more…
On December 6, when the Denver City Council’s technology services committee approved the selection of Deproduction, a local nonprofit, to manage the community’s public-access television channels, they granted the wish of Tony Shawcross, its executive director — but they may not have done him any favors. With bureaucrats and representatives…
Let There Be Lights The clause that refreshes: Regarding Kenny Be’s “Jesus Clause,” on the cover of the December 1 issue: It was wonderful to see Kenny Be’s Worst-Case scenario back in Westword. I applaud his poking fun at the Parade of Lights organizers. The Downtown Denver Partnership caved in…
Standing alone in the crowded hallway outside Denver Juvenile Court, Tiffany McAdam folds her arms tightly across her chest to calm her shaking. She is waiting for the hearing in which Judge Dana Wakefield will rule on the fate of her four-year-old son, Martin — the boy whom police took…
The front entrance to Herman’s Hideaway looked like a hippie revolving door on a recent Friday night. A steady parade of dreadlocked white people danced to the music of Lion SoulJahs for fifteen to twenty minutes, then filtered into the shuttle bus waiting patiently out front in the loading zone,…
