News

Yeah, That’s the Ticket Lots of luck: After reading Patricia Calhoun’s “Time’s Up,” in the December 19 issue, I don’t feel so bad about recently receiving a parking ticket in Denver. A resident of Colorado Springs, I visit Denver on a fairly regular basis. Last year, a friend of mine…

With less than a month until the National Western Stock Show throws open its doors and pens, general manager Chuck Sylvester is still putting out fires. On this mid-December morning, for starters, he has had to pull the plug on the team-penning competitions due to a lack of paying contestants…

Heather Lamm has fond memories of her childhood home: playing hide-and-seek, hunting Easter eggs in the back yard and decorating for Christmas. She even considered getting married at the 18,231-square-foot, ten-bedroom, two-and-a-half-story house. But, like many children, Heather can never return to her nostalgic place because another family occupies it…

1. For $2.50, Denver’s Catholic faithful can now: A. Give a street urchin a coupon that’s redeemable for a free meal at a participating McDonald’s. B. Order a pin that says “Chaput for Cardinal.” C. Buy a 2.5-ounce bottle of Lourdes holy water that’s been shipped from the French shrine…

Using a rather paternalistic tone (he’s a former high school principal, after all), Aurora mayor Paul Tauer warned the overflow crowd to keep it civil at the Aurora City Council’s January 6 meeting. Apparently, the public had gotten a little overheated the last time the eleven-member panel discussed gentrification of…

Sometimes a person needs to drink two cold beers, fast. The only sensible place to do this is the Lake Avenue Inn in Eastlake. Eastlake is completely surrounded by the much larger suburb of Thornton. While Thornton is a twilight zone of housing developments, strip malls and four-lane speedways, Eastlake…

Most of the time, Alex Stone, a reporter for KOA radio, has nothing but news on his mind. According to Jerry Bell, KOA’s news director, “Alex is as hard-core as you can get. He’s got all the police scanners and stuff in his house and in his car, too, and…

Crisis? What Crisis? Older and wiser: Your January 2 issue was a great way to start the new year! I was feeling really old when I woke up in 2003, but after overdosing on twenty-something angst in the “My Quarter-Life Crisis” essays, I know that while I may be getting…

I Dont Think Ill Go to My High School Reunion By David Kawamoto I don’t think I’ll go to my high school reunion. I’m not interested in who’s married and who’s going bald. Who quit smoking and who still lives at home. I don’t want to know that my shy…

Stabbings and beatings are common. Drugs are plentiful — although ingesting them sometimes has unforeseen results. A restraint chair comes in handy, as does the occasional warning shot from Tower III. And whatever you do, don’t mess with inmate Ramirez. Those are some of the impressions of the Limon Correctional…

A big brown cloud was 2002, A stinky year for all but a few. Yet things look no better for 2003, Making us wish to cower or flee. Before you learn how bad it is, Resolve to take this cheering quiz. 1. The Denver Public Library, in its quest to…

Even as studios push prestige pictures like Gangs of New York and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for Oscar contention, Abby Winter and Laura Peterson are adding a little snark to the festivities. For the past eighteen months, the Capitol Hill-based duo have been offering decidedly opinionated movie…

The weight room’s clank, fists hitting leather, a muffled yell from the oldest continuously operating pick-up basketball game in Denver — the Twentieth Street gym sounds just as I remember. I haven’t been here in almost five years, but nothing has changed. The minute I open the front door, my…

Boo-Hoo for 2002 Worse comes to worse: Your December 26 Year in Review issue convinced me that 2002 was the worst year since…2001. Here’s to better news in 2003. Francie Howell Denver Dem bones: Regarding Ernie Tucker’s Year in Review quiz: It was so significant that the money and the…

In a year of record lows, Denver could report a new high point — several, in fact, since the Mile High City had grown three feet taller in some places, according to the National Geodetic Survey. Those findings, made in the 1990s but just now showing up on maps, indicate…

Terry Lynn Barton “I did it,” Terry Lynn Barton told one investigator. “It was a stupid thing.” And with those words, the 38-year-old U.S. Forest Service employee became one of the few people in the public eye to honestly appraise — if only for a flash — their fuelish actions…

Hundred-year fires, 200-year droughts, the worst economy in a decade and the collapse of all of Colorado’s pro-sports franchises (as well as the semi-pro Nuggets): This past year was an all-consuming pain, a bonfire of the vanities, an Elvis-sized inferno that belongs on the ash heap of memory. But before…

Up Against the Wal-Mart How low can you go? Bravo to Stuart Steers for helping bring to light what Wal-Mart is really about (“The Wal-Mart Crusade,” December 12). For two years, I’ve been trying to get friends and family to realize that Wal-Mart is bad for the American economy. To…

Bleeding from his behind, Fidel Ramos had this crazy notion that he should be taken to a hospital. Not a prison infirmary, but a real hospital, with an emergency room and doctors and such. His keepers at the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center, a maximum security prison on Smith Road,…

Last April, Alvin Jones got the message on his answering machine: a prison chaplain, telling him to call a certain nurse. That’s how he found out that his brother Nathan had died. The story of his death, as found in public records, would scarcely fill a paragraph: Nathan Earl Jones,…