As soon as Charmaine Barros enters her daughter’s vacant East Village apartment, in the shadows of downtown Denver, the smell of decay overwhelms her. She futilely opens the windows and the patio door leading to the second-floor balcony. Her daughter moved from the federally subsidized apartment a month ago, though…
Ollette Omedelena loves the two gurgling fountains in the backyard of her Washington Park home, even though listening to them sometimes makes her cry. For ten years, Omedelena cared for two women with severe developmental disabilities. One of them, a blind woman in her sixties named Jim Anna, would sit…
The Community College of Denver doesn’t worry too much about admission standards. Just about any potential student who wants to take a class there knows that he can probably get in. Unfortunately, that same approach seems to have been taken by computer hackers. CCD’s home page, at ccd.rightchoice.org, has been…
East High Farmer’s Market Under the orange and yellow tent, a man with an Australian accent looks at the drawing on the Big Mike’s Original Barbecue Sauce label, then looks at Mike. “Are you the Big Mike?” he finally asks. Mike McCrea looks down at his impressive belly. “Looks like…
Once upon a time, George Carlin was able to say with little fear of contradiction that his famous seven dirty words — shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits — couldn’t be heard on radio or television. But that was a long time ago, and today there’s little doubt…
Qwest for Ire Stall in the family: Thanks for keeping the name of Qwest in the spotlight with Patricia Calhoun’s “Life’s Bitter Here,” in the August 24 issue. Needless to say, they are not making friends by undoing the good that US West has done for the community. What Qwest…
Summer, Hygiene to Platteville Eight in the morning, and already the day promises to be another hot one as the men climb down from their pickups and clomp up the stairs of the Hygiene Cafe. There’s not a cloud in the bright-blue sky, not a hint of an afternoon storm…
Rocky Mountain News society scribe Dahlia Jean Weinstein recently made a discovery that doubtlessly caused followers of the lively local electronic dance music scene to accidentally let the baby pacifiers in their mouths drop to the floor along with their jaws: Apparently, Weinstein reported in a full-color spread in the…
Maybe law enforcement’s resistance to the idea of increased rave activity on the Front Range is due to a simple matter of taste (and a generation gap). After all, sheriffs are people, too, and they just might find the events less threatening if the music wasn’t so strange. (Arapahoe County…
The tax man recently came knocking at state treasurer Mike Coffman’s door after the Republican businessman failed to pay the quarterly withholding taxes for his company, Colorado Property Management Group Inc. Embarrassed by the snafu, Coffman says he hadn’t been keeping abreast of the day-to-day business — which he used…
Storme Aerison walks to the front of the courtroom and selects an aisle seat. Gone is the heavy mascara, the lipstick and the thick layers of blush. Gone are the poses, the pouts and the sultry glances of Aerison’s Internet persona — Shannon Ireland, cover girl. On this afternoon, Aerison…
African-Americans account for just a 5.1 percent slice of the Denver radio audience, according to figures used by the Arbitron ratings service — and while this demographic is far from the only group whose members listen to hip-hop or rhythm and blues, its traditional loyalty to the music suggests that…
Itching for a fight? Put a pipefitter from the Bronx and a cabbie from San Francisco on adjacent bar stools and ask which team will win the World Series. Or get a couple of lifelong Broncos fans going about where the worm must turn this season — in Brian’s brain,…
Redneck Letter Day Out of left field: Just read Michael Roberts’s August 17 column on David Barsamian, “Leftoverture.” In honor of Jeff Foxworthy, I have compiled twenty-something reasons you might be a left-wing redneck: 1) You have a poster of Noam Chomsky above your bed. 2) You pay attention to…
Cody Wille stands flat-footed outside the back door of Clark’s Market in Aspen. He fumbles with his mask, trying to get the eyeholes right with one hand while clutching a BB gun in the other. The gun is a surprise. His friend Moses Greengrass handed it to him moments before…
When Gilpin County resident Laura Kriho was called for jury duty back in May 1996, she didn’t want to go. She planned to call the courthouse to get out of it, until she spotted a notice on the back of the jury summons warning that a failure to appear could…
Justin Erik DeBusk, wearing tan prison garb and handcuffs behind his back, was sentenced to eighteen months in a federal prison on July 10 for his involvement with one of the country’s most elusive drug dealers, Robert Golding (“Vanishing Point,” July 6). As DeBusk, who is 26, was escorted into…
They could be separated at birth (and by a few decades) — self-made men who share a hatred of the media and a love of guitars, animals (one shoots them with cameras, one with guns), the military, their fathers, America, Charlton Heston, and writing about themselves in endless detail. In…
You’d think any radio show capable of attracting fans from avant-garde musical acts such as the Olivia Tremor Control, Built to Spill, Friends of Dean Martinez, Negativland and Pere Ubu would have to be mighty hip, right? And yet Alternative Radio, the Boulder-based program intended to profit from Keep Left,…
In the nine and a half decades since Teddy Roosevelt was president and the Ford Model T was introduced, only two American men — both of whom, as it happens, live in Boulder — have won gold medals in international marathon competition. Most people, non-runners included, could peg the first…
The Hating Game Time marches on: How timely that you printed Julie Jargon’s “P.S.: I Hate You” in the August 10 issue, at the same time that Senator Joseph Lieberman was chosen by Al Gore and/or his “strategists.” Salzman’s plight sounds exhausting and quite burdensome, but I credit her courage…
Westword’s What United Did to My Summer Vacation contest has been a resounding success. Well, not for United Airlines customers, of course. No, things just keep getting worse for them. A recent example? Nearly 200 United flights out of Denver International Airport were canceled between this past Friday and Sunday,…
