News

When Leonard Fahrni says he reads Playboy for the magazine’s articles, you can believe him. Fahrni does indeed read Playboy–and Entertainment Weekly and God knows what else–to fill his storehouse of knowledge. To him, each dollop of data, each apparently trifling fact, deserves to be gathered, recorded, catalogued and treasured…

All the news that’s unfit to print: Every year Carl Jensen and a loyal staff of news watchdogs at Sonoma State University in California pore over publications large and small, sniffing out the important stories that appeared somewhere–anywhere–only to be met by almost overwhelming silence from other media outlets. Jensen’s…

When my wife and I were planning to have a second child, we didn’t give much thought to what we would feed him or her–we naively thought that would be the least of our worries. Instead, we’ve found ourselves embroiled in a daily battle with corporate America over the most…

Of Life and Limb I feel the articles in Westword are always thought-provoking, but Kate Hawthorne’s April 13 cover story, “Out on a Limb,” was positively inspirational! My best wishes to those families. And to Westword I say, Keep up the good work! I don’t know what we would do…

Colorado polluters would be able to avoid fines and keep secret internal investigations of their own environmental wrongdoing under a bill that, after being thwarted in recent years, stands a good chance of passage by the Colorado General Assembly. The Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry calls the bill a…

The most vocal liberal on the state Criminal Justice Commission has given up–driven out, he says, by politics that seem to breed prisons. In an eight-page resignation letter, Roger Lauen urged Governor Roy Romer, other commission members and legislators to “please wake up” before the current mania for building prisons…

History books remember Cynthia Ann Parker as the Anglo girl who was kidnapped at age nine from her frontier Texas home in the spring of 1836 by a Comanche raiding party. Twenty-four years later she was rescued by the Texas Rangers, then spent the few remaining years of her life…

part 2 of 2 For families that had just come through such dramatic situations, life dwindled down to mundane problems rather quickly. My car had died while Bill was still in the hospital. No, I didn’t crack it up; it just needed some warranty work. But that meant I had…

part 1 of 2 The first week in October was hell on the traumatic amputation specialists at University Hospital. Within 36 hours they received three emergency cases: a detached arm and two severed legs. On Monday, October 4, Mike Thurby of Arvada was hauling the day’s last load of trash…

Two strong forces conspired to put my head in the hands of the Ultima College of Cosmetology. The first was the inimitable ARC Value Village store at 72nd and Federal, where I have shopped for life’s little necessities for nigh on to a decade. Several years ago, ever on the…

Anton Chekhov once wrote, “Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that wears you out.” But then, Chekhov never appeared on CNN, electronically labeled “Victim’s Wife.” Having been in publishing for nearly twenty years, I understood from the start that Bill’s excellent adventure made excellent copy. A…

Law and disorder: State legislators are already peeved at having to find $400,000 in a tight, tight budget to fund Attorney General Gale Norton’s new “death squad” for pushing the prosecution of death penalty cases. Adding to their irritation is the fact that Norton broke her budget by about that…

Live and Let Die Regarding Steve Jackson’s “The End of the Line” in the April 6 issue: My heart goes out to Ric Games and the hundreds of thousands for finding the courage to stand up to the very thing that’s encompassing them. Too many people are being destroyed by…

When its new light-rail line is completed this year, Denver will join the ranks of “America’s most progressive cities,” promotional literature for the project says. But construction of the system, some now charge, has involved an old-fashioned conflict of interest. The Regional Transportation District, the government agency building the light-rail…

One day last month an army of bulldozers and house-movers showed up, and there went Irene Redfern’s neighborhood. But not Irene Redfern. For the past six decades Redfern’s life has revolved around the intersection of Downing and Evans. When Safeway decided to zap more than a dozen houses on her…

From the start, the fight for control of talk-radio station KNUS-AM/710 has seemed like a nineteenth-century melodrama–a crusty rich guy who’s the self-described “meanest man in Denver” versus a heartbroken blind man. And while the final chapter has yet to be written, the latest developments are positively Dickensian: A Jefferson…

cartoon…

part 2 of 2 It was also in 1985 that Ric met Danny and his lover, Brad. The pair ran black-market AZT from Mexico, selling bottles for $75 that U.S. pharmacies sold for $300–if you were lucky enough to be part of the government drug-testing program. They were carefree rebels,…

part 1 of 2 A light snow was falling as Richard Games entered the Catholic church on Palm Sunday. He dipped his fingers in holy water and crossed himself. Near the front of the sanctuary he knelt and crossed himself again. Then he rose, moved to his seat and began…

Ken Almos spoke quietly to the front-desk attendant at the Denver Swim Club, a gay bathhouse on Colfax. Two guys in the steam room were having anal sex, and he wanted them stopped. It wasn’t the sex he objected to; it was their failure to use condoms. The attendant walked…