Opinion & Commentary

An inventory of the annual awfulness that appears every holiday season on the steps of the Denver City and County Building (from left to right): 1) Plastic Santa in his sleigh, heading up a ramp behind four pairs of plastic reindeer, with red-nosed Rudolph in the lead. 2) Wooden stable…

This is not energy conservation here, folks, this is a glitch,” quipped Mayor John Hickenlooper at last Friday’s “Light the Lights” event, after he and son Teddy flipped the switch on the new LED light display at the City and County Building — and the entire scene went black a…

Ernie’s will open on schedule today, after a whirlwind renovation by Rod Wagner of the space that for years held 3 Sons, and for decades before that was home to Ernie’s. But while the original Ernie’s — which opened in 1943 and whose sign has been reconstructed for the new…

Wanda James and Scott Durrah, the owners of 8 Rivers, just celebrated the end of their first year at 1550 Blake Street in LoDo, where they moved their restaurant after a successful run in the tiny spot at 3609 West 32nd Avenue that now holds Venue. “You can’t have a…

Unlike Michigan, Colorado doesn’t have a Cannabis College — not yet. But the entire state is getting quite an education in both the efficacy of medical marijuana in soothing certain maladies and the difficulty of imposing new rules on dispensing it. Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown has gotten a real…

One hundred and fifty years after the last rush to the Rockies, when gold was discovered back in 1859, a new rush is on. This time, adventurers are mining medical marijuana — and business is smoking! Every day, I get a call from another acquaintance thinking of getting into the…

The Denver Department of Excise and License has received an application to transfer ownership of a liquor license at 1445 Market Street in LoDo. That’s the old home of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse — but it’s also the building that houses the Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce. And, in fact, the…

On December 1, the City of Denver will start collecting city sales tax from every medical marijuana dispensary in the city. “Tax revenue agents will be meeting with all dispensaries, giving them the information,” says Denver City Attorney David Fine. Not that the city has a list of all the…

There’s still a month to go before the year ends — plenty of time for more people to join the elite flock of fuck-ups for 2009 (and for Josh McDaniels to get back on the list, after his last-second reprieve with yesterday’s win). Still, there’s been no shortage of Colorado…

I haven’t thought about pot this much since eighth grade,” says one Colorado official. But over the past two months, as the medical marijuana industry has continued to boom in this state — inspiring a parallel boom in efforts to regulate the industry, with some municipalities proposing rules and others…

You’d think that supplying medical marijuana to someone who needs medical marijuana — and has already had a licensed physician attest to that — would be enough to qualify a person as a “primary caregiver.” But you’d be wrong, at least according to the Colorado Court of Appeals. Four weeks…

Before you tuck into your turkey, give thanks for people like Brad and Libby Birkey, who in October 2006 opened SAME Café – a pay-what-you-want restaurant at 2023 East Colfax Avenue whose name stands for So that All May Eat. Running SAME Café has “really opened our eyes,” Libby told…

Who’s the biggest turkey in Colorado? We’re accepting all nominations, fair or fowl, for the most unsavory characters in the state this year, and will post our Top Ten Turkeys of 2009 list here first thing Friday. And although it’s hard to imagine anyone topping the antics of Richard Heene,…

John Mariani, the food writer for Esquire, publishes a weekly newsletter, Virtual Gourmet, in which he regularly serves up industry news — and another critic. In the November 22 edition, it was Jason Sheehan’s turn. Under the heading “THAT’S VERY GOOD, JUST KEEP ON TRYING TO THINK LIKE A NORMAL…

On Saturday, a group of Tea Party activists gathered at the Colorado State Capitol to celebrate Thanksgiving — and small government — by reading the Mayflower Compact. For political theater that laid an egg, it didn’t come close to the turkey served by Roy Romer-era Lieutenant Governor Mike Callihan, who…

Although the metro area’s third Earls was rumored to be opening today in the former home of Ocean at 201 Columbine Street, it now looks like that will be pushed back until Friday, November 27 (according to the poor fellow who just opened the phone at 5:50 a.m.). But there…

Tom Tancredo will have his Kumbaya moment at 10 a.m. today, when he gathers with Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis and other top GOPs — including former governor Bill Owens and former gubernatorial Josh Penry — to unveil an agreed-upon set of Republican principles. And that will mark the end…

Erik Osborn, the disgraced developer who has a December 7 trial date in Denver District Court, failed to show up for a hearing yesterday. The Denver District Attorney’s office sent this brief note to some of the complainants in what has grown into two separate criminal cases against Erik Osborn,…

The last time Anthony Bourdain passed through Denver, on a 2002 loop hyping A Cook’s Tour, he found nothing in this town to recommend a return trip — and said so, loudly.Still, he got a warm welcome when he returned yesterday for “An Evening with Anthony Bourdain” at the Buell…

Representative Wes McKinley is sitting in a bar in Denver, but his mind is hundreds of miles away — on the rangeland of southeastern Colorado, that stunning swathe of cactus and canyons and ranches that have been in families for generations. The land that the U.S. Army would like to…