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When I first interviewed John Heckman back in 1984, he struck me as a bit elderly, at age 76, to be running for Congress in a race he didn't have a lotto player's chance of winning. Twenty-three years later, he was still running — for mayor, senator, governor, you name it — almost until the day he died, two weeks ago, at the tender age of 99.

Heckman was a crank, in the sense that he was a perpetual independent candidate for all sorts of offices and was repeatedly trounced. But he was also a Lakewood businessman with some common-sensical, Reaganish ideas for cutting government spending. He was no dummy — his son James shared in the 2000 Nobel Prize for economics — but he didn't mind looking foolish in order to make a point about the tyranny of America's two-party system and the need for maverick citizens to get involved in the process.

Sometimes he couldn't even get invited to a debate when the incumbent had no other opposition, but he generally managed to show that the other side didn't have much faith in democracy (with a small d, mind you).

Heckman took many of his cues from the Ten Commandments, rather than from some lobbyist, and his aged moralizing never did much for voters. Still, we could do worse. We have done worse. There are folks who want to blame Ralph Nader for the presidential debacle of 2000, but the system needs independents to keep it halfway honest. I don't know where Lakewood's perpetual candidate is headed now, but I hope he gives 'em heck, man.
--Alan Prendergast

As anticipated, the Denver City Council chose to once again postpone a vote on an ordinance that would allow Xcel Energy to erect new 111-foot transmission towers in Ruby Hill Park. The decision last night gives neighborhood group leaders until September 10 to come up with a way to pay for burying the power lines, which Xcel says will cost $4.4 million more than leaving them above ground. District 7 Councilman Chris Nevitt, who is engaged in the negotiations, thanked the bill’s sponsor, Councilman Charlie Brown, for supporting the delay.

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I don’t think that Kelly Clarkson can be considered hard rock. Neither can Sugar Ray vintage 1998 when Mark McGrath got down on his knees to deepthroat VH1. But that’s just my opinion. Obviously it should be left up to the experts, and when the Hard Rock Café decides to loop these “hard rockers” on TVs all over the downtown monstrosity, who am I to argue?

I would never choose to just meander into a Hard Rock Café, but when word hit the street that Denver’s own had just received a new shipment of “memorabilia,” I thought I might swing by, you know, ironically. It was horrible. First I sat down and had a beer and a plate of fries. Ten fucking dollars. I don’t know who these people think they are, but charging $5.50 for a pint is stupid, I don’t care how many gold statues of Elvis it comes with.

Second, whoever is in charge of deciding what crap goes on the wall apparently thinks that Denver is the '80s-hair-band capital of the world. There were so many rhinestoned jumpsuits, the glimmer started making me dizzy. Between Motley Crue and Bon Jovi, the Hard Rock could blind a nation.

And finally, according to the plaques accompanying the rock detritus, Red Rocks is the only venue that has ever existed in Colorado. No one ever played anywhere else in Colorado besides Morrison. Good job with the research fellas.

So I said goodbye to the glamour of rock’s past and hope to never return. Leave it to the tourists I say, and the bastards who think it is entertaining to drink Bud Light out of an aluminum bottle while ogling a wife-beater that the bassist from Maroon 5 once wore. Totally hard rock, man.
–Taylor Sullivan

As a longtime fan of Foss General Store, a landmark in Golden since 1913, I was heartsick to discover that it's slated to close soon -- another victim of that bane to small-town businesses everywhere, the Big Box Store. But upon dropping by on Saturday, July 28, smack in the middle of Golden's annual Buffalo Bill Days celebration, another emotion joined my overall melancholy: a tremendous desire to pick the old joint's bones.

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7.30.07

PBC,

I split the first two weeks in this country between Sydney and Melbourne, trying to erase the image of Foo the Saigon security guard and his red Thermos from my mind while also trying to locate the fabled Australian "spirit." This spirit was nowhere to be found in those two metropolises, as they have been folded nicely into our American concept of modernity. And, to tell you the truth, the cities were just too damn familiar with their 7-11s, Starbucks and McDonalds (they call them "McCafe's" here to reduce the stigma) on every block. I'd been told beforehand that Sydney is a lot like San Francisco, and Melbourne similar to Seattle with its weather and rock n' roll ethos, and those descriptions proved correct. Too much so. Sure the folks still talked funny and were as friendly as advertised, but I was weighed down by an overwhelming sense of being home...but not. And then you throw in the fact that the U.S dollar is at an eighteen-year low against the Aussie buck (which means to us non-economists that a bloody six pack of Tooheys New Lager cost US $14). When cashing in some travellers checks, the bank teller actually apologized for the terrible rate. It was starting to feel like I was paying through the nose to be homesick.

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The entire breadth of digitized human knowledge at their fingertips and this is what America is searching today:

Tom Snyder
Long live Snyder, the host of the The Late Late Show, who died at the age of 71 yesterday. TMZ reports his catchphrase on the show Tomorrow, was “Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air." What the hell is a colortini?

Colortini
Wikipedia, that always reliable repository of minutia, reports that a Colortini is a mythical drink Snyder invented as the perfect alcoholic companion to his show. Colortini.com was apparently maintained by Snyder until earlier this year when it was taken down. The domain name now returns a page offering links that send readers to hair-coloring websites.

Christy Freeman
CNN will tell you all about it, I can't put the horror into words.

Rural Cellular
Marketwatch.com is reporting Verizon has agreed to buy the Alexandria, Minnesota-based Rural Cellular Corp. for $2.67 billion. When reached for comment, some random Vikings fan said that, yes, he could indeed hear me now. I'm sorry for that joke, by the way. It hurt me more than it hurt you.

Los Angeles Girl Love
God bless you, America.

--Sean Cronin

Bob Beauprez tells the Rocky that he decided to get back to his roots following his bid for governor by returning to the old family dairy farm. Only problem was that he had long ago developed the 700 acres into a suburban expansion of 1,300 homes called Indian Peaks. Can anyone else think of a better metaphor for a campaign that was orphaned during the primaries but still managed to wander through the election like a lost child. Apparently Beauprez plays lots of golf now and still speaks with a rural drawl. Can you say Spraawwlll? –Jared Jacang Maher

The idea of a tease in TV news is to offer just enough of a report to convince viewers they should stick around through a commercial break and watch the full piece. But such snippets aren't supposed to be misleading -- and the one sports anchor Rod Mackey employed during 9News' 10 p.m. newscast on July 29 most certainly was.

In teasing the evening's sports segment, Mackey (pictured here) screened footage of star Denver Broncos receiver Javon Walker flat on his back as he talked about Walker going down on the first day of the team's 2007 training camp. A quick flip to Channel 4, where anchor Vic Lombardi offered a training camp tease that made no mention of Walker, suggested that something was hinky, and that turned out to be the case. Upon his return, Mackey said Walker merely had the wind knocked out of him, and then transitioned into a predictable first-day-of-camp package.

Yes, Walker went down, but considering that he plays tackle football, that's not exactly a news flash. Simply put, 9News spun a video clip in a highly dubious way to hang onto viewers -- a ploy that's as sad as it is cynical. -- Michael Roberts

No one would name El Paso County as a font of immigration reform. The Southern Colorado locality, where I-25 morphs into the Ronald Reagan highway, doesn’t exactly shine when it comes to welcoming our Mexican neighbors. At least two state delegates from the area belong to the border vigilante Minuteman group, which last year announced plans to alert Colorado Springs restaurant-goers that their food was being made by unvaccinated “aliens.”

Yet, in spite of all the immigration ire, one El Paso County representative is making strides to change that. Marsha Looper, a Republican from Calhan, recently hatched a plan to set up a state labor office in Mexico, where workers can hook up with Colorado businesses in need of employees.

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If you're ready to head off to the box office tonight to check out The Simpsons Movie, you won't regret the decision. The movie, it does not suck. Check out the whole review here.

Or, if you want to see what Marge and Homer look like when they're imagined in high-fashion settings, check out our style blog, The Cat's Pajamas.

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I Know Who Killed Me opens tonight at theaters everywhere. And while the powers that be didn't offer a screening in time to make the paper version of Westword, we have one for you here.

Watch the mallrats’ jaws drop as they pay to see the same old teen slicer-dicer, only to get this wacko hodgepodge of the Brian De Palma horror filmography and -- I swear to God -- Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique. Lindsay Lohan plays a demure honor student who gets abducted by a psycho and appears weeks later in a hospital bed, missing --well, let’s just say that piano scholarship may need rethinking. Worse, the girl not only has no memory of her past but claims to be someone else entirely -- a jackpot for her horny jock boyfriend (Brian Geraghty), whose girlfriend suddenly morphs from a bashful abstinent into an exotic dancer hot to hit the pole. In short, it’s a gift-wrapped part for Lohan, who plays her good-girl/bad-girl role with wit and an air of sly calculation. Despite some disgusting (and obligatory) meatball surgery with rotting fingers and severed hands, this intriguing oddity -- directed by Chris Sivertson (The Lost) -- is less a shocker than a surreal, disjointed mood piece about teen alienation. The script even has the nerve to forsake the obvious solution for something much crazier and over-the-top -- the kind of high-altitude nonsense that can only be explained onscreen by radio paranormal maven Art Bell via a Kafka allusion. Yes, it’s that kind of Lindsay Lohan movie. -- Jim Ridley

Rated R
105 min.

An agreement was reached in the Ruby Hill tower controversy Wednesday evening – an agreement to keep on talking. It’s not exactly the stunning pact one would expect from two closed-door meetings but, hey, it’s a beginning. Beginning of what, nobody is saying.

Since all players are bound by a non-disclosure contract, mediator Steve Charbonneau is careful not to reveal the specifics of the talks. But he does say that it would be wrong to characterize the most recent accord as a fully-cooked final agreement. “I would characterize it as a proposal,” he demures.

But sources within the group – which included more than two dozen reps from Xcel Energy, City Council, the Mayor’s Office, and myriad southwest Denver neighborhood groups – say they hope to go before the City Council on Monday to request that CB306, a proposed ordinance to exempt the 111-foot towers from the Ruby Hill Park view plane, be postponed yet again while all the power players carry on negotiations toward an concrete accord.

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Mark Manger

Bob Briggs wants rail through the mountains.

Bob Briggs (above), the man whose spent the past few years raising support and money for a statewide, high-speed, passenger rail system along the I-25 and I-70 corridors, was fired earlier this month from the group he started.

In 2005, the nonprofit Briggs created to promote rail, now called the Colorado Rail Association, secured $1.25 million from Referendum C funds to conduct a feasibility study for rail in the mountain corridors. In order to receive the money, CDOT required that an intergovernmental agreement be created, and so the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority – a government entity with a membership of about twenty counties and municipalities – was founded to receive the funds and lead the study. Briggs acted as the group’s director from its inception, and in June was formally made executive director by the board. But then on July 6, the board voted to terminate his contract.

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