Blogs

Looking to get your windshield repaired? Don’t plug “Smart Glass Denver” into Google. You won’t come across the company’s poorly designed website, or even their phone number. Only blog after blog after blog referencing the sad story of Kristi Cannon, a Denver woman who sought revenge after a disturbing incident with Smart Glass. The culprit? A post-it note.

Story goes like this. Last week, a glass technician was on the job repairing a car in Kristi’s work garage in Lakewood. Noticing that Kristi’s nearby BMW had a crack in its windshield, he decided to leave a Smart Glass business card on her car. But he was out of cards, so he thought a post-it note with the words “Please Call Me About Your Car!” and a phone number would suffice. Boy was he wrong.

Later that day, Kristi returned to her vehicle to see the note. In a panic, she began circling her car looking for dents or dings. Nothing. Then she imagined that her car was about to blow up. So she called her fiancé. And then she dialed the number. It was Smart Glass. And they wanted to repair her car.

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In 2000, Westword published its seventeenth Best of Denver issue, a celebration of the city that saluted everything from the Best Name for the New Football Stadium (brewmeister John Hickenlooper’s campaign to keep the Mile High Stadium brand inspired customers to suggest he run for mayor), to Best Performance by a Coloradan (local girl Jessica Biel was making good – very good – in movies and national magazines) to Best Political Resurrection (twelve years as governor would be enough to send most people into retirement – but Roy Romer moved on to a job as superintendent of the Los Angeles school system).

But the biggest resurrection of all involved the transformation of a dilapidated building at Clarkson and Colfax that had gone through numerous incarnations – from roller rink to wrestling ring to recreational sports center. By 1999, bombed-out buildings in Beirut seemed to have more concert-venue potential than the Mammoth Events Center – but a few million dollars and a name change later, it had been transformed into Denver’s Best New Old Music Hall: the Fillmore Auditorium. With acts ranging from Dylan to the Cult to Flogging Molly, the Fillmore continues to rock this town.

Here are the rest of the Best of Denver winners from 2000

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On January 31, a two-day barrage of panels dealing with global warming issues concludes at Colorado State University. The sessions are part of an "unprecedented teach-in" taking place around the country coordinated by the Green House Network under the rubric Focus the Nation. But of the fifty CSU profs involved in the discussion, one is conspicuous by his absence.

No, it's not philosophy professor Holmes Rolston, who's hosting a thumbsucker on "The Ethics of Climate Change." No, not Tom Dean, who teaches in something called the Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise Program, and weighs in today on "Economics and Climate Change," nor chem prof Anthony Rappe, who addresses alternative energies, nor writer Laura Pritchett, who tackles the subject of dumpster diving. They're all joining in, but as usual, professor emeritus Bill Gray finds himself, by choice or design, unincluded.

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A More Messages blog from January 30 includes an e-mail Q&A with Ward Churchill, who responded to a query about the dropping of charges against one of his supporters over an episode involving Boulder Daily Camera reporter Heath Urie. However, the final section of the communique was temporarily omitted because it made a separate accusation against the Camera that required a response from the paper. With apologies to Paul Harvey, here’s the rest of the story, which deals with the 2005-2006 period when the question of whether or not Churchill should be allowed to continue in his role as University of Colorado Boulder professor ate up huge chunks of newsprint at publications across the Front Range.

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When local gamer Ben Schulz and his pals made the inane video “A Rough Go” in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, they created a global phenomenon – one that launched Schulz’s video game character Leeroy Jenkins to international stardom, as described in the story, “The Legend of Leeroy Jenkins." Leeroy the crazy digital berserker has inspired Jeopardy! questions, truck commercials and T-shirt slogans around the world (many entail Leeroy’s catch phrase “At least I have chicken”) – and now he may end up in the hallowed halls of Harvard.

Schulz has been invited to speak at ROFLCon, a conference on Internet celebrity being held at the Ivy League institution on April 25 and 26. “We are talking now about whether or not he can take time off work to come,” says Christina Xu, a ROFLCon staff member. “He’d talk about accidental celebrity status and how do you deal with that in real life. He’s sort of a folk hero. In some ways, the Internet is sort of like Leeroy Jenkins. It’s charging through our lives without any real plan.”

That’s deep. Harvard deep.

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The January 31 Message includes an update about an incident involving Boulder Daily Camera reporter Heath Urie and a supporter of professor/controversy magnet Ward Churchill. The item includes the first public comments either Urie or Churchill has made about the case -- and there's much more from both of them below.

First, a recap. As detailed in an October 18, 2007 column, Urie had been sent to cover an outside-the-CU-curriculum course taught by Churchill, who'd been fired earlier in the summer for alleged academic misconduct. There, Urie was told that press wouldn't be allowed in the classroom, but he subsequently learned representatives of the university's Campus Press online publication had been granted admittance. When he entered the room to ask about what he perceived to be a double standard, he says he was physically ejected by Josh Dillabaugh, a CU sophomore who was part of Churchill's retinue -- and he subsequently filed a formal complaint about these actions with the university's police department. However, Benjamin Whitmer, a CU instructor, Churchill backer and chief instigator on the provocative TryWorks.org blog, who was also present, denied that Urie was manhandled. Indeed, he insisted that the reporter instigated any contact that occurred. Whitmer also argued that Urie and the Daily Camera should apologize for their collective conduct.

In late December, charges against Dillabaugh were dropped, and in the weeks that followed, Urie, Whitmer and Churchill all shared their thoughts -- the former in a telephone interview, the last pair via e-mail. Here's what they had to say.

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As noted in this January 29 blog, Denver Post editor Greg Moore isn't wild about the idea of his employees participating in caucuses set for February 5, but he's given some staffers permission to join in, while restricting others from doing so. At the Rocky Mountain News, the message is much simpler: no caucusing allowed.

Below, find the January 29 memo Rocky editor/publisher/president John Temple (pictured) sent to his crew:

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Next to me was a man old enough to know better drinking Jager shots with Guinness back, and when Green Bay made an ultimately pointless fourth-quarter fumble recovery deep in Giants territory, he found it reason enough to grab me around the neck and shake me like a kitten he didn’t like. That’s a fairly intimate exchange between two men who don’t know each other, and had I not been stunned by the shaking and already full of Hoss’s thick and smoky center-cut St. Louis ribs, chunky mashed potatoes and sticky-sweet barbecued baked beans, I might’ve said something.

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Times may be ultra-unpleasant for newspaper operators these days, but specialists in other areas of the media universe aren't enjoying a smooth ride, either -- and Clear Channel represents exhibit A. Toward the end of the last millennium and the beginning of this one, the Texas-based firm seemed to be an unstoppable force destined to dominate radio and concert promotion for years to come. But even though Clear Channel still owns more radio stations than any other U.S. company, declining listenership and a slew of other factors hit hard, leading to a late 2007 buyout -- and in the weeks since then, the news hasn't improved. As noted in this January 29 article, fears that the deal is about to fall through fueled sharp drops in the corporation's stock price on two consecutive days.

Such developments would have raised concerns at the eight Clear Channel stations in Denver under any circumstances. However, employees at KOA, KHOW, KBPI, KRFX, KTCL, KBCO, KKZN and KFMD had already been sweating due to a recent memo from Lee Larsen, market manager of the Denver cluster. In the note, reproduced below, Larsen writes about staff attrition and assorted belt-tightening that's just around the corner:

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In the recent past, relatively few journalists had a burning desire to participate in Colorado's caucuses during presidential election years -- or even to cover them. After all, these sessions generally happened long after presumptive nominees had been determined in both major parties, making the time-consuming process rather redundant. But 2008 is different. Colorado's caucuses take place on February 5, a.k.a. Super Tuesday, when voters in 24 states will be making their preferences known. And while Colorado's delegate count is modest in comparison to that of California or New York, Denver's status as the host city of the Democratic National Convention in August makes the state worth winning, especially for candidates on the left side of the ledger -- which explains why Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are scheduled to make separate appearances here on January 30.

As a result, managers at journalism outlets are faced with the prospect of staffers aplenty wanting to caucus, and that's a ticklish matter. Passionate involvement in the community can often make reporters and editors better at their jobs. Yet being identified with a certain party or candidate can lead to charges of bias -- and that risk is magnified in Colorado, since the caucus system call for folks to take public stands, as opposed to making their picks in the privacy of a voting booth.

On January 28, Denver Post editor Greg Moore attempted to strike an appropriate balance in an internal memo reproduced below. Moore makes it plain that he'd prefer Post employees to avoid the caucuses entirely, and bans involvement by anyone too closely linked with political coverage. However, he gives others permission to get involved -- although he requests that those who do try to keep as low a profile as possible.

Here's the memo:

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Day One
Day Two

Day Three
January 15, 2008
by Audrey Sprenger, Ph.D

The American West | Lowell, Massachusetts, the small industrial town of Jack Kerouac's childhood and growing up, is not a setting in his most famous novel On The Road. Still, there is a presence of this town and the people Kerouac left behind there in his depictions of the American West, particularly the rural back roads where his alter ego, Sal Paradise makes his home for a short time.

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Day One
Day Two

Day Three
January 15, 2008
by David Amram

The American West | Since I was brought up on a farm in Feasterville, Pennsylvania during the 1930s, most of my first impressions of the American West were informed by Saturday matinees at the movies. But my Uncle David, a merchant seaman who had driven cross-country many times when not at sea, and my uncle Milton, from Las Vegas, New Mexico, both told me stories of this far away place.

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In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you're out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat (where to find them) in the comments section below. Also, if you have any pictures of these colorful creatures, please email them here so we can fully document their existence.

Switching suddenly from PBS' Antiques Roadshow to Fox's new reality-based game show Moment of Truth? Host Mark Walberg must need a neck brace from the whiplash. Or at least a hot shower, you know, to scrub vainly away at the shame.

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A quick update on ex-Café Star chef Rebecca Weitzman’s New York adventure. When I checked out her work at Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain in Manhattan, I loved the food and hated just about everything else. Now I just got word that Weitzman has put in her notice and is once again leaving the Flay sweatshop for more promising work way down around the Lower East Side/Chinatown/Bowery neighborhoods.

According to Weitzman's e-mail, she’ll be taking over as chef de cuisine at Inoteca -- a solidly and seriously regional Italian joint created by the guys who made their name with ‘ino and Lupa in New York. “This job will be a refreshing change because I will be running the kitchen, creating the menu and all specials,” Weitzman told me. “I have missed being creative and decided to follow my love of Italian cuisine and seasonal local food. I can’t wait.”

Neither can I. Looks like it’s about time to start booking another trip to the big city… -- Jason Sheehan