Denver News Blog

​You don't expect much from your daily-newspaper sports columnists these days. Sentences that make sense, some well-placed punctuation, maybe a bad pun or two. But while our expectations have been lowered over the years by the likes of Woody Paige and Skip Bayless and whoever else shows up in the corners of our sports pages, this effort by the Post's Mark Kiszla made Paige look downright sober.

After the Broncos' lifeless loss to the Redskins on Sunday, Kiszla somehow came to the conclusion that quarterback Kyle Orton was hiding on the bench rather than reenter the game:

You know you're drunk when you look at this thing and say, "Yeah, I can totally fly that."

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Pilots are casual enough as it is. Whether explaining why you've been sitting on the tarmac for 45 minutes or forecasting the Hail-Mary-inducing turbulence ahead, they're always so relaxed. It's as if they're unaware that they're guiding a massive piece of metal through the sky.

And now we know they're so damn chill. They're all hammered.

A Flickr photo

Sure it would suck to work here. But it wouldn't stab-yourself suck.

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We've all been there: Stuck in a job we hate, dreading showing up for even another day. There are ways to grin and bear it, but sometimes that isn't enough. Sometimes you know just showing up will break you, and you've gotta stay away for a day.

There are plenty of decent ways to pull that off. Stabbing yourself is not one of them.

Dave Schultheis, shmuck emeritus.

​Say it ain't so, Dave!

Colorado Springs Republican state senator Dave Schultheis, whose untenable positions and fabulously xenophobic quotes made him one of Westword's favorite Shmucks of the Week, has announced that he won't seek reelection in 2010.

A champion of small-minded racists, Schultheis wasn't just vilified by Democrats; he was also shunned by many in his own party, who couldn't get behind his hard-line beliefs.

Cesar Corzo's troubling past didn't stop Rite of Passage from hiring him.

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Reason number 13,456 not to do something dumb and end up in jail: Former social worker Cesar Corzo.

Corzo, you'll recall -- unless you've blocked it out, for which we couldn't blame you -- is the former Arapahoe County corrections worker accused of being a giant scumbag. As Alan Prendergast reported last week, Corzo is accused of: "bringing illegal drugs into the facility and giving them to his clients; presenting slide shows involving pornographic images during group counseling sessions; bringing in a former female client and allowing his clients to have sex with her; and instituting an 'anti-snitch policy,' whereby any of his clients who divulge what occurs during counseling sessions to outside parties will be (and were) beaten."

Even these guys probably doubted McDaniels.

​Okay, you and me, and most of the local media, and all of the national media -- everyone, really, except this guy. We read his age, and we heard the lip-smacking and the no-commenting, and we saw all the former Patriots showing up in Dove Valley, and we decided: This guy's gonna fail. We wrote him and his Broncos off, penciled them in for 3-13 or 4-12 or, maybe if a couple teams had plane trouble and missed the games altogether, 6-10.

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It wasn't long after Balloon Boy's balloon fell gently and empty to the ground that I sent out the above Tweet.

Of course, in hindsight, those odds were way too high. And now we're all left to figure out how to fill up another balloon, attach Balloon Boy's dad by the ankles, and let him float, float away, with not a cameraman in sight.

Kevin Salyers

​Any day that includes a trip to Wal-Mart is bound to suck, low-low prices notwithstanding. But when it ends with getting your ass kicked by a guy in a wheelchair and then a trip to jail, it's time to change your lucky socks.

​I've never owned a horse, or even horse-sat for that matter. So I can't say for sure that I could properly maintain the nutrition of an equine if charged with such responsibility. If the horse didn't like Ben & Jerry's or the onion rings from My Brother's Bar, he might not have the best culinary week of his life.

But I'm pretty sure I could do better than Alexis Williamson.

Wiilamson is 22 and lives in Wellington, a rural town just north of Fort Collins. A year ago, sheriff deputies say, her father moved out of state, leaving Williamson to care for at least three horses. This, it turned out, was a really shitty idea.

​Aurora's Jesse Dennis Dimmick was already wanted for questioning in a murder when he went on the lam recently, eventually finding himself in a police chase with Kansas authorities. And while murder is a little too severe to label Dimmick a shmuck, what he did next more than qualifies.

During his chase in Dover, Kansas, Dimmick, 23, crashed his car into the home of a newlywed couple. Obviously not a fan of Cops, Dimmick was not aware that this was the point at which he was supposed to lie down and start thinking about which job he'd want in prison (something in bedding, I'm guessing). Instead, he stormed the home and took the couple hostage. That's where it gets weird, as our friends at Truecrimereport.com explain:

Marcus Burton: A victim of shmuckery.

​The world doesn't hand us many absolutes. Don't stare directly into the massive fireball in the sky. Make babies. Never buy fewer than eight Washington apples at one time. And, of course, if you happen to know enough about rocks to teach geology at a large institution of higher learning, never, under any circumstances, attempt to talk about football.

It's this last great truth that was violated recently by a thus-far unnamed geology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It happened in a class attended by junior linebacker Marcus Burton, who relayed his story to a reporter. From the Denver Post:

Burton said his geology professor told the class: "You people may think this class is boring. We're just talking about rocks. But it's no more boring than both the CU games. Marcus, you're a captain. Can you tell us about that?"

Thirteen taught me everything I need to know about middle-school girls.

​When I read this morning about a Boulder-area middle school banning jelly bracelets because of their potential sexual meanings, my first reaction was to shmuck the principal up. I mean, the whole pink-means-hand-job bracelet thing has been floating around since 2003, and no one seems to have ever really demonstrated that they actually mean anything. Isn't it possible that these kids just have really bad taste in accessories?

But then I thought about it, and I realized: This is the principal of a middle school, which is quite possibly the most dreadful job in America. It's like being the office manager of Hell. Not only does the principal not deserve being named a shmuck, the dude deserves a medal, and a vacation, and maybe a night out with someone wearing an indigo-colored bracelet.

Why? Because let's face it: Middle schoolers suck.

Well, this is all very confusing.

First of all, this is just my second Sniagrab ("bargain spelled backwards!") season in Denver, and it still baffles me. As far as I can gather, scores of people who really like to ski, and can afford to ski a lot, every year set up camp outside various Sports Authorities around Colorado in order to be first in line at the store's annual ski-equipment sale. This is a little Andy Rooney of me, I realize, but if they can afford to ski so much, can't they afford to pay full price? And wouldn't they want top-of-the-line equipment? And why do they call headphones "headphones" anyway? I mean, you can't call anyone with them, and they go in your ear, not your head. That doesn't make much sense to me.

Anyway, I guess it's a pretty big sale, and people enjoy the community of camping out every year. But then I read earlier this week that a woman from Texas -- first name Reba, middle name Crazy -- had plopped down her tent a full ten days before tomorrow's sale.

​We don't like to repeat shmucks around here. There are plenty of multiple offenders, sure, but there's lots of new blood every week, too, and this week was no different. We could have shmucked the kid who bashed in the DNC offices, if only for unleashing the right's loony pack of attack dogs on us. But Ariel Attack feels a little too confused to be forever labeled a shmuck. There were criminals and corporations too, but their actions seem too serious for an award typically reserved for the bumbling morons among us.

And some weeks, a former honoree once again separates himself from the pack so fully, with such vigor, you just can't look anywhere else. And this week, that guy is Brandon Marshall. Who, as you'll see below, I sort of want to punch in the kidneys.

Robble, robble.

​Tom, you make us laugh. You make us cry. You make us want to jump off a cliff rather than watch your Lasik infomercials. But your antics over the past two weeks simply made us shake our heads and wonder about your sanity.

You didn't like our recent feature about your connection to the Efusjon drink. You said we got it all wrong. That is fine.

But then you made it a personal vendetta. You lured Westword reporter Jared Jacang Maher to a McDonald's under false pretenses and tried to ambush him on camera, you Hamburglar, you. Then you came to Westword and barked at managing editor Jonathan Shikes. (Hint to Tom: Try calling us up and scheduling an interview, like a normal person.) See the video clip below.

A photo from back when Jay was working on a losing record as a Bronco.

​It may yet prove to be the case that being able to throw a football really hard does not make you a good NFL quarterback. In fact, it may require intelligence and grace and a good offensive line, and Jay Cutler does not have any of those things.

His most recent baffling sound bite, in case you missed it, involved saying this about his old and new fan bases: ""Denver's like a 6 and Chicago's like a 9." Let's ignore the part where he shits all over the Broncos fans who supported him through two years of nothing particularly special, who forgave him for comparing himself to Denver's greatest sports hero, who were willing to give him a mulligan on a truly epic collapse in the final games of last season. Jay Cutler's utter disdain for the people who paid his salary should come as no surprise at this point.

After all, there are more exceptionally idiotic things about this quote. Listen, Jay: Just because you like to throw on your striped shirt on the weekends, unbutton it to your sternum and assign a number ranking to every floozy in a sequined dress doesn't mean you should go and publicly objectify entire cities worth of sports fans. And why the hell would you say Chicago is a 9? If you're going to be describing the fans of your current team, it is your job to say they are the best in the world. Twenty-thousand people came to watch you lob twenty-yard outs at some dude named Earl Bennett, and the best you can do is a 9?

As far as shmucks go, you'll always be an eleven to us. Can't wait for you to come visit later this month.

​This week's shmuck is state Senate minority leader Josh Penry of Grand Junction. He's also gunning for Bill Ritter's Governor job, and the short version of the past few weeks' convoluted saga of schmuckitude is that Penry cares a lot more about his political future than his constituents. (Which makes him exactly like every other politician, which makes every other politician a shmuck. Which means we're probably right about this one).

It's tough to decide where to begin, really. Early July -- when the Feds started looking at a disposal cell south of Grand Junction as a storage facility for thousands of tons of mercury -- seems a good a time as any. It seems pretty clear that to store mercury in the cell would blatantly abuse the intent of the facility, which was to store uranium mill tailings from the city's past. The facility was approved on condition that it not be used to store hazardous materials. Like mercury.

Sometimes we have to dig a little to find a shmuck worthy of our weekly dishonor. And sometimes, a dude lets his girlfriend's terrier die a slow death out in the car while he watches her audition for American Idol.

Oh, Quincy Vanderbilt from North Dakota. You could have done so many things differently, and we wouldn't be here right now, declaring you Shmuck of the Week. You could have talked your girlfriend out of driving three states away for the slimmest of chances to be mocked on national television. But I understand that one: You've got to help her chase those dreams, on the slim chance she'll start having sex with you again.

I am, for the record, generally in favor of toplessness. Not my own, mind you, which I am so strongly against I often wear a shirt in the shower, like the fat kid at the public pool, only hairy and alone. But other people's toplessness? Sure! Topless beaches in Europe, topless scenes in movies, topless pools on cruiseships: I vote affirmatively, and spiritedly, for all.

But there is something shamefully pathetic about the plan of Boulder's Dan Kennedy, the CU student who wants to open a coffee shop staffed by topless coeds.

Serena Brooks likes to play rough.

I have very few rules in life. Don't eat ice cream right before bed, unless you want heartburn. Don't watch Jimmy Fallon right before bed, unless you want heartburn. And never, ever, under any circumstances, get high and drunk on a Monday night and have a threesome with another dude and a chick from Niwot named Serena -- especially if Serena looks like the type of girl a Springer Show producer would stop on the street, and especially if Serena's six-month-old is sleeping nearby.

It's a rule I've managed never to break over the years, unlike that damn Fallon rule. But, as the Post and every other outlet reported this week, two local men recently showed they just didn't have the restraint. As you can imagine, it didn't end well.

"Run! Run! Why is no one else running?"

There are days when sifting through the world's deadbeats in search of a stand-out shmuck just doesn't feel right. This, dear reader, is one of those days. So instead, I give you Gary.

For anyone watching from their living-room windows, it must have been quite the sight: a lonely little man sprinting wildly for cover, leaving his golf clubs and his dignity alone in the 13th fairway.

It was around five on Thursday, and I was three holes into a lonely post-work nine at Aurora's Saddle Rock Golf Course. Then, suddenly and violently, the skies opened. Lightning flashed all around me, bolts hanging in the air like unwanted guests. And there I was, having never golfed in a lightning storm, a bewildered California guy, standing on a hill with a copper sand wedge in hand. I imagined myself in line to meet St. Peter, watching MJ moonwalk through the gates to the sound of light applause from Farrah Fawcett. And that, needless to say, scared the shit out of me.

There was a time when I wanted Roger Goodell to come down on Brandon Marshall. It was before the ESPN hit piece, but after Marshall's most recent display of unhinged chauvinism, and around the time former Falcons quarterback Michael Vick was to be released from prison. While most Broncos fans were collectively hoping Commissioner Goodell would ignore Marshall's transgressions, I was hoping for something severe, something season-changing. A four-game suspension at the least; a season at the most. Maybe it's because I'm not a so-called "dog person," but it seemed to me the punishment for throwing around a woman should at least match that of killing dogs.

It didn't happen. Marshall escaped the commissioner's wrath. And now, of course, he wants to be traded and is skipping practices to make it happen. And so it came to be that I no longer want Brandon Marshall to be suspended. I want him to be kicked in the Adam's apple. By someone named Vinny. Preferably in work boots.

It was a banner week shmuckwise for members of Team Nature, which grabbed three of the top four spots in our weekly Shmuck Power Rankings. The rankings broke down like this:

4. Gravity. Newton and his God forsaken apple showed up at my very manly volleyball game the other night and caused me to come down on my ankle, which has since puffed up like that one hot girl from high school.

3. Marilyn Musgrave. She hasn't really done anything since last week, but I'm still a little hungover from that performance.

2. Father Time, for making me too old to eat Sonic corndogs without puffing up like my ankle.

1. Mother Nature, for being a total whore.

Musgrave (left) receives an award from the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Center.

First off, apologies are probably in order. It occurs to me that, over the last six months, you've probably managed to wipe clean the stains left on your mind by former Rep. Marilyn Musgrave. Since her election in 2002, Musgrave's devotion to squashing women's rights, gay rights -- basically the rights of anyone with a decent shoe collection -- has made her a front-runner for Shmuck of the Decade. But there she was in November, right-winging her way right out of office, and out of our gray matter too.

And here I am, bringing her back on an otherwise pleasant Friday. It will be brief, I assure you. Painless? Probably not.

I was feeling a little Shmuck Light this week, unsure that anyone had really risen their shmuck game to a level deserving of this honor, which is fast becoming the Teen Choice Awards of the half-baked-insult-blog world. I engaged our Twitter friends, and even they, at first, were a little unsure. One guy suggested we lay the shmuck down on the Conifer teen who injured herself boogie-boarding on the hood an SUV. But Shmuck Bylaw 4.247-A clearly states that all high school students are "permitted to, and in fact encouraged to, engage in otherwise shmuck-worthy behavior for a four-week period beginning two weeks before and ending two weeks after the last day of school." So she was off the hook. In the hospital, but off the hook.

So we were stumped. But then a few people came through with not a single shmuck, but a shmuck collective that is more than worthy of the honor: The NBA referees.

It pains me to bestow such a dishonor on someone with such an honorable mustache, but this week's Knight of Shmuck must be former Congressman Scott McInnis, who's taking one of the more bizarre approaches to governorship since Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura.

After months of not-so-subtly announcing his intention to seek the GOP's gubernatorial nomination, McInnis this week officially announced his bid. But he did it with all the publicity of Leper Tweetup.

Perhaps that's because McInnis's constant "unofficial" campaigning has made him Topic No. 1 at all the cool Ethics Police parties, leaving him leery about making too big of a splash. Or perhaps he simply doesn't get that in order to win votes, people -- not just basement-bound political bloggers, but actual, nose-breathing people -- have to know that you're running, and why.

Either way, he betrayed the audaciousness of his facial hair. After all, if you're going to flaunt ethics codes, you should do it with pizazz. He should have blown it out.

The sweater confirms it: Shmuck.

Sometimes picking a shmuck is hard work. Sometimes the world presents you with such a vast sample tray of worthy shmucks, you have to employ a team of PhDs to measure their shmuckiness. On other, rarer occasions, the calendar presents a virtually shmuck-free week, and you're left to pick Bob Schaffer again, simply for his continued refusal to move to Utah.

This, however, was not one of those weeks.

This week, the world gave us Mark Cuban vs. Kenyon Martin, one of the strangest displays of the 2009 playoffs. And when Ron Artest and Stan Van Gundy are still around, that's saying something.

Snow. Sun. Snow. Sun. Clouds. Thunder. Heat. Cold.

We realize this is Colorado. We realize that if you don't like the weather in Colorado, wait an hour. We realize that it's kind of fun experiencing all four seasons in a 24-hour period sometimes. But c'mon. The past week has been a little much (and it's only going to get worse: Sunshine today and ten inches of snow predicted for Saturday).

I guess Mother Nature is dishing out a little payback for our greedy consumption of 70-degree days in February -- and that's all well and good. But I have patios to sit on and cold beers to drink, and it's no fun to pop open an icy one and tilt my face toward the sun only to have to hurry inside a moment later with my snow-covered tail between my legs (check out the 9News weather "planner" above).

There are flip flops and snow boots next to each other by my closet. I've turned on both the A.C. and the heater in my car in the past few days. I wanted to water the grass, but I don't want to burst my pipes.

Forecast calls for sun, snow and a chance of Shmucky weather.

For previous Shmucks, see our Shmuck of the Week archive.

It's coming up on the ten-year anniversary of the Columbine High School murders -- so what better time to introduce a bill in the state legislature that would ease a restriction on certain people who want to buy firearms?

The bill, pushed by Republican senator Greg Brophy of Wray (pictured) and Republican representative Steve King of Grand Junction, would waive the background check requirement for anyone who has a concealed-carry permit.

Who opposes the bill? Police chiefs and sheriffs who believe that Colorado's conceal-carry permit process isn't standardized or centralized enough to be trustworthy, according to a story in the Denver Post. Other opponents include: gun-control groups (of course) and a number of Democrats, who now control both the state house and senate.

The bill would also do away with the background check in gun stores and at gun shows, something that would undo a portion of the state's landmark Amendment 22, which was passed by an enormous margin in 2000, shortly after Columbine.

Remember, Senator Brophy and Representative King: Guns don't make people into shmucks, people do.

For previous Shmucks, see our archive.