A family fatality afforded us the chance to stumble upon the St. Patrick's Day Parade in downtown Denver--a wonderfully morbid coincidence for an Irish-American like me and the fatal party herself. I say stumble in part because everyone was sober in the a.m., which might explain why the powers that...

An Open Letter To Dave Danforth, Owner and "Publisher/Mascot," Aspen Daily News

Dear Dave:

You and I have had our differences over the years--too many to count--in part because I have been sliced open with a dirty knife by the Aspen Daily News like so many others before me. But...

ASPEN HIGHLANDS--Around here--and throughout the skiing world--it is known as "The Bowl."

Highland Bowl hangs there above you wherever you are in Aspen, and if you're a skier the shadow is longer still. The purity of it here at the peak of Aspen Highlands is all but beyond description, and...

A man in blackface in this brave new century would invoke the wrath of our culture writ large. When the tape of a blackfaced act originating in Australia was seen in the United States, the revulsion was immediate, calling to mind Al Jolson singing "Mammy" in blackface nearly a hundred...

Why can't we be more like Canada?

They host the Olympics like they mean it. They smile. They play hockey and penalty-kill. They honor the indigenous people in their midst without trying to wipe them out. And they have the Canadian Mounties.

But most of all what they have is...

Who knew? Who knew that Scott Brown's election to the Teddy seat in the United States Senate would break open the slush of bipartisanship? But hey, as Peter Gammons used to say in the Boston Globe, a guy's got to eat, and not even a flopper like Brown can avoid...

The arrival of Grace Church at 1776 Emma Road in Basalt--1776 is not a misprint--roiled and soiled the community in Emma as they contemplated a megachurch, albeit a teensy one, in their midst. Dead center in the Roaring Fork Valley, the more liberal members of the town were universally concerned...

Like the blue folk of Avatar, Hollywood is facing an Oscar scandal of massive proportions without a clue as to what happens in the end.

I know because I live in a town that is still trying to recover from Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), the method of misbegotten democracy just...

I once met a bigshot from Google who had decided, as bigshots so often do, that the rules of decorum no longer applied to his kind. In this case that meant Mr. Big decided that he no longer need to bother with capital letters in his emails.

Why? For the...

In politics, to quote Yogi Berra: You don't know nothin'--and that goes double for the Know Nothing Party.

The Grand Old Party, formerly known as "Republican," has now officially adopted the "Just Say No" mantra in a way that not even Nancy Reagan could be proud of.

"No" is not...

The charade pertaining to gays in the military -- I love you, man! -- is all but over, but in the meantime military apologists on the right and the left need never ask nor tell about the elephantiasis of untouchable defense spending.

Needless to say, the Tighty Righties ridiculed President...

As a talk show host, I am immensely gratified by the political career path yapping that portends. I could become a talking points talking head like Mike Pence, the Congressman from Indiana who cut his bleep filling radio frequencies in his home state. I could wallow in the footsteps of...

The mutually orgasmic chortle of the cognoscenti missed the point about the announcement of the Apple iPad by a citified mile because a preponderance of yappers were obsessed with where said tablet fell in the pluperfect Apple pantheon of digital inamorata.

Was it cellphone or laptop? Would it set the...

Within one hour of skiing Powderhorn in Grand Mesa, Colorado, my wife said: "I love this place."

This revelation is no small thing in our little world because my new bride--we married in May 2009--had lost her mojo when it came to skiing and I'm the one to blame. She...

In the summer of 2007 I reported from the Aspen Institute upon the "Death Of Newspapers Greatly Exaggerated," as put forth by William Dean Singleton, the chief bottle-washer at MediaNews Group, owner of the Denver Post, the San Jose Mercury, and multiple other newspapers across the country.

Now comes the...

It's not secret that anyone who lives in Aspen knows that The Secrets of Aspen on VH1 is about as true to life as a fake boob job. But I do know one person who appears on the series -- a real person living in Aspen --and I think it...

A friend of mine was saying she had a hard time listening to my putatively liberal radio talk show "Con Games" (KNFO 106.1 FM in Aspen, 95.5 in Vail) because I had changed my tone over the last year and was now ranting and raving at Republicans rather than strumming...

Darwin's restaurant was packed, so we went next door the day after Christmas for the next form of evolution: James Cameron's Avatar, albeit in 2-D, the standard stuff that fills screens to bursting and the stadium seating to capacity. Instead of plush, lush 3-D, we ended up in one of...

Aspen locals have not seen the last of Charlie Sheen, 44, last seen playing one of the full-blown men on my favorite CBS sitcom, Two And A Half Men. Unfortunately for everybody, Sheen was last seen in Aspen in a Pitkin County Jail cell Christmas Day, after his arrest for...

To be a true sports fan -- and you know who you are -- you have to sit through loads of dreck. Boise State-Tulsa, as a example, or the NFL preseason, or the backend of blowouts year-round in every sport.

But the good news is every now and again you...