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Pagosa
Springs Daily News
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| Heard Around the West |
| Betsy Marston | 7/30/10 |
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| Back to the News Summaries |
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COLORADO
As befits his plain-Jane name, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper is a beige kind of guy, more comfortable in blue jeans than a suit. These days he’s running hard as the Democratic candidate for Colorado governor. After 12 days on the campaign trail in rural western Colorado, he happily reported to Telluride Watch that “sometimes you can go a couple of days without seeing a necktie.”
Given his modest tastes, it isn’t surprising that Hickenlooper and his wife would balk at living in a mauve mayoral mansion that boasts 88 television sets, a pink baby grand piano, a tanning bed, a 1,102 square-foot swimming pool, a 12-foot fire pole in the master bedroom, bathrooms sporting photos of scantily clad babes, and, oddly, “mini-condominiums for squirrels.”
Of course, the city of Denver didn’t build the house on Shangri-La Drive for its mayor. Dubbed “Cableland,” it was designed for the cable-television magnate Bill Daniels, who died in 1990, and left it — along with a $4 million endowment for upkeep — to the city. Now, reports The New York Times, Hickenlooper wants to sell the mansion to raise scholarship money for needy students who graduate from the city’s public high schools.
But although Daniels’ private foundation, the Daniels Fund, supports the sale, city council member Charlie Brown isn’t so sure: “The mayor’s wife hated the house, so what? Maybe another first spouse will like it. I think it’s cool.”
THE NATION
New Mexico food writer Ari LeVaux is determined to decipher the myriad ways marketers tout their products as greener than green. When Whole Foods touted the non-organic chicken produced in Pennsylvania by Dell & Evans as “barn roaming,” LeVaux understood that this was meant to evoke charming images of frolicking chickens. But, he cautions, “All we really know for sure is that they’re stuck inside some kind of structure.”
 Ambiguity is also evident when companies market poultry and eggs with descriptors such as “happy chickens,” “ethical eggs,” “pasture raised,” “naturally nested,” and his personal favorite — “wild hens.” What these terms mean is whatever a vendor wants them to mean, “which is to say they’re meaningless.” In an attempt at clarity, LeVaux tells us that “natural” is a USDA term meaning that no extra ingredients are added; it indicates “nothing about the bird’s life.”
“Humanely raised” is a term used by the National Chicken Council for meat birds, he says, and “presumes that anything short of waterboarding is humane.” The chickens can be crowded into warehouses with less than a square foot per bird. If you want to buy meat or eggs from chickens that lived some semblance of a natural life,
LeVaux suggests buying at a farmers’ market, local hippie co-op or family farm. And, of course, there’s always the option of raising chickens yourself.
THE WEST
What is it about summer and people acting nutty in cars? In Salt Lake City, “a naked woman led police on a wild chase with two stolen cars — including their cruiser,” reports the Salt Lake Tribune. A week later, a Utah man ran Wyoming state police ragged by first driving erratically, then taking all his clothes off, then ramming his car into a car occupied by a Cheyenne couple, then jumping out and entering a car driven by a woman who’d stopped to help. In the Good Samaritan’s vehicle, he found a 9 mm handgun in the backseat and began “firing bullets through the windows.” The man did some more damage to vehicles before furious truck drivers helped police subdue him.
No explanation was given for his bizarre behavior, but a woman in western Colorado knew exactly why she backed her car into an irrigation ditch: A vampire had popped up in the middle of the dirt road, reports 9news.com. Not all the incidents have been in cars: A fed-up man with a samurai sword confronted two men urinating on the sidewalk near his house, reports the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Independent.
Then there was the guy dressed as a leprechaun in Boulder, Colo. The green imp darted between cars in a supermarket parking lot and pretended to shoot people with his finger, “maybe even flipping off a few,” according to kwtx.com. A police officer noted that this was the first-ever complaint about a leprechaun. The headline specified that “Police Look For Leprechaun Who Was Acting Weird,” so if you’re a normally behaving Small Person of Greenness, you’re probably OK.
THE WEST
Attention, women: Give a cheer to a former real estate agent who’s become a “portable restroom operator.” He’s Las Vegas resident Chris Christian, who got the idea for his PortaJane at a crowded blues festival in Telluride, Colo., reports View News.
“What’s the worst part of attending an outdoor event for any woman?” It’s the “60 seconds they have to hold their breath to use a porta potty.” PortaJane, manufactured out of recycled milk-carton material by Allied Plastics in Wisconsin, is pink, roomy, features a self-flushing toilet, hangers so that handbags are off the floor, a mirror and hands-free faucets. Christian has also come up with a can’t-beat slogan for his PortaJane: “Because John can’t aim.”
Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, a syndication service of High Country News (betsym@hcn.org). Tips of Western weirdness are always appreciated. |
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