epgarbage

http://www.estesparknews.com/events/article_8c97b36c-32c2-11e8-b6e7-734aaf8ffc8f.html If only the person responsible for giving it existed.  Will people who attend be able to even hear him, or will they be reduced to passing their hands through a fleeting apparition?

Look, I'm as tolerant as the next guy when it comes to corn pone columnists in our local papers, but Vic Anderson's time was up around six years ago.  Vic's bio indicates he was an original member of the Lazy B Wranglers, and is still a champion yodeler and musical whistler, which gives you some idea what era he has yet to emerge from.  Any chance you might know the Schuhplattler or perform Japanese Noh or craft jewelry from hair, Mr. Anderton, or have some other fetish/archaic skill that seems equally out of place? Would it be alright if Estes Park was Elko, Nevada, or St. Anthony, Idaho, or Burwell, Nebraska?  Mebbe.  Or mebbe these communities have an equivalent number of readers who have already progressed beyond requiring their weekly dose of faux-Baxter Black and Bonanza reruns, or instead subscribe to another service more qualified to provide it. For the past half-century, Estes Park has had no significant history of ranching or roping or engaging in...

Those with a thirst for knowledge should review this preliminary time line.  Check you local listings for more details.

Never one to admit failure, CDIV is back blasting away, this time with a countdown clock and five exclamation points (!!!!!).  At least he now admits (I wonder if he reads my stuff?) Mayor Jirsa won by 6 votes, not 4 votes, in the last town election. Again, Estes Park citizens, in case you've forgotten, or just come out of a coma, you are in no way REQUIRED to vote.  It is not a MUST.  We are not living in Australia, where non-voters face a hefty fine.  So until CDIV drafts an "Aussie rules" ordinance (should we start another countdown clock?), citizens who have no clue about any of the candidates running in this election are more than welcome to stay at home, munching on bon-bons and measuring their life in coffee spoons.

They're known as Emergency Backup Goaltenders, or EBUGs, and they often have regular-guy identities and 9-to-5 jobs away from the hockey rink.  They can range in age from early 20s to early 50s [sic], are utilized much more frequently at the minor league level, and keep sharp (if anything prepares rank amateurs for professional hockey) occasionally splitting time with the third goaltender at practice, or playing in beer leagues.  The NHL needs to confirm this, but from what I've read, it seems when called upon (at least this is true in the minors), they could go in for either team. Scott Foster, just living the dream Last night, 36-year-old accountant Scott Foster, whose hockey career ended at Western Michigan University in 2005, lived out the childhood fantasies of accountants, former athletes, and sports fans everywhere, entering the final period of the Chicago Blackhawks-Winnipeg Jets game when the Blackhawks' second-stringer Collin Delia (filling in for Anton Forsb...

I love when CDIV gets all hepped up about something (six exclamation points - six!!!!!!) and blasts his email subscribers with a non-story masquerading as breaking news. First off, our citizens MUST not do anything except pay their taxes and follow all local, state, and federal laws.  They don't even MUST have to do these, except there will likely be a penalty if they are caught. Second off, most people in the know are waiting until next Monday or Tuesday to cast their vote, so as not to "tip off" those snoops who already got a peak at the early vote counts they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near.  We are finally wise to that game. Third off, see my earlier post from late last week, where I implored people who have no idea at this late date who the candidates are NOT to vote.  I may not want my neighbor deciding who gets on the town board, but I sure as hell don't want my neighbor, who was told by another neighbor exactly how to complete his ballot, determi...

If Monday behaves like today did, I'm jumping back in at 24,200.  The increasing tension in Israel, the diplomat expulsion tit-for-tat in Russia, nothing dampened buying enthusiasm today.  The quarter ended down, but today suggests it never planned on going without a fight.  I'm bullish for April (the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot, but we all know he suffered from bouts of severe depression, and never invested in the stock market).

We might want to consider restricting the sales of bow saws, especially at hardware and camping expos where there is no waiting period or required background check.  Did she practice on her hair first?

Mail ballots should arrive within the next two weeks, provided one of the incumbents doesn't resign/retire from the board prior. Apparently, the powers that be have decided you COULD write this person in, but what's the use of potentially having one supporter/insider on the board when you can instead crank up another half thought through recall and have none.

We are now one day removed from the (calendar observation of the) 1985th (or thereabouts) anniversary of the murder of one historic figure whose teachings still directly influence half of the world's population, and six days removed from the actual 50th anniversary of the murder of another. I know we are celebrating the events surrounding the crucifixion/resurrection of the first with a big Easter egg hunt at the new Community Center, but I'm wondering who or what group in Estes Park is in charge of commemorating the death of MLK?  The schedule of events on MLK Day this year was underwhelming - I'm wondering if most folks in Estes Park still ascribe to the disgusting and repellent comments I heard first-hand when the holiday was added to the calendar in 1983:  "Let's kill four more and take the whole week off." Estes Park has a credibility problem regarding race.  We know that from the 250+ white folks who so gleefully add their name to a growing list of ...

The "Week of Walking Everywhere" exercise is drawing to a close, and I wanted to fill folks in on how it went. It helps if you play this in the background  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AzEY6ZqkuE (1) I live a fair distance from town, and am required to be in the downtown area at least once a day.  So the effort to walk back and forth was substantial but certainly not overwhelming (I haven't worn my feet down to bloody stumps).  I decided to assign myself this challenge for two reasons - because I was getting lazy, and because I wanted to do the very minimum towards reducing fossil fuel emissions while still being able to lord it over others. (2) I became much more efficient about how I planned out my schedule.  When you have a car and a full tank of gas, you find excuses to run an errand at the drop of a hat, often very inefficiently.  Initially, I was walking back and forth twice a day, because I was behaving like I would if I were still driving excep...

In case you don't subscribe to the Trail-Gazette (my guess is, this will also appear in tomorrow's Estes Park News, which carries an imprint date of Friday but is now generally available online prior to noon on Thursday), here is the list of people brave enough to take a stand and say "I support racial intolerance in Estes Park as practiced by F.O. Stanley".  Not a person of color among them, arranged alphabetically for the convenience of police monitoring, those listed below are all proud white supremacists, the creme de la creme of Estes Park's Anglo Saxon ruling elite (with mayors, town trustees, and trustee candidates in the mix).  Hooded meetings for the men held every Friday evening starting at 7 o'clock sharp, with tea and petit fours meekly served by the subhuman underclasses to the gals on Tuesday afternoons at 4.  For those not crippled by the arthritic shackles of oppression, ignorance, and hate, cross burnings are held in Bond Park at midnight on t...

It seems to have progressed well beyond the rumor stage that Senior Citizens Inc., kicked unceremoniously from their previous home, is going to shack up with the American Legion. This seems like a win-win for both sides (apparently they are just waiting for a cook), as the Seniors needed a building and the Legion needs money.  Plus Med-X is right next door, so Little Debbie won't have too far to walk. Sadly, this reckless decision has started the countdown clock to Estes Park's catastrophic devastation, the destruction Bobbsey #1 clearly warned was coming if two senior centers were allowed to co-exist in one town.  You can see clouds gathering in this very picture, likely preparing to unloose Zeus' thunderbolts on the ignorant masses.  Stephen King didn't coin the phrase "Rip a Carrie" for nothing.  It's coming folks.  You'll be lucky if you get penetrated by only 30 sharpened knives.  And all of you who failed to heed the Bobbsey prophet's wa...

So today was a non-event.  You don't need to spend any time contemplating these charts.  1 day chart 5 day chart Next in line - Thursday?  Anybody here named Thursday?

Remember your first one? It's that time of year when magazines and non-profits and Chambers of Commerce release their rankings of colleges or coffee chains or "most liveable cities" or "best places to retire if you're a white supremacist". Today it was the Top 50 Casual Dining Restaurants in America according to "loyalty", which means absolutely nothing to me (I mean, I understand the word loyalty, I just don't know how to properly measure it at a restaurant, other than in dollar amounts).  Foursquare, the company behind this "I'm 10, and these are my favorite movies ever" exercise, utilized some invented rating system involving four metrics (whenever I see the word "metric" appearing in something other than a scientific, peer-reviewed paper, I replace it with the word "dog turd", because invariably what follows is going to smell bad, be an embarrassment if discovered by guests, and require an unnecessar...

The Loveland Reporter-Herald today announced they will (for the time being) no longer allow public comment on articles posted on their website.  The Trail-Gazette, a sister institute, has already gone down a similar road once before by removing certain entries they found offensive (to CDIV, during the time he was being piled on for labeling Wendy Koenig a "racist"), but then switched systems to Disqus, allowing for what they hoped was less anonymity.   Hasn't worked (or has worked in the sense that fewer different entities post) but the Trail-Gazette doesn't really need to worry about removing comments at the bottom of a story, indeed, I think they would welcome them, because "no comments" generally means no interest and no readers.  I would appreciate if "Just Sprayin" and "Louis Friend from Pagosa Shi*springs" would uncloak or cut back a bit, because they both reveal themselves through their daily diatribes and lonely old men who n...

It hasn't hit their webpage or Facebook page as of 9:30 MDT Wednesday morning (Update:  Still nothing as of 10:30 a.m. MDT) (Further update:  11:30 a.m. MDT and still nothing, although the porn fiend is now clickable) (Final update as of 12:30 p.m. MDT:  Posted and available free of charge to non-subscribers, at least until the Hospital requests removal), but the Estes Park Trail-Gazette has finally recognized Dr. MacElwee's corporeal form as existential reality, at least on paper (in an "above the fold" grabber on the front page of today's issue, no less).  Cut for space was the paragraph where MayBilly R.F.D. promised to hire a tutor and go through flashcards every Sunday evening for two hours to learn to better recognize hospital staff other than those he gives substantial 6-week "you're special because you stuck around" bonuses to. Today is March 28.  The unfortunate events surrounding Dr. MacElwee's suspension occurred on Mar...

Gandhi was reportedly asked by an interviewer what he thought of Western Civilization (other scriveners of this likely apocryphal story substitute the words "modern civilization").  "I think it would be a good idea," was his purported response. There is so little truth in our lives - even your closest friends and confidants lie to you on occasion.  Once a lifetime, an auction on Ebay can be a true thing (provided the people you are bidding against aren't the seller and his enlisted friends logged in under different identities).  The "Fern Lake" auction that ended last Sunday was frenzied, tripwire competition at its purest and most unpredictable, the stuff of legend. To recap from yesterday's installment, 20 minutes before the auction close, bidder #1 (identified as "Bobbie") had done something quite unpredictable, and bidder #2 (identified as "Me") had responded equally out of character.  Neither one of these bidders (so...

Today's action in the markets was just a carbon copy of Friday, generally unimpressive steadiness throughout the morning and then a sell-off towards the close.  I don't know if Monday's jump was a fake-out or a genuine belief that the looming trade war is not as bad as portrayed, but it was very much not your typical Monday market action after a bad preceding week, and certainly did not achieve the "washout" I was predicting, or that investors need.  So we are going to test the November 2017 lows tomorrow or later in the week, because Facebook's (and thus tech's) credibility problem is not going away anytime soon (the whistleblower at Cambridge Analytica believes his predecessor was poisoned?). Here's today's DJI chart, which could be placed over Friday's chart and be reunited as its not-so-long-lost twin.  My buy signal was a dip early on Monday, which we never saw, so now I'm (1) admitting fallibility and (2) still advocating holding ...

Well, our crack police force with the help of Kate Rusch has outed another felon, in this case, self-professed "Alpine Geek" Brian Biggs, who ostensibly creates internet websites and helps film companies produce documentary footage when he is not downloading child pornography. The town randomly chooses who it subjects to these "perp walk", but in this case, I'm hoping the town administration is finally "woke" to the caustically degrading, horrific activity of pedophiles, and will begin the immediate removal/renaming of any pikas connected to any individuals historically linked to the sexual molestation of pre-teen girls. Plans for the next collector set include an adult pika humping an underage pika

Earlier this week, Chinese trainspotters in Beijing noted a delay in regularly scheduled arrivals from the northeast.  Here is a map of the Chinese-North Korean border that helps explain why this was so significant: Thus did private citizens, indeed, likely private citizens derided for engaging in a seemingly insignificant, time-wasting hobby, discover something the Chinese government and Chinese media was too scared/cowed/backwards to reveal:  Fatty the Third (the popular nickname for Kim Jong-un) was heading their way. Kim Jong-un and other high-level North Korean government officials travel by train.  Obviously, less important passenger trains were being moved off the trunk line to make way for his "supertrain".  Chinese citizens were forbidden to take photographs when the delegation arrived at the capital, but someone with a cell phone and a fair bit of courage managed to get this image to Reddit: No, I'm kidding, that was a joke.  Here is what the N...

Okay, EstesTruth was not in attendance today, and I took fewer notes than last time (and last time I took none), so if you are relying on me instead of the video recording of this meeting for your information, you are doing so at your own peril. EXCLUSIVE:  Here is a very intriguing optic from me walking down the hall 3 minutes prior to the meeting:  CEO Larry Lemming was having a one-on-one outside his office with former board president Diana Van Der Ploeg.  This is an exclusive.  No one else saw this encounter but me, and their tete-a-tete quickly broke up as I passed, with promises to meet again in the near future.  So good for you, recall board, you got Diana removed entirely from any decision making on the future of the hospital...NOT.  Why can't we get Diana physically escorted from the building?  Is Van Der Ploeg actually a cipher for Diana Prince (a.k.a Wonder Woman)?  What was the point of the recall, again? There were 30 people in t...

So yesterday, I left it where, two days before the auction close, an anonymous Ebay bidder I referred to as "Bobbie" was the high bidder on a Fern Lodge postcard at $45.67, a price another anonymous bidder (referred to as "Me") had also bid (purposefully) to expose "Bobbie's" maximum bid, and not put "Me"self in the lead (if two bids are identical, the first one entering Ebay's databank "wins").  Two things result from exposing someone's maximum bid with plenty of time before an auction (especially an auction on a rare or one-of-a-kind item) is scheduled to end:  (1) The high bidder gets nervous.  (2) Other bidders unrelated to #1 and #2 now have knowledge of the maximum bid placed by the high bidder, and so are free to deal with this information however they want (if they are uninterested in the item at that price, they can move on to another item, but if they are interested in the item, they know the minimum they will pote...