epgarbage

prompts tsunami warning - Unless you are heavily involved in the crab fishing trade, I would stay away from the following regions for the next 12 hours or so.

It was nothing but love for interim VEP CEO Shannon Davis at last night's town board meeting.  Their revised "operating plan" touched all the bases, in that it made all kinds of promises that cannot be fulfilled, decided local photographers weren't so awful after all, and wished wishes that won't be granted, because no one over there knows what they are doing beyond knowing how to spend money that isn't theirs.  The buzz words "tool box", "tweak", and "super boomers" were sprinkled liberally throughout a power-point presentation with font so small it couldn't be read from the front row, but why bother speaking to the audience, since the audience was the four trustees who bothered showing up or not mailing it in, and those four trustees have now decided Shannon or Shane or Chantilly Lace, anyone who can burn through money less quickly than Forgery, is better than Forgery.  Quid pro quo:  You allow us to do a forensic audit, we ...

Those of you forced to eat by friends/family at a Golden Corral know you are in for a gastric adventure.  And if you buy your meal from a gas station, you are asking for an ER visit 12 to 24 hours later. So you should approach the Himalayan kebab place on the corner with some trepidation, because it got a lower restaurant rating than the two previously mentioned treasures. I doubt very much if a restaurant that can't spell kebab has authentic kebabs, but maybe they come flash-frozen, as below:

Convicted of 90 days for exploiting a minor.  Yeah, that seems about right, given that Estes Park used to allow men to rape underage girls for time served, meaning the 3 minutes it took them to perform the act.

The Estes Pickers Museum (sorry, Estes Pickering Museum) is out panhandling for money again, this time asking for public assistance in setting up an "acquisitions fund".  I have to laugh, because when the Pickering family enlists the public in helping them offload some of the free things they got from the Estes Park Trail-Gazette and others for cash money, it is called "philanthropic" and "forward thinking" by the Pickerings and their bought-and-paid-for paper instead of "self-serving" and "fraudulent", and no one in Estes Park is the wiser, because no one in Estes Park is generally (a) sober or (b) carrying around a full grown-up complement of neurons. Do these items include all of Jim and Nancy's stuff currently being unsuccessfully hawked on Ebay? Eventually Estes Park residents will all evolve with a nose ring so they can be led around more easily by this brother-sister duo, but if you are dumb enough to hand over money t...

This just crossed the wires earlier today: Today is Monday, and I was somewhat confounded this accident occurred (or perhaps was going to occur) on Tuesday morning.  Doing a little more digging, I came across an update on this accident in a Longmont newspaper.  From a month and a half ago. So here is the 83-year-old accident victim (being quite generous, but I wasn't on scene) from Estes Park.  It is a shame when obituaries don't include the cause of death, because unrelated newspapers then break stories that already occurred, adding to the grief. If I ran a newspaper, every obituary would include a mandatory, required mention of "cause of death".  Otherwise, you are not getting real news.  If the cause of death was so embarrassing or problematic that it couldn't be included in an obituary, the obituary wouldn't run.  If you can't have a birthday at your favorite restaurant because you are in jail, you don't send birthday announcements, or ...

this was a good weekend of o-so-predictable college and professional football outcomes.  The Buffs were so train-wrecky headed into the Utah game they should have been 20 point dogs, not 7.  What, does Folsom (in the snow, in the empty) offer a 13-point home field advantage?  Laughable.  Like taking crack from a baby.  The Broncos, meanwhile, another 7 point dog, packed the away stadium and were rested or arrested or something coming off the bye.  Their defense held up just long enough to win, and it was heartening to see Von Miller earn some of his $350,000 per minute salary. For illustration only, although my take this weekend was essentially identical So based on this (inside?) knowledge, I placed two large Colorado-centric even money bets at the Strat and Station last Thursday, and not only is baby getting a new pair of shoes, but Vic T. Walker is getting all the boots he wants.  The Buffs game was a snoozer by the third quarter, there was no...

Is any of this reading material true?  If Simply Christmas on West Elkhorn demanded its history, would any of  this qualify as accurate? Built in 1898?  Used as a Town Hall?  Exsqueeze me?  This was truth as provided in 1926.  If it was that bad then, imagine how screwed up and convoluted it would be now.  Oh wait, you don't have to imagine.  Estes Park T and N Revised is available now, just in time for the holidays.

If I'm reading this right, the Tiny Town gas station, which is not a restaurant, got a higher rating from the Larimer County restaurant inspectors than the Fresh Burger Stop hamburger place in the same building, which is a restaurant.  What about Tiny Town qualifies it as a restaurant?  The cans of Peace Tea in the coolers?  Did they do a better job than most of keeping these cans upright and off the ground and free of bugs around the mouth hole?  And why do I want to eat at the Fresh Burger Stop in the same building, if just the physical act of walking from one side of the building to the other moves me from "excellent" into the "good" section?  Remember, "good" is one step above "fair", which is one step above "marginal", which is one step above "unacceptable".

In Estes Park, if we didn't have tourism, 90% of our population might actually have to earn a living.

The best place to start is here, where you should quickly recognize that 6-man football is not like 11-man football (what you may not discern from this particular video is why a school that has 20 or more kids out for football would play 6-man football, but this is Texas, unlike states with less population, where 6-man football is a necessity, not a luxury), in that the field is smaller, narrower, and it takes 15 yards to get a first down. What will throw fans of 11-man football off is how the center doesn't have to be in the center, how a two-point conversion is actually a kick rather than a run or pass (because it takes two people to execute a kick, thus putting you at a disadvantage against the defense), and how speed really kills (look about the 8 minute mark if you can last that long, where a Balmorhea (the team with the annoying train whistle) running back reverses field and makes a first down, where this would have been impossible in 11-man football). If you have any in...

Victor T. Anderson bought a new pair of cowboy boots.  You can read all about it in the Estes Park Trail-Gazette, whose new mission statement nowhere includes the words "we will strive to keep you constantly updated on the status of Victor T. Anderson's footwear choices". I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  If this were Elko, Nevada, or Lexington, Nebraska, or Buffalo, Wyoming, Victor T. Anderson's weekly poop sheet (meaning rancid diarrhea on the page, not the nautical bent) would probably be welcome.  I have no idea if they tolerate dreck and doggerel clogging their pages any more than any other place, but Estes Park, Colorado, has no agriculture to speak of, two failing community gardens, some vanity black Angus that wouldn't sell on the Chicago livestock market for anything near what they bring up here, and probably a couple of patches of carefully tended marijuana. It reflects very poorly on Estes Park that (a) we have to constantly apo...

Is (not surprisingly) not in Estes Park. Meanwhile, in other news, the Spice Tree is no more, Via Bicycle has been replaced by a Baptist Church (so let me understand - If you run a business poorly for one year, that qualifies you to sit on the VEP board?) and Antonito's has now expanded (or metastasized, your choice) to a third location, so those of you who have been avoiding it at its first and second locations will now have to escape the latest Borg takeover.  I didn't realize we had so many Italians living and eating out in Estes Park, but mebbe the Mafia has gone to the mattresses until the whole Whitey Bulger thing blows over.

Better get the Chris Watts pika draft to the Loveland sculptor.  Too bad Chris lives in Weld County, but we can stick his pika out at the climbing gym, which is closer to the county line.

Madison, Alabama, a suburb of Huntsville and two hours south of Nashville, Tennessee, had an online contest to name their new minor league baseball team.  Stop me if you've heard this already, but the winning entry was the (you guessed it) Rocket City Trash Pandas.  Huntsville is home to to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, hence the Rocket City part.  The trash panda part is an endearing local sobriquet for raccoons, those midnight masked bandits who (out where I'm from, get into farmers' sweet corn, but in Alabama, apparently) rifle through garbage. So the public once again proves it is better than any advertising agency or panel of consultants at making critical decisions.  "Rocket City Trash Pandas" almost, but not quite, replaced my favorite ever "let's put it up for a vote" decision, which is almost never a good idea, unless it results in (nearly) assigning the name "Boaty McBoatface" to the lead research vessel in the British ...

Ho hum, another Estes Park sexual assault case swept under the rug.

Do you have a license for that? The new defensive weapon of choice, apparently, is the vacuum cleaner, which is in the news for the second time in as many weeks.  Remember how that poor Englewood couple fought off intruder Chad Kelly with the aluminum tube from their vacuum cleaner back in late October?  Now we have a guy who singlehandedly stopped the Tallahassee shooter by clocking him with the canister from a nearby vacuum, and when that only slowed him down, grabbed another cleaning appliance (a broom) to finish him off. Let's hear it for the NVA (National Vacuum Association) which has somehow managed to get one of these bad boys into the vast majority of homes and workplaces, despite there being no constitutional provision guaranteeing every citizen's right to own and use a sweeper.  Forget the Tanner Gun Show, I'm heading to my nearest Electrolux dealer to protect my property and loved ones.

Your crackpot letters to the mayor are kept confidential when you spell the word "confidential" correctly.  When you don't, well, you allow the world to enjoy your crazy alien abduction tales.  I wonder how the town government will protect me from Cynthia when she eventually runs out of meds.

Let me see if I understand this: Russ Schneider loves commercial operations in residential neighborhoods (see above). Or, Russ Schneider donates large sums of money to an organization attempting to keep commercial operations out of residential neighborhoods (see above). I'm a bit confused. Update:  Now I'm really gobsmacked:  Russ Schneider's $2000 donation has disappeared (see above), and the GoFundMe site is down $2000 from yesterday.  Did Russ just declare bankruptcy?  Flee to Mexico?