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Showing posts from 2017

Does right always win?

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The best rendition of "Grown Up Christmas List" is one of the earliest, with Natalie Cole's pure phrasing backed by David Foster's accompaniment and harmony (reprised in this 1996 video). One line in particular strikes me, preceded by the wishful "Every man would have a friend". The hopeful "That right would always win" seems like the biggest stretch of all (besides the requisite "wars not starting" plea that will never occur until humans are replaced by robot overlords). When David Foster released this song in 1990, it was virtually ignored.  Note again for the record:  One of the currently most covered Christmas songs in recent history was virtually ignored and didn't even chart upon its initial release.  You want a comeback story, here is a comeback story.  Mannheim Steamroller recycles electronified crap year upon year, and dominates the holiday airwaves.  David Foster releases a song that, while admittedly pap, at least

When I was 2017

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Another year, another twenty-six fortnights of near-flawless predictions and foresight.  If the Estes Valley Valley Administrator gets 4 column inches to brag about all his girth and accomplishments (note no mention of the rampant racism and pedophilia he failed to address again this year, and in fact condoned by failing to address it in any meaningful sense, ever), those who possess a similar skill set and work for much less money are entitled to shower themselves with credit as well:  The Baldpate didn't sell, EVIC didn't break ground, VEP broke wind, EVPL broke down, finally carting off EV local history to the bagel bin (which, BTW, didn't hold a program for two months bcuz of "reprogramming"), the EVTG faltered mightily when it came to investigating anything of consequence besides EF's bootie hole, EVMC recall committee failed to place any of their candidates (if they had any) on the board either time through, and so forth, and so on. It is a wonderful t

VEP temporary/interim/permanent

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VEP is back, passing a provisional 2018 budget without stipulation (except the splash pad and climbing wall is on hold pending state approval) and appointing a temporary records custodian without yielding to urges to pay the former CEO another $20,000 for serving so admirably as the prior one. It is clear there is still a major disconnect between the "stakeholders" (meaning, in their minds, the business owners who pay for ads and editorial content in the visitors guide (which, by the way, VEP makes no apology for printing 20,000 too many of each year, as leftovers are sent to fourth graders along the front range (are there even 20,000 fourth graders in the entire state of Colorado?), who promptly discard them and thus save VEP the landfill costs)) and their unwanted "overseers" (meaning the town board and county commissioners).  VEP would like to be able to overspend (they call it "negative cash flow", the general public calls it "irresponsible"

EPIC looking for new site

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So the five years of contortions and bullshi* Stan Black et al. dragged the community through FOR NOTHING have finally come to an end.  EPIC was unable to raise even the $50,000 required to hire a professional fundraiser, necessitating the plundering of FOSH funds.  Those trustees who voted to allow FOSH funds to be used in such a reckless fashion will have to answer for it next election cycle. EPIC remnants are now trolling for another site, apparently acknowledging without really acknowledging the complete stupidity of ramming a giant megalith into an area with no parking.  As Stan and the boys are finally coming to their senses and taking suggestions, I can think of no better place for the entire proposal than 455 Elm Road.  Perhaps the plans and all the donor funds contributed over the past 20 years can be efficiently funneled into this location. Ample seating for 200, plus rehearsal space, without having to beggar a dime.

While we're talking about jail birds...

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I'm sure everyone is aware William Sydney Porter spent three years in a Columbus Ohio, federal penitentiary in the late 1890s.  Porter, who most people will better recognize by the pen name (no pun intended) O. Henry, embezzled $4000 (other sources suggest $1000) from an Austin, Texas bank (where he held a $100/month teller job), having initially fled to Honduras to avoid trial. William Sydney Porter with his wife and daughter around the time he began stealing funds from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas His wife's illness convinced him to return to the United States and face the music, but things were not exactly going swimmingly in Central America (claims of acquiring a fruit farm notwithstanding, he found employment mostly as a manual laborer during his six month stay). So let's all lift a glass this holiday season to the ex-con American who coined the term "Banana Republic" and wrote the most famous Christmas story this side of the Atlantic, one

Speak, Wide Stripes

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Opponents of capital punishment will easily recognize the following individual, while advocates of retributive justice, or those on the sidelines, might need an additional hint, for example, a photograph of the actress who portrayed her in a 1995 movie Dead Man Walking, the movie, drastically altered important details of the real-life story recorded by Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking, the book.  Those of you who get your history from Netflix would be well served to read at least the first few chapters of the book, paying close attention to circa-1980 Louisiana (and more broadly, U.S.) arrest and incarceration statistics, especially the racial disparity between those sentenced to die and their victims (killing a white person was, and still is, much more likely to result in a death sentence in states with capital punishment than killing an African-American). Sister Prejean's actual initial pen pal was Elmo Patrick Sonnier, not Matthew Poncelett (the Sean Penn chara

Meanwhile, back at Nestle's $125,000 bar...

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If the Trail-Gazette's reporting is accurate (I haven't seen the documents myself, and those responsible for this largesse are being mum), our VEP CEO left with an FUEP (figure it out) severance package of one additional year of an already-inflated salary, courtesy of our Lodging Association.  I truly hope Curly can find it in her heart to give generously to various worthy nonprofits around town before her departure (or maybe she'll apply for the head of roads and bridges, given her guaranteed super-positive recommendation from Sean "Hand Lotion" Jurgens), because someone sure as hell charity-balled her $125,000 more than she deserved. We're sorry things didn't work out.  How, about, as a parting gift for a job not well done, we give you a Mercedes only Wall Street investment bankers and major league baseball players can afford? But good on her.  All you need to do to succeed financially in this town is get appointed to a position you are unqualif

People are keening about imminent nuclear holocaust...

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but the gold and silver markets certainly don't reflect actual concern.  Look at this six-month chart of gold, priced in U.S. dollars: The silver chart is similar: If the $2.50/ounce price drop in silver from early September until early December is any indication, no one is seriously worried about our world being one crazed dictator's or reactionary world leader's disappointing breakfast omelet away from global thermonuclear war. Sorry to break the news to you, panicky CNN devotees, but, similar to a world awash in supposed climate change fears with no reactionary immediate mass exodus from coastal cities, your behavior doesn't support the talk.  Instead, you seem to be more than willing to keep piling your investments into paper. Of course, the counter-argument is that no one is stockpiling gold or silver right now because they don't see any reason to have any wealth or stability or bartering power post-apocalypse - they would rather just be dead than

Final Park Hospital District board election results

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Ain't no more updates, this 'un is final: For comparison, the final "unofficial" tally a few weeks back for the short-term board positions was David Batey 1839 Linda Hanak 1386 Sandy Begley 2006 John Meissner (write-in) 213 Which means 8 additional ballots were cast (or withheld for purposes of "shielding" foreign ballots, then released, 16 potential votes maximum), with Sandy Begley getting 6 votes on these eight ballots, David Batey 5 votes on these eight ballots, and Linda Hanak 5 votes on these eight ballots.  (Only possible permutation is:  Batey-Begley combo 3, Batey-Hanak combo 2, Hanak-Begley combo 3) The "unofficial" tally a few weeks back for the long-term board positions was Monty Miller 1566 Bill Pinkham 2066 Bert Bergland 1243 Bruch Carmichael 1394 Diane Muno 1930 Again, it is easiest to explain these changes by 8 additional ballots being cast (or released from quarantine, 24 potential votes maximum) with Monty Miller

The other shoe droppeth

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I feel not-so-good-so about the recently announced resignation of the VEP CEO, and I'm certainly not one to pile on, or demand credit when a surprising and completely unpredicted outcome goes a certain way (meaning my way, but that comes across as insolent).  We pick people and then we pick on those people - My only weasel justification is that I wasn't ever asked to pick this particular person, sit in on the interview process, or weigh in with my thoughts.  I'm just the buzzard that hangs around hangs around stranded emigrants, and either you acknowledge the wagon train is being circled by carrion eaters, or you start boiling your shoelaces and culling the stock I don't know if the CEO is who I originally thought she was, or bowed to the inevitable weight of who too many people, particularly people who wielded power (meaning not me), incorrectly thought she wasn't.  Her coffee circle will decry the bum rap, her enemies will bay at the moon and hope the door taps

Thomas Morgan Robertson

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"She Blinded Me With Science" was released one year prior to "Whirly Girl", but I don't think I paid much serious attention to college-dro pout Thomas Dolby until I went away to college, when his "Hyperactive" became the de rigueur basement speaker blast during Saturday morning cleanup at the frat house.   "Hyperactive" was the thinking man's version of "Whirly Girl", more introspective but wound just as tightly on the drum.  I love how "Hyperactive" threatens repeatedly to unspool, each time catching itself as the bass line walks a tightrope over fiasco canyon. MTV was just 1-3/4 year old, and Thomas Dolby 2 4 -1/2 , when "She Blinded Me With Science" topped out at #5 on the Billboard chart But SBMWS gets all the attention now, especially the video, a play on British eccentric s and silent movies, supposedly storyboarded before the song was even written.  (Dolby himself admitted the composition

Whirly whirly whirly whirly girl

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One of my guilty pleasures from the 80s was a throwaway pop song called "Whirly Girl" by the band OXO (pronounced Ox-Oh), which peaked on the Billboard charts at #28 around the time of my 18th birthday.  It is often ranked among the top #10 worst songs of the 1980s by whoever bothers compiling these sorts of lists, but I refuse to apologize for the silly lyrics or the high school prom band bass line or the senseless "whomp whomp" welcome to the next verse.  I especially enjoy the giddy "calliope on crack" synth keyboard settings, but enough background - You have to turn your brain off to enjoy "Whirly Girl", and the less you know about Ish Ledesma (except for the fact that he is Cuban, which may explain the frenetic propulsion driving the beat, whose coda may be a car crashing into a telephone pole, for all I know) or the fact that the bass player's son later filmed a documentary about his step-father, forced to live in their basement after h

Holiday Road

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Entire song of 27 different words (six of which were borrowed from a nursery rhyme), chorus with the same two words repeated over and over.  Accompanying totalitarian-themed music video that feels more like an excuse to work female desk jockies "oh-ohs" into choreographed backup.  Favorite closing number of college a cappella groups everywhere. What a car Ultimate road movie, ultimate Chevy Chase at his smarmiest movie ("This is no longer a vacation.  It's a quest.  It's a quest for fun."), ultimate John Candy at his earnestly dopiest movie ("You couldn't even break the skin with that thing"), ultimate Beverly D'Angelo (before she went all crazy on us, although not Ellen Barkin crazy, and still packed with"walloping gorgeousness", as a critic once wrote) at her harriediest movie (Tomorrow you'll probably kill the desk clerk, hold up a McDonald's, and drive us 1000 miles out of the way to see the world's largest p

GROUNDHOG DAY

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The Baldpate Inn sold at absolute auction earlier this month for $1.3 million.  The build-up to the sale was impressive by northern Colorado newspaper standards, with the Estes Park, Loveland, Fort Collins, Boulder, and Denver newspapers not just reprinting the Concierge Auction press release, but assigning a reporter in each case to write a distinct feature story. So it is with some confusion that, after hitting the alarm clock this morning, I found this on my Google news feed: 4900 S. Highway 7 is the Baldpate Inn.  What happened, and why are we going through this exercise again?

So glad to have a life outside Estes Park

"I'm an optimist, brought up on the belief that if you wait to the end of the story, you get to see the good people live happily every after"  - Cat Stevens (born Steven Georgiou, 1948) I moved to Estes Park "permanently" a decade ago at 42 years of age, and no matter what you thought about me back then, you had to acknowledge I arrived full of energy, passionate about causes I advocated for and believed in.  It is one thing to be passionate about fringe beliefs, and as I've repeatedly acknowledged, if I was passionate about demanding the shelves at the Estes Valley Library be stocked with Nazi literature, or sex toys, I could understand the pushback.  But at the time of my arrival, seeing the decrepit state of assembling and preserving Estes Park newspapers for future generations (or pretty much any ephemera related to Estes Park history) and the seeming unwillingness to make what had been haphazardly saved of this material available to the public (and no

Estes Park town trustees turn up in the craziest places

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Nederland's "Mountain-Ear" newspaper began life in 1977 as a twice-monthly publication, changing to a weekly in 1980, the schedule it adheres to today. Colorado high school girls track was still something of a novelty in the 1970s, and one of its biggest stars later went on to referee disputes in other civic fields. Nederland [Colorado] "Mountain-Ear" newspaper Tuesday, 11 April 1978 If this scan proves difficult to read, here's a transcript:  [Headline:]  Olympic Star To Ref All-County H.S. Meet.  [Body:]  The second annual Boulder County High School Track and Field Championships will be held Saturday, April 15, 1978, at Centaurus High School [in Lafayette] beginning at 9:15 a.m.  Sponsored by the Town & Country Review, this will again be the only county track meet attended by all boys' and girls' teams from throughout Boulder County.  Honorary referee for the day will be track star Wendy Koenig Knudson, best known for her 800-meter run

Traffic Lite

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Estes Park didn't get its first traffic light until the late 1940s, and even then, it was turned off and covered up each winter.  This was 35+ years after the traffic signal was invented in Salt Lake City, Utah, which housed red and green lights in a structure resembling a birdhouse, and required manual switching between signals. The yellow "change is coming" light was added to the mix in Cleveland eight years later.  While we're on the subject, the blinking green light as used in Russia, which follows on the heels of the solid green light as a warning that the green light is growing "stale" and you should get a move on (or, at the other extreme, I've heard in China the combo "red-yellow" means the light is preparing to turn green, so start revving your engines), is a brilliant idea, and if we borrow nothing else from our former enemies, we should at least consider borrowing this. The Russian traffic police are notoriously underpaid, and

Helter Skelter

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The name Azel Galbraith should be familiar to anyone claiming to be an Estes Park resident, but my guess is, 99% of long-timers will need to quick Google it before nodding their heads in agreement. Azel Day Galbraith is buried in Canon City, his wife and son in Fort Collins.  This discrepancy alone should give one pause, but provide the dates of burial, and suddenly the tragedy becomes nearly self-evident.  Jennie S. Galbraith (maiden name Lamb ring any bells?) and her 8-year-old son both died within minutes of each other on a cold morning in Russell Gulch, Gilpin County, 22 February 1904, while Azel Galbraith died shortly after being fitted with the hangman's noose on 7 March 1905. Jennie had so much going for her, while Azel was a gambler, womanizer, drunkard, and idler, an all-around waste of breath.  What did she see in him, what redeeming features penetrated the glare from his dome?  Did they meet prior to her graduation (as valedictorian) from Fort Collins High S

Gimme Shelter

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When Joyce and Robert Holcomb purchased property in the Magnolia/Coal Creek Canyon section of Boulder County southeast of Nederland in 1975, it entitled them to run for office in the High Country Fire Protection District, which, while primarily a Gilpin County enterprise (formed in 1972), covering sections and townships near Rollinsville and Pinecliffe and additional areas north of Black Hawk and Central City, also included old mining districts southeast of Nederland with mostly dilapidated cabins used as summer homes, and a wedge of Coal Creek lying in Boulder County. At the time, the Holcombs lived in Arvada, or at least this was their address in 1984.  Prior to this, in 1978, Joyce Holcomb ran for a 2-year term on the High Country Fire Protection District, and when she was elected and set up the 1980 board election as secretary, she provided a Golden mailing address in the announcement of the upcoming election in the legal notice section of the Weekly Register-Call new

Living in High Country

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The High Country Fire Protection District, staffed by approximately 50 volunteer firefighters and one paid fire chief, is no more, having been absorbed into the Timberline Fire Protection District a few years back.  When extant, it covered most of Gilpin County and a portion of Boulder County, large in area but small as far as population - the typical number of ballots cast for board members in any given election was less than 350, and in the 1980s, rarely made it above 100. Estes Park town trustee Robert Holcomb's resume includes serving for a time as president of the board of directors of the High Country Fire Protection District.  This would require residence in this district, and indeed, Boulder County grantor-grantee books and the Weekly Register-Call, a Gilpin County newspaper, confirm that, beginning in 1975, Robert Holcomb owned property in Boulder County. December 2014 Weekly Call-Register "30 years ago" retrospective Gambling became legal in Blac

Johanna writes

The Estes Park Economic Development Corporation (EPEDC) is patting itself on the back because "the award for 'Small Community of  the Year' was presented" to them by the Economic Development Council of Colorado (EDCC) "on behalf of a town that sets its sights on building a more resilient, inclusive, and vibrant community and economy after recovering from the devastating Colorado floods in 2013." How has the following economic development been beneficial to Estes Park? The Estes Park Event Center, completed in spring 2014, has not brought all the big events expected from outside of our community.  It is not profitable. The Estes Park Medical Center (i.e., Park Hospital District) did not have the money to build the EPMC/Anschutz Wellness Training Center within the two years specific in the "Contract for Sale of Lot 4" to John Cullen, owner of the Stanley Hotel (i.e., Grand Heritage Hotel Group, LLC).  Since the money was not raised, according

Scream already

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Folks in Estes Park are to the point where they don't even wait for proper introductions at a gathering before relating how much they dislike our current commander in chief.  I'm so thankful I'm not related to the man, because imagine how uncomfortable things would get if I fired back, "Oh, yeah, good to meet you, I'm his nephew." We used to have a filter, we used to think, I think, if others were milling about who might overhear a casual conversation we were having with a friend, we ought to be a bit circumspect before offering up assassination jokes or cutting insights into the ignorance of registered voters.  Now we just launch right in, apparently, because who could possibly be offended by demeaning the body habitus and speech impediments of the holder of the highest public office in the land.  My country tis of thee, DT sucks - do you downhill ski? Did 10 really went?  Or did 10 intend to went? Having said that, I'm all for a good public dem

Final unofficial results - PHD

Awaiting only the final official results 6-month term    (total votes  change from first unofficial count  percentage change) David Batey 1839       +152     +9% Linda Hanak 1386      +164     +13% Sandy Begley 2006    +161     +9% John Meissner (write-in) 213   +28   +15% 3-year term Monty Miller 1566      +126     +9% Bill Pinkham 2066      +183     +10% Bert Bergland 1243     +127     +11% Bruce Carmichael 1394     +129     +10% Diane Muno 1930      +158      +9% ~2500 ballots were included in the first unofficial count.  The final unofficial count included votes from these ~2500 ballots plus another ~250 ballots. Percentage of registered Larimer County voters who voted in this election:  96,153 / 251,257 = 38% Comparison with the 2016 PHD election results: 4-year term Van Der Ploeg 317 Mayo 298 White 224 Bergland 172 2-year term Murphee 310 ~400 ballots were cast in the 2016 PHD election, leading to this interesting fact:  80% of the ballots cast in th