Smart Teachers

How to Shop Smarter With Your Smartphone

Chances are, you’re as tethered to your smartphone as the next guy or gal, incessantly texting, browsing and emailing throughout the day. But chances are equally high that you’re not using that smartphone as well as you might to save yourself time, trouble and — most importantly — cash, at least when it comes to shopping. The power of your smartphone goes well beyond the ability to...

Smart Teachers

These teachers march to the beat of their own drums: Andre Adeli, Boulder Prep: Principal and Civics Teacher Charlie Garcia, Erie Elementary: Fourth Grade teacher Karen Shanley, Ballet Nouveau: Dance teacher Liz Simms, Trail Ridge Middle School: Science teacher Michael Schefferstein, Justice High School: Math, science and technology teacher Sarah Kleinsteiber, Broomfield...

This is Not a Test

First, it was chalkboards—replaced with shiny whiteboards and, later, newfangled Smart Boards. Textbooks and spiral notebooks went the way of the Trapper Keeper, superceded by iPads and laptops. Schools began banning sugary sodas and dodgeball. Adults who wander into modern Colorado classrooms are curiously lost in anti-bullying initiatives, healthy lunch programs and ridiculously advanced...

Peachy Keen

Sure those folks in Georgia “say” they have great peaches, but have you tried a Palisade peach? Way better. Like, comparing-The-Beatles-to-Wings better. So where can you find more than 30,000 pounds of certified organic Palisade peaches? Why, the Lafayette Peach Festival of course. On Aug. 18, head out to this sunny street festival and enjoy fresh peach pie, peach cobbler, peach smoothies and...

9 Questions for Meiko

Singer/songwriters are as ubiquitous as Subaru drivers in the Centennial State, but we don’t have the market cornered. Georgia peach Meiko has ear-wormed her way into our lexicon by underscoring a steady stream of pivotal moments on TV soundtracks. Her quirky vocals and pop-hook sensibility have made her a standout in a field littered with also-rans. Here, she talks about her writing process...

The Dark Night

Batman is The. Greatest. Superhero. Of. All. Time. This is one of those arguments that comic geeks love, because, on the surface, it’s about costumes and gadgets and super powers. But the heart of this argument is the timeless theme: Humanity’s triumph. The Dark Knight has been engaged in the greatest renaissance of his storied career, bookended by Frank Miller at one end and Chris...

Challenging Element: Peaches

When Roma Melrose was a girl in India, peaches were shipped up from Kashmir to Delhi where she grew up. They were small and sweet. They’d come wrapped in colorful tissue-like paper. Decades have passed since her days of eating peaches in Delhi, but the memory of eating peaches as a child is so distinct that the small woman, who now lives in the countryside near Niwot, holds an invisible...

Rib Ticklin’ Good

In Texas, barbecue means beef, so any place that purports to be a Texas-style barbecue joint had better bring the goods when it comes to brisket. And Lulu’s delivers. Here’s the thing: I’ve never been much of a barbeque connoisseur, so I couldn’t tell you with certainty that this is better than the best barbeque in Texas, because I haven’t had the best barbeque in Texas. But I...

Eatery News

Openings/Closings Big Choice Brewing Company brings a craft brewery to Broomfield and Echo Brewing opened in Firestone. La Revolucion Taqueria y Cantina opened on Main St. in Louisville next to Lulu’s, and Miller’s Grille opened on S. Public Rd. in Lafayette. Bramble & Hare, a “farmhouse kitchen and pub” by Eric Skokan of The Black Cat, opened in Boulder next to The Black Cat...

Forming Mini-Foodies

Kids in BoCo have it pretty good, as evidenced by the outstanding plethora of classes, camps, and other fun extra-curricular activities touched on in this issue. Lucky for the mini-foodies among us, BoCo adults take their offspring’s food education pretty seriously—both in the classroom and out of it. Take, for example, our local “renegade lunch lady,” Ann Cooper. She’s known as a...

The Good Apples

I’ve seen a lot in my nearly 31 years of life. As a reporter, you end up being a witness to a lot of crazy stuff. I’ve watched undocumented immigrants being pulled onto buses as their families watched, tears streaming down their dusty cheeks and fingered curled around the chain link fence that held them back. I’ve been the recipient of jailhouse confessions—exhibitions of remorse, regret...

The Month in Review

The Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs was the worst in the state’s history, destroying 248 homes and killing two; investigators still don’t know the cause. June was the hottest month on record in Colorado and the first six months of 2012 were the hottest on record in the United States. Lack of rain and fear of wildfires led to fireworks bans across the state, but Erie still allowed...

Q&A with Sheriff Joe Pelle

Bookended by historic blazes on the north and the south, Boulder’s Flagstaff Fire ignited on the same day that Colorado Springs’ Waldo Canyon fire exploded, eventually destroying more than 200 homes. Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle, the county’s fire warden responsible for tracking the fire danger index and requesting firefighting resources in the event of a wildfire, saw the potential for...

Bare Necessities

To hear Bob Pierce describe it, the scene inside the Boulder County Courthouse on Tuesday, July 19, was pretty bizarre. It all started when his wife Cathy was prevented by a sheriff’s deputy from entering the courthouse. She was clad in sneakers, shorts and, on top, nothing but a see-through mesh sun top. “He said, ‘You’re dressed inappropriately,’ and I said, ‘How?’” Cathy...

Boulder Gets Fashionable

Fall is a very fashionable time of year. Especially in New York, when the city becomes a runway for the best designers in the country during New York Fashion Week. Although Boulder was once dubbed one of the worst dressed cities by GQ Magazine—it’s lies, all lies!—the city is about to join the fall fashion fun. Boulder will host Fashion’s Night Out for the second year. On Sept. 6...

A Case for Cycling

When I say “road biker,” chances are the image that immediately pops to mind (after Lance Armstrong, that is) is a tall, skinny guy with the muscle tone of an antelope attired in brightly colored Spandex, sporting a helmet that looks like something the Rocketeer might be wearing if he was still around and traded his jet pack for a crotch rocket. Oh, and possibly wearing very intimidating...

Reading Aloud

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold …” And so it began, with Hunter S. Thompson’s widow, Anita, launching into the opening chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in front of a mostly male crowd echoing the words along with her, many from memory, others from personal, dog-eared copies of various vintages. Reading Hunter S...

Barely a Bronze Medal in Education

With the Olympics dovetailing nicely with August’s typical back-to-school frenzy, we thought it would be a good time to see how the old “U-S-A” stacks up against the rest of the world in the gold-medal competition of educational spending and results. On first blush, the competition looks like it’s going our way. Nationally, the United States spends an average of $10,995 per pupil, which...