Party Crashers

Rumble in the Rockies

It’s the main event, and boy, is this gonna be a doozy. The challengers have trained—some more than others—and the reigning champs are in the best shape of their political careers. The sparring is over, it’s time to see who will take the belt. For the 2010 mid-term election, YS profiles each fighter…er, candidate, and we do what we do best: have an opinion. Just call us Colorado’s...

Halloween Scene

You want your Halloween to be frightfully good, don’t you? Killer costume, a bloody good party and even a signature cocktail that will wake the dead. Yellow Scene is on the case. We’ve put together a bone-chilling plan for creating a haute Halloween—a hauntingly fantastic extravaganza that will put your pumpkin-carving, cider-sipping parties to shame. Here, costume and makeup experts, a...

Party Crashers

By almost any measure, the basement meeting room of the Longmont VFW is one of the dingiest meeting spaces in Boulder County. The ceiling is claustrophobically low, and because each row of fluorescent lights running the length of the vast room has at least one burned out panel, the lighting is dim and renders visitors with a bit of a sickly, jaundiced glow. The heavy door is wedged open with a...

Duly Noted: Breaking Bad

My monthly cable bill is around $210...

Ahead of the Pack

That breweries in Boulder County, Denver and the Front Range win medals at the Great American Beer Festival isn’t the big news it was at the beginning of the nationwide competition that just celebrated its 29th year...

Birds of Prey

It’s Tuesday but just barely. I’m meeting Andy Hall and his ferruginous hawk, Tony Stark, at a Starbucks. The sun won’t show up for at least another hour. In this early part of the falconry season, Hall explains, it’s best to start sooner rather than later for several reasons: There’s less wind and less heat in the morning, which makes it more comfortable for Tony Stark to hunt rabbits...

Beyond Boulder

I’ve given out hundreds of food-related awards over the years ranging from local “best of” lists to the James Beard Awards, and I learned one thing: awards are designed to instigate debate and make people really mad.  ...

Pure & Simple

Sometimes fine food can begin to border on the pretentious, with too many flavors, too much fuss that doesn’t allow the food to stand for itself. Sometimes, all one wants is the sort of food available at Gindi Café in Boulder: simple, unencumbered ingredients allowed to sing on their own accord. The owner, Francine Gindi, calls it “A New York-style brasserie serving interesting food at...

Challenge: Apples

We’ve wanted to do a challenge with Flavor of India in Longmont for some time, but we had to wait until the head chef, Chacha Singh, and his son Daman, who runs the house, were back from a trip to India. “We can do anything,” Daman assured me over the phone. “We even do fish and chips.” What could I give to challenge a chef who claims he can do anything?...

RTD Has No Cushion

The sluggish recovery from the financial meltdown of 2007-08 doesn’t feel like a recovery at all; lots of people and institutions are still being fiscally flogged. And as institutions go, Denver’s Regional Transportation District is feeling the pain like no other. What it needs—and what would benefit us all—is a serious infusion of cash...

Rage Against the Machine

It’s the beginning of a long and cantankerous month of candidate interviews for the mid-term elections of 2010. So far, things are going swimmingly. Still, as this candidate and I talk about the deficit, unemployment rate, taxes and healthcare policy, the candidate begins to get, for a lack of a better word, pissed. He works to keep the anger from bubbling to the surface and exploding into some...

Charlie Garcia

Sitting in a classroom full of tiny chairs and tiny desks, Charlie Garcia is getting emotional. It’s not sadness, really. They are happy tears filled with happy memories. The long-time, much-loved teacher at Erie Elementary is considered a sage to many local parents and children. They can tell you all about his happy tears on the last day of school each year...