Aspen evolved organically. Unlike Vail, for example, it doesn’t have a prepackaged Disneyland feel. It feels authentic.

But the town has real growing pains, especially in the infrastructure. Some long-range planning is needed. Here are some suggestions: Continue reading →

Aspen literally stinks. I mean “literally” in the literal sense, not the figurative sense in which people who are literally illiterate use “literally.” Here’s the story:

Right downtown, it smells like a snowboarder in an overflowing outhouse in the August sun. Except it’s only April. All winter, this stink on ice has been ripening like leftover pizza forgotten in the vegetable drawer, and now it’s thawing and festering into putrescent pus. This stench is doing what stenches do, and it’s doing it well.

There’s evidently a problem with the sewer system. As the leaders in the presidential election keep inadvertently reminding us, money can’t buy class. In Aspen, it can’t even buy fresh air.

But don’t worry. Continue reading →

“No mistakes in the tango, darlin’. Not like life. It’s simple. That’s what makes the tango so great. You make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on.”

— Al Pacino, “The Scent of a Woman”

Terrorists struck again. Their bombs in Brussels massacred 31 men, women and children and maimed or dismembered another 300-some.

The terrorists stated that they were Muslims, and stated that they committed their terror in the name of Islam.

Attributing such words to the Islamic terrorists who speak them is deemed “Islamophobia” by the politically correct crowd. Their fear of Islamophobia rises to the level of a phobia itself. Call it “Islamophobia-phobia.”

As between Islamophobia and Islamophobia-phobia, the second feels better but the first is less lethal.

In that regard, Continue reading →