The editor of your fine newspaper, Randy Essex, kindly offered to publish my column once a month. He suggested that in my first column I should introduce myself. So here goes.

Residents of Glenwood Springs will be pleased to know that I have a longtime connection to towns with a spring. I was born near Springfield, Massachusetts, and grew up in Colorado Springs.

Residents of the latter often shorten their town name to “The Springs” as if the Glenwood one and the ‘field one don’t even exist. I never found a spring in The Springs, at least not one of the water kind. But I can understand the residents’ reluctance to use a more descriptive name for their town like “The Potholes.”

I went to college in Continue reading →

“Yes, it’s true. This man has no d–k.” — Bill Murray in “Ghostbusters.

A certain candidate for president, who was not successful in the past but shares a name with a candidate who was, has declared in the form of a campaign bumper sticker that we should be “Ready for Hillary.”

Hmm. Her pitch for the presidency is that we should be “ready” for her. OK, but “ready” in what sense?”

Well, you see, she has an angle. See if you can figure it out from these hints she’s dropped:

• It’s time for women “to crack every glass ceiling,” she proclaimed in a speech, for which she was paid her standard fee of $250,000.

• In another speech (she gives a lot of them — who wouldn’t at a quarter million a pop?) — she declared, “There cannot be a true democracy unless women are given the opportunity to take responsibility for their own lives.”

• Apparently feeling a bit subjugated before collecting another quarter mill for yet another speech, this woman intoned, “The subjugation of women is a threat to the common security of our world.”

You guessed the angle, didn’t you? “Ready for Hillary” is to remind us that after electing the “First Black President” we should be “ready” to elect the “First President Without a Penis.”

People doubt whether she’s qualified for the job of president, but no one doubts that Continue reading →

Those words were spoken by an atheistic writer and thinker I admire, Christopher Hitchens.

Hitchens developed cancer a few years ago. People wondered if his terminal illness would shake his disbelief in God. Proselytizers expected a deathbed conversion. In a foxhole, the saying goes, everyone gets religion.

But they didn’t know Hitchens. His unfaith was strong. He wrote about it during his treatment and decline, and he never lost it till the day he died. After that, we don’t know.

As for me, well, Continue reading →

We’re “a nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about race.

That’s according to our attorney general, a smart and accomplished black man named Eric Holder who is being succeeded after six years by a smart and accomplished black woman, both of whom work for our twice-elected black president.

I agree with Holder. Refusing to talk about race is cowardly, even if the reason is an understandable aversion to being called ugly names by those who might disagree with what we have to say.

Holder later said in the wake of the Ferguson riots, “It means that we as a nation have failed. It’s as simple as that. We have failed.”

I agree with Holder on that, too. Continue reading →

The kinky movie “50 Shades of Grey” came out this Valentine’s Day weekend (St. Valentine must be turning in his Catholic grave), so naturally, a movie review is necessary.

Others at the newspaper are assigned to report on skiing conditions here in Aspen or they get to review “American Sniper.” Me? I have to review a kinky movie. I admire the way the bosses identify and utilize each person’s unique talents to the fullest, but, um, how did they know?

Anyway, the movie is about a woman named Anastasia (exotic, huh?) and a man named Christian (ah, there’s the connection to St. Valentine) who engage in the sort of vile, grotesque and evil eroticism that others have the prudence only to hope for, fantasize about and dream of.

In some scenes, Continue reading →