Michael Conniff
Michael Conniff purports to be a third-generation newspaperman, the son of a Pulitzer Prize winner, the first person ever hired fulltime in new media at NBC, the first writing instructor at Harvard ever to use word processing as a teaching tool, a Breadloaf Scholar in fiction, a ballboy for the world champion New York Jets in 1969-1970, the host of "Con Games" on KNFO 106.1, the editor-at-large at Aspen Peak, and the guy's guy behind Post Time Media Inc. and Aspen Post, Snowmass Post, Skiing Post, and Fractional Post.
In the Cold War, Mutually Assured Destruction—AKA MAD—was Strangelove come to life.
Kids of my generation spent lifetimes in ridiculous bomb shelters wondering if the lead in a pencil could protect us from imminent destruction. I can still see the can of beans in our basement lined up like a Maginot Line, next to the soup before anyone told us soup is good food. At least we the pipsqueaks and our designated representatives had a plan. The only way we could keep the Soviets from blowing us to smithereens was to make sure we could blow them to smithereens...and to make sure they knew it.
Continue Reading November 27th, 2008
Before the experience fades into the gloaming, I'd like to take a moment to pay tribute to the play "Chicago," as performed over the past two weekends by the Aspen Community Theatre.
Ed Foran's "Mr. Cellophane" quite rightly got its share of the kudos, but I was amazed at the depth and breadth of the cast, the costumes, the music, the dancing, the set, the staging--and the general feeling of naughty enterprise that kept the evening sailing along from start to finish.
Continue Reading November 19th, 2008
ASPEN, COLORADO (Post Time News)—The harshest critic of both Aspen City Council and City of Aspen staff now admits there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by anyone in the Burlingame Ranch affordable housing brouhaha.
“There were no criminal actions,” Marilyn Marks told Post Time News, “and we are not accusing anybody.”
Marks, a citizen advocate who has found a calling in monitoring city governance, supported a criminal investigation into Burlingame when another Aspen activist, James Perry, made the formal request to Aspen City Attorney John Worcester—who quickly turned thumbs down on the idea. Marks, nonetheless, continues to call for an investigation
“We never broke any laws,” Worcester said. “Besides that I have no other comment.”
The admission from Marks represents a level of vindication for the targets of her considerable ire—including Mayor Mick Ireland and City Manager Steve Barwick.
Continue Reading November 18th, 2008
I used to think nothing Marilyn Marks could do would ever shock because I know her and her kind so well.
But Marilyn Marks shocked me today to the bone when I learned she has been contacting our Aspen Post bloggers—and spreading the rumor to at least one blogger that my engagement was in trouble because of the “stress” of working with Post Time News to do stories for Factual Aspen Investigative Reporting (FAIR).
At long last, Marilyn, have you no decency? Is there nothing to which you won’t stoop?
Continue Reading November 17th, 2008
After mulling the absurdity of Curtis Wackerle, the Aspen Daily News reporter covering City Hall, writing a story about a news organization that is a direct competitor on his beat, I wrote the following email to Daily editor Troy Hooper, no stranger to the Aspen Post audience, and copied Daily owner Dave Danforth and publisher David Cook; and also copied were the three Factual Aspen Investigative Reporting (FAIR) board members.
As you will read, the Hoopster made up a lame excuse to explain away the conflict-of-interest and then went down in flames.
Read and enjoy.....
Continue Reading November 15th, 2008
In typical fashion, an inexperienced reporter at the Aspen Daily News called me up twice in the last two days to let me know I was in “hot water”—that’s a direct quote—for the investigative reporting undertaken by Post Time News for the new nonprofit, Factual Aspen Investigative Reporting (FAIR).
As this story unfolds, you need to understand a couple of things about the reporter in question—Curtis Wackerle, part of the hack Wack a’ Sack tag team covering Aspen City Hall with kid gloves. I know for a fact from inside the newsroom that Wackerle, in direct competition at City Hall with Post Time News, is feeling the heat from our coverage.
Let me put it more directly: we’re making him look bad because we’re covering the stories that he and Sack are missing.
Continue Reading November 14th, 2008
In this wacky-tobaccy world of 21st Century politics, if you can’t parboil an idea down to a sound byte then you might as well chug it raw. We the people like our politics plain and simple, like meat and potatoes: Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, good guys and bad girls—with nothing much in between.
The problem for pols, pundits, and poobahs is that the world doesn’t work that way here on Lifeboat America. A black-and-white world nowadays is vacuous and often insulting, with all nuance lost in the rigidity of pre-sharpened saws and crackpot sound bytes presented like precious family gew-gaws.
And guess what? Voters have noticed: in state after state they’re simply not buying. We’re not talking about Ralph Nader or John Anderson or Ross Perot or even Bob Barr—third-party candidates who now and again arrive on the Presidential stage with a megaphone for disenfranchised citizens and license to scream bloody murder because they just can’t win.
Continue Reading October 22nd, 2008
The fate of the unrepentant synergist is to see the seeds of all things in all other things and that goes double for your friendly neighborhood Con Man. In the spirit of everything telling us something about something else, I give you my trenchant analysis from the trenches—or, how football as we now know it is no different now than our national politics on the cusp of a major realignment.
Let’s go into the huddle and I’ll draw ’er up for you.
Continue Reading October 20th, 2008
Hmmm... let's see.... God-like cycling champeen and testicular cancer survivor Lance Armstrong announces his comeback, wins a bike race in Aspen--and puts in a bid for a house in the West End of Aspen.
Can it be true? Is it possible that our lonely outpost lost in a box canyon in the Rockies is about to get an injection of star power? Could this be the start of something big?
Continue Reading September 11th, 2008
All that would be well and good if the story in any way backed up the twin contentions. Yes, in the story City Attorney John Worcester says it will come to a vote but no other evidence is presented to confirm the story’s premise or to indicate that getting by without a vote is “not likely.” As for those dissatisfied residents, one can eventually find “Aspenite Phyllis Bronson” as the one resident (singular) who remains unconvinced on the record that the museum on the Z-G property may not be a great idea.
Continue Reading September 9th, 2008
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