CON GAMES: Is Aspen Post Anti-Semitic?

“Some of my best friends here are in fact Jewish,” blogs Michael Conniff, who counts menschs among his personal constabulatory, “but I have driven a good chunk of them crazy in the last two weeks by simply doing nothing. As the proprietor of Aspen Post, the local blog, and the founder of Post Time Media Inc., its parent, I have been called anti-Semitic and much worse in this last fortnight, all because I refused to shut down bloggers who were sympathetic to the Palestinians and critical of Israel.” Michael believes the reason he is misunderstood by his Jewish friends is “because they don’t understand what a blog is in the first place.”

CON GAMES: Aspen’s Worst Year

Will that black cloud over Aspen ever go away? Offering a glum retrospective, beginning with the very recent bomb scare incident, Michael Conniff writes, “One way to change the world is to leave it, but to do it after sucker-punching your home town has to fall short of divine justice or retribution. Such an act of desperation also says something about your home town—and the news is not good.” Reflecting on his personal experiences, Conniff confesses, “The politics turned so ugly that you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad girls any more. I ended 2008 asking myself why I had bothered to even care about Aspen in the first place.”

Colorado Classic Origins Revealed

Responding to the outpouring of appreciation for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's recording of "Colorado Christmas," band member, longtime Con Games listener and new Post blogger Jimmy Ibbotson explains how the song came into being, “Our manager, Chuck Morris wanted us to have a Christmas song for business reasons. His parents were born in Russia and they didn’t have a Christmas tree while he was growing up. But, he fell in love with Johnny Cash and The Carter Family and convinced us to record the gospel-flavored Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. II. He liked a good song about faith and family, whether or not the faith was that of his fathers.”