The Con Man gets a visit from Lt. Colonel Dick Merrit and Seaman Dan Glidden, two retired veterans who stand for all that's good about those who have served the country. Also: a bit of a rant of flag lapel pins and taking back the lapel flag pin--and the flags--from those who desecrate it with faux patriotism.
Click here for the complete "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Memorial Day May 28, 2008.
1 comment May 26th, 2008
You may take this as a challenge and/or invitation to change the future toward a sustainable civilization! The USA grows by 3.1 million annually on its way to adding 100 million people in 30 years. What drives that population overload? Legal and illegal immigration! Water shortages, energy costs, gridlock, crowding, air pollution and quality of life hang in the balance and can only worsen with added population.
Continue Reading Add comment May 21st, 2008
I opened this morning’s edition of the GSPI to learn that we’re being overrun by wildlife. That’s right, wring your hands and run screaming into the night, there’s beavers eating trees in Noname and Grizzly Creek, and bears are eating llamas in Rifle. I tell you, I’ve lived here a long time, but I can’t remember the last time life here seemed so tenuous, so
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Alright. Whatever. Tonight I’m in a
See you in a few days…
Cheers,
Add comment May 17th, 2008
My mom was born in a tent (some accounts I’ve heard say it was a cabin) near Estes Park, Colorado on an August night in 1936. My grandfather was a laborer during what must have been the construction of Trail Ridge Road from the Alpine Visitor Center to Grand Lake. It is one of the cruel realities of surviving your elders that you come up with questions you can never have answered.
When I was a much younger man, in that netherworld between high school and life, I went to work in the coal mines. Yes, back in the day, there were coal mines, and some of them were in Pitkin County. But I digress.
Continue Reading Add comment May 11th, 2008
The removal of several trees along the banks of the Roaring Fork river has some Glenwood Springs residents up in arms:
Glenwood Springs Post Independent-The chopping of dozens of trees along the edges of the Roaring Fork River in the River Meadows Mobile Home Park last weekend and on Monday has provoked a strong reaction from both resident Deborah Hord and some of her neighbors... "I'm here requesting or trying to make people see that we need to implement laws to protect our trees," Hord told the City Council Thursday night. "I know that we are a tree city and to not have any laws to protect our trees - what does that say? I'm still pretty upset because it's torn up the riparian and the wildlife. It's destroyed pretty much everything there."
Now, the Glenwood Springs City Council is considering laws about tree cutting.
Add comment May 4th, 2008
Many summers ago, I joined a party of favorites—me, my life-long friend Carmine, his son Andrew, and the three Dons: Carmine’s father, older brother, and nephew—for some high-country fly fishing on the Cimarron. It was no major adventure. A left turn off the two lane highway just North of Ridgeway and another fifteen or so miles uphill and we were there.
It had been a few years since I’d last guided a fly fishing trip, but my piscatorial reputation was fairly well known, if not as unwarranted as a Modonnna grammy. Still, among people who were near enough my own kin, my angling abilities were honored.
Continue Reading 1 comment May 4th, 2008
Aspen Music Festival and School Director of Educational Outreach Debby Barnekow writes about her second day in the Valley schools with guitarist Brad Richter.
At Basalt High School there are 3 guitar classes, part of an every other day schedule like band, choir, math, biology, etc. Principal James Waddick believes this is a necessary avenue of expression for some of his students and indeed it is-a beginner, intermediate and advanced classes. Brad met with all 3 classes today to work on getting some of them ready for performance on Friday's Music and M.O.R.E concert. For nearly all of them of the students, this will be their first time to perform and there were many who are a little uncommitted. Brad's answer is to keep practicing the Led Zepplin song, Kashmir that they are to play.
After school we met with Harris Jackson, a 13-year old guitarist at Glenwood Springs Middle School whom I met during the Stars of Tomorrow competition last week. Harris is self-taught which makes his musical accomplishments all the more amazing-he composes, arranges and plays. He played for Brad who gave him pointers on how to get more efficiency from his hand positions and how to work on speed. At Brad's invitation to play on Friday's concert, Harris was overjoyed. He will be a nice addition to the program.
Add comment April 9th, 2008
I’ve had this easy chair since about 1995.
I have no particular fondness for this chair. It’s comfortable. It’s warm. It’s proven durable. But it’s a freaking chair.
It’s leather, with low back, and an ottoman. It used to be brown, but now it’s more of a beige. It’s got two holes in it, one in the seat and one in the left arm—skier’s left, that is. My wife has wanted to replace this chair for months now. In itself, that is fine with me. What’s troubling is that my wife shared her desire to replace this piece of furniture with my mother.
You know the saying, “two heads are better than one”? This is Balderdash. Hooey. Piffle.
Continue Reading Add comment April 5th, 2008
I have been studying separatism as a kind of background exercise in what I regard a troubling association between Senator Barack Obama and Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.
Separatism is based on an idea that ethnic minorities cannot advance in a society dominated by an ethnic majority.
Separatism is an idea that is not without precedent in the writings of the U.S. founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson, who penned what I regard the central premise of the United States when he wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” also wrote this:
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [blacks] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
~Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, 1821
Continue Reading 26 comments March 30th, 2008
We had entered the “practice” portion of the “Women’s Health Conference: From Theory To Practice”—and that meant a group of us was walking in the woods to the Rio Grande Trail and thence into Clark’s Market in Aspen with Dr. Bob Vogel, the University of Maryland professor of medicine who doubles as chief of medicine for the Pritikin Longevity Center and Pritikin Research Foundation.
The idea of the conference, sponsored by the forward-thinking Aspen Center for Integral Health (acih.org) was to dig down deep into what goes down in the real world. Thus: the walk, a moveable lecture about what remains for us to feast upon in the healthiest of worlds.
Continue Reading 1 comment March 24th, 2008
