Mark the Red Angus calf can’t get the herd to run away to freedom so they won’t get eaten. If only he’d thought of this!
Of an eight day journey through blizzard conditions, Post blogger elktrailb77 writes, "Colorado Christmas had a calming effect though throughout the entire venture.”
Frosty Wooldridge calls for the pardon of U.S. Border Patrol officers Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean.
Posts filed under 'The West'
The Con Man sticks a fork into the carcass of conservatism and says it's finished as a unifying national force. Also: an interview with Nick Heil, the author of "Dark Summit," the story of the deadliest season on Mount Everest--and a final shot at John McCain's disturbing ties to lobbyists with disturbing clients like the military junta in Burma.
Click here for the complete "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Tuesday May 13, 2008.
May 13th, 2008
In the “Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy and Toto danced into an amazing adventure. The main message often-times remains forgotten:
In our minds…
it is the wizards, behind the curtain,
who control and manipulate "the show."
They do not! However, if you allow the ‘wizards’ to run your show, you leave yourself no choice in the outcome of your life or the life of your civilization.
Continue Reading May 13th, 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 May 11th, 2008
I haven’t been sleeping much lately, which means I’ve spent countless hours in the hopeless darkness thinking of the most ridiculous things imaginable. The sleep deprived mind, I’ve learned, is not a sane mind.
Last night I could not stop thinking about a story I had read online. Two Houston teens, the story reported, were arrested for digging up a grave to make a pot pipe from a skull. The writer mentioned that he would love to hear the conversation that led to such a brilliant idea, so I figured I’d oblige him.
Continue Reading May 10th, 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 May 4th, 2008
The news that the Wheeler Opera House will be home to a new comedy festival this Memorial Day is great news for Aspen, if not quite as good as the possibility that HBO might one day return for the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival (USCAF).
The Aspen Rooftop Comedy Festival is coming in a partnership between the Wheeler Opera House and the Rooftop Comedy operation based in San Francisco.
Continue Reading May 1st, 2008
One of the people at the newspaper who hired me when I came to Aspen five years ago told me about “the tractor beam effect.”
That’s a poetic way of saying that once people leave Aspen they always come back, inexorably drawn to the mountains, the valley, the rivers, and certain ineffable things that have no name.
True enough: all of that speaks to why we’re so lucky to be here. But it’s also another way of saying people leave—they leave all the time—and that we’ve experienced this directly and personally. At least three key people, great friends, will no longer live here full-time come 2009.
Continue Reading April 24th, 2008
Click here for the complete "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Wednesday August 23, 2008.
The Con Man takes issue with the notion that Hillary Clinton can't win the Democratic nomination, saying it ain't over until it's over, and it ain't over until the superdelegates vote. Plus: Immigration Wednesday with Mike McGarry, co-founder of the Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform, with talk of the Pope's comments on immigration.
April 23rd, 2008
As I sit here in front of this laptop, there are four Mexican-American men outside my home, prepping the grounds for the Spring/Summer metamorphasis that is spiring, which inspires me still...
Sure, they are Mexican, well.... actually one is from El Salvador... so that actually constitutes him as Latin-American. Somehow, the four of them, with him, seem to be hitting it off very well, working very well together. I understand Spanish fairly well, as two years of it in high school and two semesters in college seem to help me. However, from Tijuana to Juarez to Matamores to Vi A'Cuna to El Salvadore to Mexico City.... they all have their own slang, and it makes me want to say... "Okay, slow down fellas, I'm trying to comprehend this..."
Continue Reading April 23rd, 2008
President Bush brags, “They do the jobs that American citizens won’t do.”
He neglects to say, “Oh, and by the way, for slave wages, social security fraud, identity theft, drunk driving, trashing our schools, hospitals and, oh, I shouldn’t leave out—crime!”
Illegal alien migration into the United States costs American taxpayers $346 billion annually as reported by the National Research Council. While employers of illegal aliens rake-in billions of dollars, the US citizens subsidize what might be called organized “Slavery in 21st Century America.”
Continue Reading April 21st, 2008
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