777 = 100

On a summer day in 1960, a nervous high school kid stood in the beautiful old library at 23 West Kiowa in Colorado Springs. The library had been built in 1905 on land donated by General William Jackson Palmer with $60,000 of Carnegie money. The awkward teen was holding a phone book and staring reverently at one name. That name appeared on quite a few books in the stacks behind him, stacks he had been mining almost since he had started reading. Red Planet, Rocket Ship Galileo, Space Cadet, Farmer In The Sky, Between Planets, Tunnel In The Sky, The Door Into Summer, and on ... And the trail had led on out of the children's section to other shelves of books by other writers with exotic names: Van Vogt, Pohl, Asimov, Simak, Kornbluth, del Rey. But it had all started with Red Planet, with him.

	An autograph, and a poctsard

HEINLEIN. Right there in the Colorado Springs telephone directory. Somehow, the courage was summoned, and the call was made. The great man himself answered. I guess I was hoping, a little, that he wouldn't be home, or that he would be too busy. But Robert A. Heinlein agreed to my request to autograph my copy of Starship Troopers. I was with a friend who had been in school with me from the 5th grade, where we had both worked on the mimeographed 5th grade paper, on through high school.

My Dad drove us out to the Broadmoor, a scenic and toney part of Colorado Springs close to the mountains. The street number, 1776, sat below a silhouette of the Spirit of '76.

I don't honestly remember much about that brief interview. His wife Virginia glanced in from an adjoining room, and smiled. While he autographed my copy of Troopers and carefully corrected a few dust jacket typos, RAH called our attention to the original Bonestells hanging on the walls. I was suitably impressed. My copy of The Conquest of Space, built around Chesley Bonestell's astronomical art, was as well-thumbed as any bible. I still regret, all these years later, that that book has been lost somewhere along the way. But the first edition of Troopers, published ten years after Red Planet, is still with me.

Heinlein explained that the house, which he had built, and one his actual cats, had been the inspiration for "Pete," in The Door Into Summer. He asked if I were involved with science fiction fandom, and issued some mild cautions about fans and fandom. I guess my politeness and rather tongue-tied state suggested more of a good boy than I really was.

Anxious not be seen as impolite, we excused ourselves, and I hurried away with my precious copy of Troopers.

	A fan and his zine, and the author's inscription

Although I've been back to my home town many times since that day, I never again made the pilgrimage up to Mesa Avenue for a furtive look at the house of a legend. The Heinleins moved to California in 1964. I learn from the internet that the house where the future once lived has "been torn down except for a few walls and the slab...the structure was almost entirely rebuilt into a huge two-story model."

I didn't realize it, but the universe was poised on a cusp that summer of 1960. The following year, my friend and I would go off to the same little podunk college in south Texas. Heinlein would write Stranger In A Strange Land, a far leap from the sturdy juvenile novels I started on in the Colorado Springs library stacks.

It was the beginning of the Sixties. I left fandom behind, and my friend and I parted ways forever. He pledged a fraternity in our sophomore year, and from college, moved on to the Navy, to Vietnam, and a successful career as a rock journalist and editor, and a presence on the internet.

Me, I came to Boulder, where I am a hoarse whisperer on the internet.

Stranger, and in consequence, Heinlein, and I, too, were all to become inextricably tangled with the Sixties.

Suddenly, the Future had slipped in almost unnoticed.

- - -

Just last year, standing in the dim quiet of Red Letter Books, browsing the copy of Grumbles From The Grave which now sits on the coffee table, my eyes fell on the following passage from a 1963 letter from RAH to his literary agent:

We have been badly slowed down, too, by visitors, a steady flood of them all summer long ... This place being a resort, people simply pour through here in the summer and if I shut off the phone, they ring the doorbell. I don't ever intend to try to write a story in Colorado Springs again between June 1st and September 1st; it is too much like trying to write directly under a busy three-holer.

I read on. Unlike most of his fellow pros, Heinlein was much bothered by copious deluges of fan mail, which he struggled to answer, "all but the crackpot ones."

Across the gulf of 47 years, I felt a flush of embarrassment worthy of any geeky high school student. Emboldened by an actual meeting with the master, I had sent RAH a copy of my fanzine the following year. The arrival of a poctsard of comment had been a major event right at the close of my era of fanac.

Oh, dear. At least I hadn't just showed up at his door wearing a propeller beanie! Standing there in the Red Letter, I breathed a silent thanks for the gentlemanliness of Robert Anson Heinlein.

He had inscribed that copy of Troopers, "Hurry back!"

–Peter Aretin

- - - -

POSTSCRIPT: In fiction and movies, and in Nabokov's brilliant tour de force, Speak, Memory, though tinged with a focus slightly soft, vital memories burn with an indelible clarity of detail. After I posted the slim memory of mine above I poked around on the web, where, as I should have known, there is a great wealth of information about RAH.

One fascinating item is a 1952 Popular Mechanics article describing the Heinlein house in Colorado Springs.

I was astonished.

No detail of this fascinating house, inside or out, survives in my memory. It is just as I wrote above. Heinlein, busy with his pen, the paintings (more than one), Virginia glancing from another room, live, imperishable, but in a void as featureless as outer space.

-=- -=- -=-

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JULY 24, 2007

NOT-SO-GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY
... as read in our newspapers

Not much has happened in Boulderia on this date, so it will probably be known as Wardo Day, the day Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ was fired by the University of Colorado. He will still be on the payroll for another year, but he will busy himself, not with teaching, but with suing CU.

In 2003, the 101 degrees reached on July 24 tied a weather record. [ Daily Camera ]

In 2005, one person died and two others were seriously injured in the Boulder Peak Triathlon, and officials and representatives of the national governing body for sanctioned triathlons made changes to the local event, including speed limits for cyclists on the downhill on Olde Stage Road. [ Camera ]

-=- -=- -=- 

Without Further Ado ...

... there really is an Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel!

At a whopping 5 x 7 inches, the Little Towel for Little Churchills® is made entirely from 100% artificial-fiber material by "sweatshop labor pathetically grateful for the chance to make more incomprehensibly useless goods for the baffling, though highly-educated inhabitants of Boulderia." The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel would set you back $90,000 in the CU Bookstore. And it comes with IMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS:

WARNING: The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel should only be held in the LEFT hand and used to wipe away tears. Using the Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel to wipe anything else is not supported, may cause irritation and may void your end user agreement. In cases of EMERGENCY ONLY, the Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel may be temporarily employed as a Gary Barnett Crying Towel, but the less expensive fibers used in the Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel could cause chronic irritation to the sensitive parts of more highly-paid University of Colorado coaches and Athletic Department employees. Please test in an inconspicuous area before attempting to use The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel for this purpose.

But The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel is not available at the CU Bookstore or anywhere else. It is being produced in a very limited edition by a local artiste for a print exchange. And that's too bad, because The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel could be a hot item this season.

I've mentioned before how Wardo is gradually passing into mainstream American popular culture as the stock figure of the scoundrel professor and left-wing crank. In this vein is a recent CBS-Associated Press piece called "The Culture Of Cheating: Notorious Ne'er-Do-Wells" in which Wardo is part of a pantheon on infame that includes Jayson Blair, James Frey, Stephen Glass, Tanya Harding, Martha Stewart, Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth "Ken" Lay, Sammy Sosa, Frankie Andreu, Floyd Landis, and James E. McGreevey.

Ouch!

Maybe Wardo should bring out an Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel of his own. Modest Geniuses, Ltd., would be willing to license our Embattled Professor Ward Churchill trademark for a suitably modest fee.

–Peter Aretin

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-=- -=- -=-

JULY 4, 2007

And now our traditional:

Some Other Things That Happened Today

1817 - Work began on the Erie Canal.

1904 - Encouraged by how well the Erie Canal came out (except for the low bridges - everybody down!) work began on the Panama Canal.

1829 - The first regular horse drawn buses started in London.

1840 - The paddle steamer "Britannia" made the first Atlantic crossing for the Cunard Line.

1848 - The Communist Manifesto was published.

-=- -=- -=-

NOT-SO-GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY
... as read in our newspapers

In 2003, under cover of darkness, a vandal wrote "COW PUKE" on a Baskin-Robbins on South Boulder Road.

In 2004, someone stole Glenn Krumel's American flag, just as someone did on September 11, 2001. In a letter to the Camera, he vowed to replace it. Meanwhile, in the skies above Heil Valley Ranch, Boulder County used a "K-Max" helicopter from Mountain West Helicopters in Orem, Utah, to "bale bomb" 110 tons of straw mulch onto 110 acres of county Open Space charred by the porevious October's Overland wildfire. Bill Pastore, driving to a friend's 4th of July barbecue, was struck by a 15-passenger University of Colorado van driven by a young grad student who was ticketed and admitted being at fault. Though forced to walk with a cane, and unable to run or bicycle, CU offered only a $10,000 settlement. A jury awarded $600,000, but CU is protected by governmental immunity laws and the settlement was capped at $150,000. [EDITOR'S NOTE: The overpaid administrators and attack lawyers at CU are reprehensible bastards.]

In 2006, At 4:45 a.m., "police contacted Tess Damm, then 14, in a parking lot near Waneka Lake Park. She was with Kristopher Long, 18, whom she met on MySpace.com. She told officers she was 15 and the pair had been hanging out for several hours," according to a Camera story.

-=- -=- -=-

My Life As A Terrorist

The biggest blast this Fourth may be the one that didn't happen.

That's because on June 16, police raided the Longmont house of Ronald Swerlin, a 50-year-old retired electrical engineer. Eventually, the cops found over 400 chemicals, including a half-pound of nitroglycerin, lead azide, and PETN, "one of the strongest explosives in the world," according to the Daily Camera.

Swerlein, who has graduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering, told police he was model rocket scientist and a "nerd" who just set off "tiny, tiny tests," the arrest report said. The cops were eventually joined by the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and National Guard and bomb experts from Boulder and Larimer County who helped push the cost of the investigation "well into five figures," and counting, according to a spokesperson.

The investigation was prompted by persistent reports from neighbors, who kept reporting mysterious explosions. One enterprising neighbor went around and polled the other residents. Swerlein was the only one who said he hadn't heard anything. Well, he was only a model rocket scientist.

It was hard not to read these accounts without a certain feeling of ... envy.

Explosives played an important part in my childhood, as they did in the youth of many of my contemporaries. These were "innocent" days, when Ozzie and Harriet ruled the airwaves, which only came in black and white.

But the paradox of the times was that kids were allowed to do dangerous things, like riding coaster brake bikes and spending their allowances, during a certain magical part of the year, on high explosives. The weeks leading up to the 4th of July became a carefully orchestrated symphony of detonation, the crescendo coming on the Big Day itself, with a parentally-supervised orgy of explosive excess. Dads loved fireworks, too.

But there was plenty of unsupervised experimentation, out in the Big Woods. That was another thing, the woods. On sunny Saturdays, I was turned loose to roam the woods. I didn't know what riches I had. I assumed all kids grew up this way, always had, and always would. It was about equally easy to imagine Huck Finn or Robin Hood appearing from the forest shadows. I expect if kids are turned loose to roam at all these days, it's in the mall.

But a love of explosives, like a taste for science fiction, stays with a person. By the time I hit junior high, the nation was in a swivet to beat the Russians, who had shocked American complacency to the core with their Sputnik. Young geniuses were in demand.

There was no internet from which to summon deliciously dangerous substances, as Swerlein did. But things were pretty slack at chemical supply houses, and we young genii found our money was accepted. One adventure involved the purchase of a gallon of concentrated sulphuric acid in a glass jug. The driver of the crosstown bus took one look at the warning label on that baby and threw me off. I had to lug it for blocks until I came to a public fountain, where I soaked the label off. I told the next driver it was maple syrup. I ruined a lot of clothes with that stuff.

	Informing enquiring schoolboys since 1907. The "Explosives" section of this 1957 reprint is very well-thumbed. You can still find it on Amazon.

There was no internet, but there were books. A good-sized city library could be mined for all sorts of forbidden information by subversive young geniuses, and not just on the matter of explosives, either. There was sex. We knew about the Locked Case, and its interesting contents, and should a forgetful librarian leave it unlocked, furtive raids would ensue.

It could be there was never a better time to be a Young Genius. My pals and I got the franchise to launch a "Sputnik" for a school pageant. I guess our silver-painted world globe with wire antennae, suspended via piano wire and pulleys, didn't look all that impressive. But it was sitting on a snuff can full of black powder, with an electrical detonator that produced an impressive flash and truly amazing amounts of smoke. The auditorium had to be evacuated, making this a really popular assembly.

I once blew up my locker by tossing a Plain English Handbook in on a packet of that old schoolboy favorite, nitrogen triiodide, that I thought was a dud. Nope! The explosion shredded the PEH and released great clouds of purple vapor from unreacted iodine and brought all activity to an awestruck halt. I was able to talk my way out of both the Sputnik incident and the purple explosion. They really were innocent times, and besides, America needed her young geniuses. These days, I guess the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and National Guard and bomb experts from a tri-county area would show up, and clap any young terrorist in irons for such stunts.

Swerlein's model rocketry excuse struck a responsive chord, too. So were we all, all model rocket scientists, in those thrilling days of yesteryear. One such project in which I participated involved the launch of a vehicle which had formerly been a card table leg. Under the influence of black powder, it launched successfully and attained sufficient altitude to clear a neighbor's fence, whereupon it exploded in a surprisingly loud way. The cops responded to this one, but, once again, we played the young genius card.

	My boyhood nitro recipe.

I never attained Swerlein's lofty heights. In fact, I chickened out on nitroglycerin, though I researched its preparation carefully, and still have the method, carefully pecked out on my Royal portable. There were no copy machines then, either. I suppose it's now about ten seconds away by Google.

I got older and my explosives period slowed. I got interested in other things. Like high voltage and, later, girls, which proved to be more dangerous. I guess these are tricky times for America's young demolitionists. Really good fireworks are a thing of the past, and the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Guard and bomb experts from a tri-county area are just itching to be killjoys, as Ronald Swerlin discovered. He faces 10 counts of possession of an explosive or incendiary device, each punishable by up to six years in prison. He might have trouble talking his way out of those.

Still, young experimenters may not be entirely extinct. I've long had suspicions about the kid across the alley and the burning down of my storage shed.

But it's OK. I think he might have burned down his folks' garage, too.

–Peter Aretin

-=- -=- -=-

-=- -=- -=-

 

APRIL 28, 2007

NOT-SO-GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY
... as read in our newspapers

This day seems to have been some kind of chronosynclastic infindibulum for school administrative defugelties in Boulderia. In what we laughingly call the outside world, today is of course known as the day (1772) on which the the world's most travelled goat died in London. She had circumnavigated the world twice on British navy ships. In 1789, the crew of the Bounty mutinied, and on a lighter note, in 1987, it was announced that 3,000 toads had passed through a special toad tunnel at Henley-on-Thames in the first six weeks.

In 2004, Fairview High School principal Tammy Quist sent an e-mail to parents saying a Fairview student was hospitalized and remained in a coma. "In this particular instance, it appears that the mixture of Dextromethorphan, known as DXM, Dex or DM, and AMT, also known as DMT, were ingested," the e-mail said, according to a story in the Camera.

In 2005, administrators at Centennial Middle School banned hugs in the hallways after "some concerned sixth-grade teachers asked the administration to spell out policies surrounding 'PDAs,' jargon for public displays of affection". According to a story in the Camera, students were asked to substitute high-fives for hugs. Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado, faculty representatives complained that they didn't appreciate being left out of the decision to hire Hank Brown as the school's next president, and a group of students of Adrienne Anderson, an environmental studies instructor at the university who was sacked by a toadying faculty, released documents in which Rick O'Donnell, director of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, complains to CU that Anderson's activities made the environmental policies of the Gov. Bill Owens administration look bad. Hugs all around!

In 2006, hundreds of slimy little weasels (OK, we put that in) called University of Colorado police to name people photographed the 4/20 marijuana smoke-out on Farrand Field. Police posted 150 pictures online of freedom fighters "lighting up, exhaling and even streaking at the annual event," the Camera reported. For each positive identification, CU offered a $50 weasel fee.

-=- -=- -=- 

Be Here Now

	–photo: KLM

IT was as if the Sixties were taking place in some parallel universe.

The War drags on into its fourth year, but few among the 3,000 students rallied in Norlin quad mentions the war. One kid carries a sign. Everywhere in the dense crowd, students light small pipes and spliffs. The sweet odor of ganja, with the prickly, nostalgic note of Mexican marijuana penetrating the dominant skunky tang of domestic hydroponic Afghani, fills the air. A haze rises overhead as the crowd, literally, smokes.

Wandering through the maze made by the packed throng brings on a sense of unreality. They are all so clean-cut, so straight, so much like fraternity and sorority boys and girls! About one in three people in the crowd, at any given instant, is involved in intent conversation with a cell phone. So, in a way, as much as a quarter of the people there aren't there corporeally, and of those that are there, a like number are intellectually, elsewhere. Are the absentee participants sitting somewhere, smoking a joint, getting voice and image updates of the actual event? And are they, in turn, in cellular conversations with still others? What would Marshall McLuhan think?

At the climactic moment of 4:20, people hold their cell phones aloft to catch a ghostly electronic image of the pall of white that rises above the mass of bodies, and I think incongruously of the election of a Pope. There are no police evident. More cops used to turn out to watch a handful of freaks they suspected of being high than bother to come see 3,000 middle-class students blow a mighty pillar of holy smoke skyward. What would Timothy Leary think?

I smoke my spliff among the kids, who are alright, I guess, wondering if we have won or lost the Revolution (which, it turns out, was televised after all). On a patch of that same collegiate sward, not far from where the stoned masses now drift quietly away, in a parallel temporal universe, had been fought a lonely battle of that Revolution.

In that particular galaxy far, far away, pot came from Kansas, mailed to my friend Gurnie after being collected from its natural habitat along irrigation ditches. After pulling the blinds and locking the door of my apartment across from campus, we would adjourn with this precious cargo to a storage closet. There, sitting among the homebrew bottles (we always drank the stuff before we could get around to bottling it), illuminated only by a blue light bulb, we would use a cigarette rolling machine to make five or six Camel-like joints. We would smoke these in brisk succession, and sit there in the blue light. We would both agree that we were pretty sure we were high.

	October 7, 1965. The Daily said 2,800 came to rant. The one in the picture is Bill Vail.

One day, Gurnie had a chance to buy some genuine mary-juana from Mexico. He was filled with misgivings at having to part with ten bucks for an ounce of the stuff. We took it to the blue room, and we repeated our ritual of the five or six joints. We waited.

Oh, Lordy! Yes, we were high. Sweet Jesus were we high! Claustrophobia set in. We fled the blue light, my apartment. We stumbled out into sunlight, across Broadway. Somehow, it seemed the broad campus lawns, under the skies of blue, might offer some comfort in a spinning universe. It's as difficult to make yourself sick, smoking grass, as it is easy to do, chugging booze. In my long career as a roisterer and reprobate since that fateful day, I have only done so one other time, a case of advanced brownie poisoning.

We sat there on the lawn for an indefinite period, clinging to the earth for dear life. Then finally, I could cling no longer, and began quietly retching my innards into the cool, receiving grass. While I was so engaged, a straight type I knew, dressed in a suit and tie, came walking along and spotted me. We were both involved in the Bitch-In Committee, planning an administration-sanctioned event featuring a 24-hour open-mike marathon in the Glenn Miller ballroom that would allow students to rant 'to their rebellious hearts' content.

Robin, the straight guy, left the walk and crossed the grass to where I lay. He knelt down, carefully hiking up the cuffs of his suit pants, and chatted away about his ideas for the Bitch-In. After a few minutes, or perhaps it was years, he cheerfully bade me good day and walked on. He never once acted as if there were anything unusual in chatting with a hippie puking his guts out in front of the biology building.

Those were the days.

What have we gained? What have we lost?

 –Peter Aretin

-=- -=- -=-

-=- -=- -=-

APRIL 20, 2007

NOT-SO-GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY
... as read in our newspapers

Today is a day in Colorado and Boulderian history that can use a little lightening up. In 1914, Colorado militiamen, coal company guards, and thugs hired as private detectives opened fire on a tent camp of striking coal miners, killing 20 men, women and children. In 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold gunned down 12 students and a teacher at Columbine before killing themselves.

In Boulderia, 4/20 has not entirely been lacking in infamy.

Back in 2004, Kory Austin Lowrance, driving his Jeep with a revoked license, struck Gilbert Levrat, 53, a Swiss climate researcher as he crossed 28th Street at Mapleton Avenue, breaking both legs and his pelvis. Regent Jim Martin was questioned by attorneys involved in the CU sex-and-football scandal. Martin said regents learned of a Niwot High School student's allegation that she was raped by two visiting football recruits at the Millennium Harvest House in December 1997 about a month after the woman filed a police report.

In 2005, Barnard Construction, a Montana-based company that installed the $22 million Lakewood pipeline, sued the city for the $13.5 million it claimed it was owed, saying that the city provided misleading information when it bid out the project. The city said the contractor laid defective pipe. A 43-year-old Lyons substitute teacher and a 20-year-old CU football player were arrested. The teacher, who was stopped for driving the wrong way, was arrested on an outstanding warrant for missing a proof-of-insurance court date. The cops thoughtfully called her school to report she'd miss class. The football player was stopped after drifting over the center and arrested on a DUI.

Last year, About 2,500 (or "more than 1000," depending on which paper you read) stoners gathered on the CU's Farrand Field for the annual 4/20 celebration. Campus administrators attempted to shut down the field with fences and sprinklers, but a mass of smokers stormed the field and smoked in unison at 4:20 pm. The administration later posted the photographs of 150 participants, including one guy wearing only sunglasses and a baseball cap, offering $50 rewards to weasels willing to identify their classmates. Meanwhile, Longmont held a community meeting about how to deal with gang-related problems, while Longmont High students planned to skip school.

This year, the school has dug up the field in a massive "improvement" project, no doubt hoping to impede the annual smoke-in. This will probably shift the festivities to Norlin quad. Agents of the Counter-Intuitive Agency will be there.

We have been unable to confirm that Councilperson Richard Polk will serve as Grand Marshall, and at exactly 4:20 light a giant spliff of "low grade stuff."

Happy

  

	The Viper's Drag (Fats Waller) I dreamed about reefer five foot long Mighty Mez but not too strong I'll be high but not for long And you know I love you If you're a viper I am the king of everything Got to get high before I swing Hear the bells ring ding dong ding And you know I love you If you're a viper You know you're high when your throat gets dry And everything is fine and dandy You're goin' down to the candy store Blow your cork on peppermint candy And then you know your dad might have said Don't give a damn if you don't pay the rent The sky is high and so am I And you know I love you If you're a viper I dreamed about reefer five foot long Mighty Mez but not too strong To be high but not for long And you know I love you If you're a viper.

-=- -=- -=-

-=- -=- -=-

FEBRUARY 6, 2007

NOT-SO-GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY
... as read in our newspapers

Back in 1905, a prominent Boulder oil and mining man spoke out in support of the library grant from Mr. Andrew Carnegie, stating, "A library is the public's club and is desirable on all accounts."

FEBRUARY 6 became a significant day in University of Colorado history in 2004, when CU's Board of Regents approved plans an independent panel to investigate whether CU's football program has used sex and alcohol to recruit players. The panel was to be co-chaired by former state legislators Peggy Lamm and Joyce Lawrence.

A dozen or so parents of CU football players sat behind coach Gary Barnett at the meeting. "They've accused every one of our sons of being pimps and gigolos, and that doesn't sit well with any of us," said a parent. "Our boys now have to prove their innocence."

Things got off to a rocky start right away for the panel with women's advocates when Lawrence told a Denver TV reporter after the meeting that, "The question that I have for the ladies in this is why they are going to parties like this and drinking or taking drugs and putting themselves in a very threatening or serious position like this."

Broomfield police said that day that the CU athletic department might be involved with an an escort service.

Meanwhile, down in town, the Camera ran a story titled "So long, thong," about lingerie "accompanied by a large picture of a scantily clad model," which annoyed one reader enough to wite a letter to the editor, and Gustavo Roberto Soto-Madrigal, 21, and a friend, 22-year-old Daniel Alejandro Velez-Sandoval, went on a two-man, two-hour, crime wave, stealing compact discs, stereos and cell phones worth $20,730 from parked cars.

IN 2006, on the second anniversary of the appointment of the special investigating committee, CU officials cut a check for $1.7 million to former football coach Gary Barnett , withholding the rest of his $3 million contract buyout for tax purposes. His sacking had nothing at all to do with the football sex scandal, but for losing games.

Also that day, in an Icarian accident near Wonderland Lake, a paragider fell 50 feet, receiving critical injuries.

-=- -=- -=-

The Expanding Blogoverse

Back in another lifetime, I used to bestow a lot of letters to the editor on what we laughingly call the local press. Sometimes, they'd print them. But, alone among these lucky journals, the Daily Camera insisted on monkeying with my text, usually my P & C. Punctuation and Capitalization. I am actually very careful about my P & C, and when it departs from conventional, it is usually on purpose. I admit to an over-fondness for commas, using them to stand in for the meditative pauses of my silently spoken Inner Voice. And I'm fond of imitating that voice's frequently ironic intonation with capitalization, a habit picked up from formative years in the amateur journals of science fiction fandom, and a fondness for S.J. Perleman.

All right, I do tend to paragraph more for visual purposed than thematically. And I don't spare the italics.

The Camera would run my little gems of the epistolary art through their Stylistic Homogenizer, even when it materially changed the meaning. All the hyphens would be stripped from a gag about hyphens. Jabs at Pomposity And Sententiousness would be declawed when all the ironic capitals were slapped back down to humble lower case.

My letters would show up, noses wiped and face scrubbed, looking far more well-behaved than they intended to be. Naturally, I complained. Unlike the work of a staffer or a paid contributor, I said, a letter from a reader is like a direct quote. If the writer spelled funny or sprinkled capitals about like rose petals at a wedding, that's information, and sometimes information more interesting than the rest of the author's prose.

To my surprise, the actual Daily Camera editor responsible, Steve Millard, responded. Though unfailingly polite from years of dealing with prickly Boulderians, Millard could not be persuaded that presenting these stylistically buffed letters as the writers' own words was deceptive. Did the Camera alter quotes, I asked?

As far as cleaning up readers' letters, Millard said, "It's one of the policies that distinguishes a newspaper forum from a bulletin board." Millard has recently stepped down from his post at the Camera; unfortunately, due to illness. Having been down that road, I wish him the best of luck. As Red Green says, "Remember: I'm pullin' for ya. We're all in this together."

Coincident with Millard's departure has been a dramatic change in the Camera's website. The letters in the Open Forum, in the paper, which I have always maintained is neither open nor a forum, are still in their places with bright shiny faces, but the website has been completely blogified. Readers can enter comments on all news stories, editorials, letters, even the daily quote and the weather. The Camera even posts the letters that have been submitted for print, supposedly in pristine and unedited form, and readers can comment on them, too. It might be interesting to compare them as submitted and as they appear in print. Well, not that interesting. It's a regular Smartmouth Paradise!

It's ... it's ... a bulletin board!

People sometimes call Mondo Boulder a blog, but that's not really accurate. There's not much journaling. I don't confess my addiction to unbaked cookie dough. We assume our readers, both of them, don't give a damn what books we have been reading, movies we've been watching, or even worse, what music we think is cool. There's no way to anonymously post comments directly on this site. You have to send a "real" e-mail to Mondo Boulder, and few are nervy enough or want to bother. The pieces here are a little more like the newspaper columns I once sporadically wrote for real ink-and-paper publications during my brilliant career as a journalistic dilettante and slacker.

But now I have a blog.

Thank you, Daily Camera! Now it's possible to talk directly back in unvarnished prose to the haughty editors, self-serving Boulderian officials, and other ill-informed readers who haunt the Camera's pages, and bestrew hyphens and capital letters a gogo. I can skip the Bogus Civility altogether. Hanging around this big, electronic water cooler is a great way to waste time and procrastinate about writing something for one's own website. It brings the pointless venting of which Boulderians are so fond right into the 20th, maybe even 21st, century.

The experience is predictable in some ways, surprising in others. The spelling is fairly atrocious, punctuation quirkier even than mine. But the Camera blogoverse has surprisingly not been completely overrun by Boulderia's strident activists with shrill cries of Impeach Bush! Impeach Bush!

Yet.

All four of Boulderia's Republicans post there a lot. Better to fight 'em there than here, to quote George. So that's where you'll find mondoboulder hanging out these days, at the new blog the Camera has created for me, reveling and reviling in unfettered free speech. This lurking about the Camera blogoverse has probably doubled my readership, to, say, four.

Camerablogging may in the long run prove to be like eating peanuts or watching "24," addictive at first, but eventually cloying.

HERE, have a peanut.

–Peter Aretin

The Blogoverse Deflates

Then again, mere moments after posting this page, I discovered that new content as of today on the Camera's website is de-blogified. The comment mechanism has vanished. It remains on stories posted previous to today.

Ooooo! If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd be off and running! Was this flowering of electronic glasnost killed off by me and the four Republicans?

Fascinating: Is it a technical glitch, or has The Camera pulled back from the very brink of the 20th century? Was it all a bit too freewheeling, too bulletin-boardy, for the starchy editorial board?

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NOTE: 1:14 pm. According to the Camera's online editor, it's a "crazy glitch."

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JANUARY 21, 2007

MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY

Today in 2005, Boulderia's city council decided not to build an $84,000 fence to keep prairie dogs out of the new $12 million Foothills Community Park. Then they passed the toughest p-dog protection ordinance in the state, giving rodents the vote and making it a capital offense to kill one of the creatures. (Yes, I made the last part up, that awaits future legislation. "Lethal control," however, was virtually forbidden, setting up a potential legal confrontation with the state.)

Last year on this day, a special diversity panel met at the University of Colorado and delivered a laundry list of recommendations to increase diversity that generally boiled down to spending a Whole Lotta Money. It's hard to tell if CU increases its spending for diversity because it won't, or can't, say what it is spending at any given time. In the early morning hours, police busted an underage drinking party at a downtown restaurant and took an intoxicated 19-year-old woman to the hospital. Accounts do not say if the gathering was diverse, or not.

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