Pikes Peak was the scene of a fraud perpetrated in 1876 by John O’Keefe, whose job was to take weather readings on the summit and signal them to the city below.
O’Keefe’s tall tale about rats on the peak’s summit was first printed in the Pueblo Chieftain newspaper. The tale then spread to the Rocky Mountain News, which published an articled entitled “Rodents on the Rampage – an Awful and Almost Incredible Story, a Fight for Life with Rats on Pikes Peak.”
In the Rocky Mountain News story, O’Keefe claimed the top of Pikes Peak was overrun by rats the size of cats that fed on “saccharine gum that percolates through the pores of the rocks.”
The story continues:
“Since the establishment of the government’s signal station on the summit of the peak, these animals have acquired a voracious appetite for raw and uncooked meat, the scent of which seems to impart to them a ferocity rivaling the fierceness of the starved Siberian wolf.”
O’Keefe claimed that on his first night at the station, he and his wife were attacked by rats and would have been overwhelmed had they not electrocuted them using electrical wire powered by a battery.
When the battle was over, they discovered the rats had eaten their infant daughter, Erin.
O’Keefe claimed he buried all that was left of Erin (her skull) under a pile of rocks with a marker and this inscription, “Erin O’Keefe, daughter of John and Nora O’Keefe, who was eaten by mountain rats in the year 1876.”
The grave became a popular tourist attraction, and O’Keefe charged 50 cents for tourists to have their picture taken at the site.
O’Keefe was eventually revealed as a fraud. He didn’t have a wife or daughter, and probably buried his dead burro under the rocks.
The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.
Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.
What could go wrong with a bite or two?
Everything, as it turned out.
Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.
But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.
I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.
It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly. The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.
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I can remember, almost forty years ago, trying to introduce a nicotine-phobic conservative friend to marijuana. He absolutely refused to inhale smoke in any form, so we whipped him up a batch of dope brownies.
The trouble with dope brownies is that they taste good and the high takes forever to come on, so you invariably wind up eating all the brownies, and when your high finally arrives you get considerably more stoned than you intended.
My novice friend really enjoyed his pot high… for a while. But by the second and third days of intoxication, we were all getting really, really tired of it.
Out Boulder, an LGBTQ advocacy group, has launched an online petition seeking to pressure organizers of the Bolder Boulder to drop their slogan “Sea Level is for Sissies” because they say the word “sissies” is derogatory.
But race organizers say they have no plans to retire the slogan.
The Change.org petition was posted Wednesday by Out Boulder’s executive director, Mardi Moore, and by the evening it had 25 signatures.
“The word is used to (demean) traits that are problematically and stereotypically associated with women,” the petition reads. “Traits that all genders have but are not valued because they are associated with women. … All genders express emotions and they should be embraced when they do.
“It’s past due that the Bolder Boulder retire this slogan. Make your voice heard.”
Moore said the slogan is “harmful” and leads to further misunderstanding about gender.
“This has been a longstanding issue for us in the LGBT community,” Moore said. “When somebody calls you a sissy, it is not positive. … That word continues the incorrect thinking that having emotions or expressing something in a stereotypically female way is somehow wrong in society.”
Moore said she was motivated to put up the petition after a letter to the editor by Debbie Ramirez appeared in the Daily Camera on April 21 calling the T-shirt “highly offensive.”
“I am a women who runs, rock climbs and performs well athletically. I also have the traits associated with someone who is called a sissy,” Ramirez wrote. “I cry, I get hurt and I express my emotions. If this is what a sissy is, I am proud to be a sissy and would never wear a T-shirt that does not value these traits in all genders.”
Senator Hudak contemptuously rejects a rape victim’s observation that she might have been able to defend herself if she had been carrying her weapon.
Rather than face a recall election, Colorado Senator Evie Hudak has decided to resign. (Town Hall)
After seeing two of her Colorado colleagues recalled over anti-gun votes, Democratic State Senator Evie Hudak, will submit her resignation.
Hudak will hold a news conference Wednesday morning at the Arvada Library.
“By resigning I am protecting these important new laws for the good of Colorado and ensuring that we can continue looking forward,” Hudak wrote in her resignation letter in regard to her gun votes, which led to the recall effort.
Proponents of the recall have until early next week to submit about 18,900 valid signatures to the secretary of state’s office. If enough signatures are valid, Hudak would be the third Colorado lawmaker to face a recall election this year because of her support for tougher gun laws.
Earlier this year, Colorado State Senator Angela Giron and Senate President John Morse, both from blue districts, were recalled and replaced with Republicans.
Former Colorado State Senate President John Morse (D – Colorado Springs)
Colorado democrats took advantage of the emotional atmosphere occurring in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shootings to ram through a controversial gun bill requiring background checks for any firearm transfer and limiting the capacity of most magazines to 15 rounds.
The response from residents of the outdoor-loving state was furious. 54 out of 64 Colorado county sheriffs even brought suit to overturn the law, contending that its provisions were too vague and that innocent citizens could inadvertently violate the law by owning magazines readily convertible to larger capacities.
Angry sportsmen and gun owners responded by petitioning for recall elections in the cases of several of the most prominent senatorial supporters of the bill.
Yesterday’s election produced the first successful recalls in Colorado’s history of any elected officials. Colorado Senate President John Morse was ousted and along with him Senator Angela Giron who represented Pueblo.
All this proves once again that gun control in regions outside coastal urban enclaves represents a very effective political third rail for progressive democrats.
Mike Blanchard’s “In Memoriam” notice from the Denver Post has gone viral internationally.
It was reported with appropriate admiration by Britain’s Daily Mail.
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Charlie Martin added a bit more at the Daily Caller:
“What’s in the vial?â€
“Nitroglycerin.â€
According to lifelong friend Ron Remy, those were the first words he heard from Mike Blanchard when they met during high school.
“I was coming up the walk to his parents’ house when he came out, carrying a small vial, very carefully. He said it was nitroglycerin. He’d just cooked it up in his parents’ kitchen. We put it on a fence post and Mike shot it with a pellet gun, and it blew out a whole section of fence,†Remy said. “We all have these fantasies — but Mike would go out and just do it. I spent a year in Viet Nam, and some of the moments of stark terror I had with Mike eclipsed anything I saw there.†…
Collecting stories from Flathead’s life, however, initially presented a small problem. “I’m not sure of the statute of limitations,†one of his friends said. After assuring them we’d protect our sources, the stories flowed like whiskey.
“We had friends who joined these ‘outlaw’ motorcycle clubs. We decided we’d have our own. We called it the ‘Dead Cats MC,’†said one of the attendees who had been worried about misdeeds recent enough to prosecute. …
The stories Blanchard’s family and friends told certainly didn’t paint him as a boy scout. According to his friends, he was astonishingly intelligent and well read, with encyclopedic knowledge of Fords, guns, and explosives, but equally deep knowledge of European history and of prosaic topics like landscaping.
On the other hand, he had real difficulties with authority, and didn’t give in to social pressures — like hygiene.
“You could have drilled for oil in the leg of his jeans,†remembered one friend who wished to remain anonymous. …
As his obituary noted, Blanchard was a life-long Republican and an NRA member. And according to another friend, he had what we might now charitably call “old-fashioned†attitudes about race.
Rafting guide rescues 13-year-old girl on Clear Creek, Colorado without waiting for the authorities and is arrested for “obstructing government operations.”
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Honolulu Elections Clerk says he checked and there is no Obama birth certificate. Not exactly definitive proof.
Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work.
One of the participants on a bamboo fly rod list forwarded the link to this 2007 YouTube video of a mountain lion looking into the window of a Colorado home in very much the manner of a house cat sitting patiently outside a mouse hole.
The lady doing most of the filming seems a bit overconfident in the ability of window glass to serve as an impenetrable barrier to wildlife. One can see the lion giving some serious consideration to having a try. Fortunately he decides in favor of prudence, or I expect we’d have never seen this video.
Apparently, the lion had been seen hanging around the vicinity of these people’s house before the video was made. The sensible thing to do would have been to shoot this particular lion.
It sounds amazing. In Golden, Colorado, the owner of a 1985 Maserati Biturbo actually traded in his exotic Italian grand touring sedan, with an odometer reading of only 18,480 miles, for $3500 from Barack Obama as down payment on a new Subaru.
The Maserati is doomed. Its engine’s crankcase will be filled with sodium silicate in a government stimulus program resembling those of the Great Depression in which farmers were paid to shoot pigs or plow under wheat, then the whole car will be crushed into a cube of metal.
In this case, maybe Obama should just save a few quarts of good sodium silicate. That Maserati already wouldn’t run.
A man in Colorado was so frustrated with his car breaking down, he decided to capitalize on the “Cash For Clunkers” program. That’s nothing unusual — except his car was a rare Maserati.
The 1985 Maserati BiTurbo has 18,480 miles on the odometer and its interior is nearly new. Yet the owner said he couldn’t drive the car more than 10 minutes without having to call his mechanic.
The Maserati, like all “Cash for Clunker” trade-ins, will soon be crushed. The man said the engine frequently had problems and he’s been trying to the Maserati for months. By trading it in, the owner got $3,500 of government money, roughly the same as he was trying to sell the car for privately.
That Colorado owner’s experience was apparently pretty typical. The Maserati Biturbo made Time Magazine’s 50 Worst Cars of All Time:
“Biturbo” is, of course, Italian for “expensive junk.” At least, it is now, after Maserati tried to pass off this bitter heartbreak-on-wheels as a proper grand touring sedan. The Biturbo was the product of a desperate, under-funded company circling the drain of bankruptcy, and it shows. Everything that could leak, burn, snap or rupture did so with the regularity of the Anvil Chorus. The collected service advisories would look like the Gutenberg Bible.
Your tax dollars at work. Nobody would buy this dog, but Barack Obama did, using your money to do it.
Since I have black bear walking regularly through my yard at my home atop the Blue Ridge, stories like today’s do make me reflect upon our current complacency about sharing our neighborhoods with potentially lethal large predators.
Mrs. Munson’s case was different from most of ours. She was living in a remote wilderness location. In California and the Eastern US, though, bears or mountain lions commonly reside in the midst of residential suburbs.
We rely on our belief that a long tradition of hunting (now very much in desuetude as far as our large predator neighbors are concerned) suffices to assure their fear of man as the better-armed and more dangerous predator.
Our reliance on that established status has worked well enough in the Eastern US so far, but, of course, the bear have only returned to most places very recently. The mountain lion, here in the East, is mostly just a rumor.
An autopsy showed a 74-year-old Ouray County (Colorado) woman whose body was found being eaten by a bear (Black bear – Ursus americanus) was attacked and killed by that same bear after she attempted to help a smaller bear that had been hurt in a fight.
The son-in-law of Donna Munson told 7NEWS that Munson was trying to help a smaller bear that had gotten into a fight with an older bear on Aug 7. The smaller bear suffered broken teeth in the brawl, Munson told her family.
Munson told her brother by telephone that she was putting out hard-boiled eggs and milk for the younger bear to eat, said the victim’s son-in-law, Bruce Milne.
Munson told her brother Thursday night that the older bear was back and said, “I’m going to chase it off with a broom.”
According to the county coroner, Munson was grabbed by the bear and it slashed her head and neck with such penetrating force that Munson would have bled out in 90 seconds.
Sheriff’s investigators said that the bear “clubbed” her through the wire fence that she had built around her porch, rendering her unconscious. It then grabbed her, pulled her underneath the fence to the back yard and then slashed her to death, the sheriff’s office said.
Later that day, a witness found a large bear feeding on Munson’s body as it lay outside her home.
Landscapers excavating for a koi pond in Boulder, Colo., found a cache of blood-spattered weapons and tools, but instead of calling the police, they summoned an archaeologist from the University of Colorado, six blocks from the site.
Douglas B. Bamforth initially thought the stone implements might have been a few hundred years old, but further studies showed that they were left behind about 13,000 years ago, making them one of only two caches of tools from that period known to exist, the university announced Wednesday. The other cache was found in Washington state.
An analysis by anthropologist Robert Yohe of Cal State Bakersfield showed that the blood came from horses, sheep, bears and a now-extinct camel — the first time a camel’s blood has been found on such a tool.
Workers building the pond for Pharmion Corp. founder Patrick Mahaffy discovered 83 items packed into an area about the size of a shoe box.
The find was made in May, but was not announced until the blood was analyzed. …
Among the flint implements were a salad-plate-size bifacial knife; a tool resembling a double-bitted ax; small blades; and flint scrapers.
Bamforth initially suspected that the tools were ceremonial, but the blood indicates that they were used for more practical purposes.
“It looks like someone gathered together some of their most spectacular tools and other scraps of potentially useful material and stuck them into a small hole in the ground by a stream, fully expecting to come back at a later date and retrieve them,” Bamforth said.
