A New Tim Dorsey Adventure!

Yes!  It's true!  Tim Dorsey has a new book out called Shark Skin Suite.  It continues the adventures of Serge, the serial killer with a heart of gold.  Serge might be a serial killer, but only for the greater good.  He is also a Florida history and trivia buff and a committed environmentalist.  I must admit that the series is a bit on the strange side.  In one book he actually runs down a ticket scalper with his car.  That is, of course, wrong, but after experiencing incredible frustration when trying to buy World Series tickets the only time the Colorado Rockies made it there, I can understand.  Dorsey himself is a big Florida trivia fan  - no surprise there - and has a web site with all kinds of links to interesting and weird Florida web sites.  Be sure to check it out at  http://timdorsey.com/links.htm.

The Rainy Season

May is Denver's rainiest month, and it definitely starting out that way.  We have had two days of continuous downpours, and the forecast is for much of the same through the end of the week, with possibly some snow on Sunday.  They even had to postpone two Colorado Rockies games in a row, which I think is a record. Most people here seem to like it, though, since most of the time it is sunny here (according to the Chamber of Commerce, we get over 300 days of sunshine a year, but nobody can say who came up with that figure). In any case, although I have a good view of downtown Denver from the roof of the parking garage (see photograph above), my office at work is in a windowless basement, and so I can imagine the weather outside to be whatever I want it to be.  As Kris Kringle told little Natalie Wood in A Miracle on 34th Street, there is the British Nation, the French Nation, and the Imagine Nation, and I live in that one.

Catching Up With Dee

I visited with Dee, my friend and former DU Bookstore co-worker, the other evening at The Pioneer, a local watering hole near the University of Denver.  Dee was recently laid off by her long-time employer, The Spirituals Project, due to a shortfall in their fundraising, but she still has a lot of irons in the fire. Dee is both a web designer and a poet, and often visits elementary schools to give presentations to students about poetry. It was at such a presentation that she attended back when she was a young student in Omaha that she was inspired to purse poetry as both a career and a passion.  Dee is taking the summer off to relax and map out her next career move.  Sounds like a plan to me.  Great seeing you Dee!  Good luck on your quest!

Cinco De Mayo!

Actually, tomorrow is the real Cinco De Mayo (5th of May), but the big celebration here in Denver was this past weekend down in Civic Center Park.  Denver has a very large Latino population, and so celebrations like these are especially well-attended.  I always thought you could never have too much fun at a Cinco de Mayo celebration, but in the bottom of the triptych to the left  it is obvious that the fellow in the handcuffs did figure out a way.  Probably tried to swipe a turkey leg without paying.  In any case, the crowds were especially heavy at the music venues.  I don't know the name of the group in the center photograph, but I am pretty sure I took almost the exact same photograph of the exact same group last year, too.  Don't blame me. Blame the Cinco de Mayo organizers. It is they who need to shake things up so I don't keep taking the same damn photographs.  And I am sticking to that story.

And Down The Stretch They Go!

Yesterday was the 141st running of the Kentucky Derby and was won by American Pharaoh.   This was the 2nd Kentucky Derby win in a row for the jockey, Victor Espinoza, which is quite an achievement.  Last year, I drove down to Red and Jerry's, a bar and betting parlor on South Santa Fe Boulevard, to watch the race, but found out that the restaurant had a cover charge and was sold out.  An auditorium was available next door where you could watch the race, but it still had a cover charge and did not look very appealing, and so I went home and watched the race on television, which I did this year as well.  Years ago my parents would have Kentucky Derby parties, where everyone would throw money in a pot and draw the names of two horses out of a hat, with the person with the winning horse getting the money.  As I recall, that was a lot of fun, which is probably why I have a special place in my heart for the Derby.  That and seeing so many women around town wearing hats and bonnets, which is such an unusual sight in this day and age.  Of course, the Kentucky Derby is the class of the horse world.  Alistair Cooke once wrote about how horse people would always talk about the lineage of the winning horses  - out of April Dancer, by Geronimo, out of Miss Daisy, by Citation, etc.  He often wished that some day the winner would turn out to be "out of Texas, by truck."  One can always hope.

All The News That's Fit To Print

At my part-time job, I often work until midnight, and as it gets later in the evening, I have time to glance at the covers of the magazines near the checkout counter.  I couldn't help noticing  a strange contradiction in the headlines of two of the magazines on display on the the second row of the rack in the photograph above. OK Magazine - which must be OK because of its title - features a smiling George Clooney announcing that he is going to be a dad, and that he definitely waited for the perfect woman.  On the opposite side of that same row, the National Enquirer - a bastion of journalistic integrity for many, many years - claims the couple is headed for a $200 million divorce settlement, and claims it knows the man who drove them apart.  What's the deal with that?  Long time Blog readers will recall that I was trying to get a movie made about the University of Denver Bookstore several years ago, and was going to have George Clooney play me, Sandra Bullock play my friend Valarie, the store's Operations Manager, and the guy who used to play Mr.Carlin on the old Bob Newhart Show play Doug, the Textbook Manager.  Of course, then the Bookstore was outsourced to Follett Higher Education Group, I lost touch with George, and now I don't know what the truth is.  Perhaps if Clooney buys an estate in Clear Lake, Iowa, as is rumored (in fact, I'm spreading that rumor), I can ask him what the real deal is when I drive out there this summer.

May Day!

Today is May Day, the 1st of May, and a holiday for workers in many pas of the world.  It is also the anniversary of a Buddhist meeting many of the employees of Hatch's Bookstore in University Hills Shopping Mall attended back in the early 1980s.  Why is this so memorable?  Because it was at the invitation of Robin, my friend and a Hatch's Bookstore employee at the time (seen along with her daughter Caitie in the much more recent photograph), and took place at the Soka Gakki International Buddhist Center, then located in a church basement in Lakewood, Colorado.  Robin, my friend Stuart, my sister Susan, my then wife Lisa, and a few others - all Hatch's Bookstore employees - attended this meeting.  We sat in what seemed like 100 degree temperatures in front of a television, watching some sort of Buddhist pageant in a stadium in Japan.  The announcer would speak for about 10 minutes in Japanese, and then a 10 word English translation would follow.  Really?  That was all the announcer actually said?  I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now.  What did they leave out?  In any case, this went on for what seemed like three hours, not that I'm complaining.  Kind of like watching the Ice Capades, but at least we didn't have to pay for the ticket.