Used to be, they built airports near cities. Now we’re going to build a city near an airport. Because, you know, we built our airport nowhere near the goddamned city, I guess.

I love the 5280, but sometimes I think a little more oxygen wouldn’t hurt anything….

Today is one of those days when I feel sorry for those who aren’t soccer fans. Seriously. Because what happened earlier this afternoon in the Champion’s League semifinal at Camp Nou in Barcelona was one of the most exciting things I have ever witnessed in any sport. And I don’t do hyperbole. I mean this literally. It was Miracle on Ice huge. If I called it David vs. Goliath, I’d be giving David way the hell too much credit. (Okay, maybe that was hyperbole. A little.)

Final score: Chelsea 2, Barca 2, with Chelsea advancing to the finals in Munich on a 3-2 aggregate score (the Blues beat Barcelona 1-0 in London last week). Full story »

You no doubt remember the infamous Lt. Pike and the his pepper-spraying assault on lawfully assembled #Occupy UC-Davis students last year. If not, let’s begin with a brief reminder.

Some of you might read my lead sentence above and think “oh, look, that ‘lawfully assembled’ part is biased. Fucking hippie.” Full story »

Music is a precious thing, and it’s always sad when even a little bit of it dies. Thus, this morning begins on a down note with the news that Greg Ham, multi-instrumentalist for Men at Work, is dead at the age of 58. Casual music fans will remember him as the author of the catchy flute riff in “Land Down Under,” the band’s smash 1982 hit (which topped the charts in the US, UK, Australia and Canada), as well as the saxophone in their breakthrough, “Who Can It Be Now” (also a #1 hit). Full story »

Earlier this afternoon, while watching the Chelsea/Barcelona Champions League match at the British Bulldog in downtown Denver, a young woman collapsed. It was unclear what happened, but my best guess from what those closer to her were telling me was that it was an epileptic seizure and she may have hit her head on the concrete floor. I immediately dialed 911 and provided the dispatcher with all the information I could. I think some others in the bar were probably also calling, so the message that we had a woman down, nature of the incident unknown, please hurry was clearly communicated.

I noted the time. After about five minutes those around me were getting restless, wondering where the paramedics were. Full story »

Back in 2007, as I was thinking about my little Dr. Sammy in 2008/EdF1rst project, I conceived a heresy. It went like this: What would happen if, as a massive economic stimulus, you forgave all outstanding student loan debt in America?

I knew from experience the impact that loan debt has on consumer spending. You have, at this point, a couple of generations who can’t afford to spend (or save) in service to the debt racked up getting their degrees (degrees, which, by the way, didn’t position them to pay off that debt in anything like a timely manner). My generation is and will continue to be underwater. The Millennials are well and truly fucked in ways that us Xers couldn’t have imagined in the 1980s. Full story »

On April 16, 2007, Scholars & Rogues went live, featuring a post by Gavin Chait (Unlearning helplessness: how donors reinforce poverty and dependency) and one by me on Joe Wilson’s speech at the Conference on World Affairs (where he said that Fred Thompson belonged to the “treason faction of the Republican Party”).

Some highlights:

• We have published 5,099 posts (this makes an even 5,100).
• We’ve fielded 36,020 comments.
• As of 12:01 this morning we’d had 3,161,729 visits and 3,472,633 pageviews.
• Our most successful day ever, in terms of visitors, was 25 October 2008, when a post from the day before (FOX declares McCain campaign dead, consigns them to the racist scrap heap of history) spurred a 15,440 visit / 17,825 pageview day. Full story »

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of robotic and 3D computer animation, which holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s human likeness.

This, from the folks at game developer Quantic Dream, is simply remarkable.

Full story »

A few weeks back Bolton Wanderers’ Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the field during the team’s FA Cup quarterfinal match against Tottenham Hotspur. He was attended to by emergency staff on the pitch and eventually stretchered off and rushed to a hospital. Despite being “in effect, dead” for 78 minutes Muamba survived and is now recovering.

Today, another elite footballer had a heart attack during a game, and this time the news is tragic: Livorno’s Piermario Morosini died after collapsing early in the Italian Serie B side’s match with Pescara. Full story »

I know that humans are the pinnacle of intellectual life on Planet Earth (well, unless you believe Douglas Adams, anyway). But there are some awfully smart animals out there, too. Today’s SVR, which pays tribute to our furry and feathery fellow travelers, begins with the Shaun White of the animal kingdom.

Full story »

To: The Broomfield, CO Police Officer Who Pulled Me Over the Other Night
From: Sam Smith
Re: Goddamned Colorado Drivers

To begin with, sir (I’m sorry that I didn’t catch your name while we were exchanging pleasantries, and my regards to your family, by the way), I’d like to thank you for only giving me a warning. I realize that you could have written me a citation, as I was clearly guilty of making a lane change without signaling. Twice. I would like to explain myself, however, by way of an observation or two about the state of driving (and manners) in Colorado, a beautiful place that confers motor vehicle operating privileges on any self-involved, belligerent jackhat who can schlep him or herself into a DMV office. Full story »

My friend Evans Mehew (the man who, several years ago, introduced me to this brand newfangled thing called “blogging”) has launched a site called Guerillassance (as in guerilla + renaissance). Evans is a very smart guy and lately he’s been thinking a lot about our addiction to things, to stuff, and more generally, what the hell has happened to the American Dream?

Have a look at his latest, “Retail Therapy (Or, The Most Effective Trap Is the One We Volunteer to Walk Into).” Thoughtful and immediate – I’m guessing most of us are going to see our own reflections in the mirror he’s holding up to the world.

We know that the Romney campaign is ramping up its attempts to lure female voters, and we were optimistic about the entertainment prospects of these efforts when, a few days, Mitt garnered the much sought-after Gene Simmons endorsement (which, now that Wilt Chamberlain is dead, is pretty much the gold standard of playa cred).

So we weren’t surprised to see Mitt on the stump wailing away at Team Obama.

Romney rebuts claims that he, GOP are anti-women
By Charles Babington
Associated Press / April 11, 2012

HARTFORD, Conn.—Presidential candidate Mitt Romney intensified his efforts Wednesday to rebut claims that he and fellow Republicans are insufficiently supportive of women, or even hostile to them. Full story »

Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen recently lost his freakin’ mind. He told Time that

I love Fidel Castro…I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [SOB] is still there.

Predictably, the world then stopped spinning on its axis.

• South Florida’s vocal Cuban exile community vowed to boycott Marlin games until Ozzie is beheaded fired.
• Ozzie apologized.
• Ozzie announced that he’d be momentarily setting aside his responsibilities managing the team so he could fly back to Florida to personally apologize to each and every Cuban-American face-to-face. Or something like that. Full story »

We recently did a three-part ArtSunday series on the work of Denver photographer Greg Thow and I know many of you were as blown away by his shot of Colorado and the 5280 as we were. Full story »

Legendary amplifier maker Jim Marshall is dead.

April 5, 2012 | 8:54 am

Jim Marshall, who was known as “The Father of Loud” for designing the amplifiers that became ubiquitous in the rock world, has died at 88.

We talk about the guitar gods, the screaming vocalists, the idiot drummers, the groupies, the stylemakers, the partiers… We don’t often pay enough attention to the technology guys, which is odd, since few genres in the history of art have been more reliant on technology than rock & roll. Full story »

You know how every so often somebody will publish a list of the greatest rock bands in history? Those usually make for interesting reading. Beatles, check. Rolling Stones, check. Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix Experience, U2, The Who, Nirvana, Celine Dion, REM… Wait, what? Back up.

Always happens. You have your obvious picks, you have some fresh blood that may be just controversial enough to spark conversation (and site traffic), and then you have your moments of pure barking idiocy that completely annihilate the credibility of the whole enterprise. As it turns out, the same thing happens when prestigious university faculties go about honoring the greatest journalists of the past century. Full story »

American propagandists and PR hacks have developed remarkably innovative ways of making words lie. Back in the ’80s we had “freedom fighters,” which was the way we described death squads who were friendly to America. “Pro-life” can be used to describe those who bomb clinics and murder physicians. “Enhanced interrogation,” of course, means “torture.” And so on. In some cases this Orwellian distortion of the language falls under the category of “euphemism,” but the more insidious innovations can be so subtle that we don’t recognize the way the language is being gamed unless we think about it very hard.

One of the most dangerous new lies: “tort reform.” Full story »

I suspect very few of us Coloradans will ever forget the day, a few years back, when our nitwit former governor posed before the cameras and pronounced that “today, the entire state of Colorado is on fire.”  Full story »

Earl Scruggs, the legendary master of the bluegrass banjo, is dead at 88.  It was just a few days ago that I was writing about the music that I grew up with, and rest assured, Flatt & Scruggs were welcome in the Smith household. There’s honestly not a lot I can say that I feel is worthy of the man’s genius – not on short notice, anyway – so I’ll keep it simple and let the music do the talking. Let’s start with the song that he was most famous for.

Full story »