We got a good deal on a rental car, and planned to drive to Boulder and up into the mountains. The car was from Hertz, and came with their GPS system “NeverLost”. Its software is terrible, mostly because the system doesn’t respond quickly enough to anything. For example, if you miss a turn into a side street, it will recalculate — and then tell you to take the next suitable street, which we had invariably passed by the time it finished working out what to do next.
I think I was about 10 years old when I decided I wanted to visit Colorado. I had read about a city called Boulder, where you could spend a warm and sunny morning in town and then drive an hour or so and be on a snow-covered mountain. I had never experienced an actual mountain, and that sounded like a good way to do it.
In the mean time, I’ve had 15 years of South Park to mould my perceptions of Colorado.
It was recently uncovered that Denver Police Department’s intelligence database was being used to track members of Amnesty International and other similar groups, on the grounds that they were “criminal extremists”. None of the people being tracked had any criminal convictions or arrests on their records. The tracking began before 9/11.
Denver police blamed a secretary for the “mistake”. The “mistake” surfaced because Denver Police shared their database with neighboring cities, and someone with a conscience at one of the neighboring police departments leaked the documents to the press.
In October 2001, Chante Mallard, a 25 year old woman in Fort Worth, Texas, was driving her 1997 Chevy Cavalier home. On the East Loop 820 split with U.S. 287, she hit 37 year old Gregory Biggs, a homeless man. Both of Biggs’ legs were broken by the impact, and he was hurled headfirst through the windshield of the car.
Ms Mallard quickly drove the few miles back to her house, with Biggs still lodged in the remnants of the windshield.