By Todd Hartley on October 8, 2010
When I first moved to Aspen in 1992, and for a few years after that, one of the great joys of driving up and down the Roaring Fork Valley on Highway 82 was that it afforded drivers an elevated panorama of Woody Creek, with its funky trailer park, bucolic horse farms and inebriated gonzo journalists.
Most importantly, though, the bird’s-eye view of Woody Creek gave motorists a glimpse at one of the finest installations of public art in Colorado history: a barn with a blue roof on which had been painted a gigantic middle finger. Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged art, aspen, finance, milan, woody creek
By Todd Hartley on October 1, 2010
All right, Colorado, I have some good news for you, and I have some bad news.
The good news is that for at least the 16th year in a row, Colorado was named the least obese state in the country, with just 19.1 percent of the population having a body mass index of 30 or more. That makes Colorado, if I’m reading the data correctly, the only place in America where less than one out of every five people is a grotesque fat slob. Way to go, gang! Give yourselves a hand. Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged broadmoor, colorado, jesus, mississippi, obesity, vermont
By Todd Hartley on September 24, 2010
Let’s do an experiment. Get a plate with raised edges and put some water in it. Now set the plate down and blow on the water. Did it move away and expose part of the plate? It did? Good. You just proved that Moses could indeed have parted the Red Sea!
All right, I admit that’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s not too far removed from what some scientists have been doing recently in an effort to bridge the gap between science and religion. Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged bible, exodus, moses, red sea, religion, science
By Todd Hartley on September 17, 2010
Affluent Europeans and Americans who zip around their countries on massive, eight-lane superhighways were outraged recently when the impoverished nation of Tanzania announced its plans to build a highway through the southern part of the Serengeti plains.
“This highway will ruin one of the most magnificent sites on Earth!” cyber-shrieked someone on Facebook named Pia. “This is an urgent environmental issue.” Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged africa, animals, highways, serengeti, tanzania
By Todd Hartley on September 10, 2010
Here at I’m With Stupid, we love to throw caution to the wind and go on madcap adventures, so long as said adventures are suitable for both a dog and a 3-year-old boy. So it was that over Labor Day weekend we piled the family into the car and set out for a seldom-visited part of Colorado known as the Wet Mountains.
We got a late start and drove until well past dark, finally pitching our tent at a national forest campground at around 10:30 at night. The next morning, the campground host, a friendly older gentleman from Kansas City, came by to collect our fee and chat for a spell. Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged adventure, bishop castle, colorado, jim bishop, wet mountains
By Todd Hartley on September 3, 2010
You know how conspiracy theorists are always trying to convince us that our government does horrible secret things that nobody hears about, things we Americans think are only done by governments run by people like Josef Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin?
Well, those conspiracy theorists are usually full of malarkey. No American leaders, with the possible exceptions of Dan Quayle and Tipper Gore, ever killed more than about 6,000 of their fellow countrymen. In fact, I believe Michael Dukakis holds the record with a confirmed body count of 5,962. Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged cia, france, hallucinations, lsd, rye bread, sandoz
By Todd Hartley on August 27, 2010
One of the things I’ve always admired most about the dimwitted — a group that by no means precludes me, mind you — is the way one person’s stupidity frequently begets even more idiocy on the part of others. A perfect case in point is the brouhaha going on right now in England over the actions of one insignificant woman who did one very dumb thing.
The woman, Mary Bale, a 45-year-old bank worker from the town of Stoke, achieved infamy earlier this week when a video of her dropping a cat in a trash bin was posted on the Internet. Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged animals, cats, england, facebook, trash
By Todd Hartley on August 20, 2010
Imagine for a moment that you lived in Southern Sudan, a dry, desolate region of Africa that less sensitive columnists than this one might aptly describe as a hellhole. Here’s a little background on what your life would be like:
From 1983 to 2005, you were embroiled in the Second Sudanese Civil War, which claimed 1.9 million lives, making it one of the deadliest conflicts on Earth since the end of World War II. Prior to that, you had 11 years of something that wasn’t quite war but certainly wasn’t peace following the end of the First Sudanese Civil War, Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged eva peron, pineapples, rhinos, southern sudan, sudan
By Todd Hartley on August 13, 2010
I have a few friends — their names and occupations don’t matter — who’ve basically decided that the people in the Middle East are irredeemable savages. And I think, sadly, that they’re expressing the opinion of lots of other silent Americans who are afraid to give voice to such a politically incorrect statement.
I don’t really agree with my friends. I’m still willing to believe that the vast majority of Middle Easterners are decent, hard-working folk who are just trying to eke out a living and raise their families in peace. Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged gun control, guns, middle east, turkey, weddings
By Todd Hartley on August 6, 2010
Astute readers of I’m With Stupid may have noticed that in last week’s column, a sober, thoughtful treatise on Buddhist meditation, I confessed that my personal mantra while meditating, which generally involves much pondering of female body parts, is the word “Boobies.”
I received quite a bit of negative feedback from self-styled Zen masters informing me that my puerile jokes and sophomoric attitude were a guaranteed way to ensure that nothing worthwhile would ever come of my meditating.
Continue reading »
Posted in I'm With Stupid Tagged breastfeeding, breasts, giselle bundchen, octomom, tom brady