Eric J. Lubbers Sings His Hits

The stately Burnsley Hotel.

So a Somali national walks into a hotel room … (stop me if you’ve heard this one).

Sometime last week, Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, a Canadian (via Somalia) was playing with a pound of sodium cyanide in his room at the Burnsley Hotel, a ritzy little establishment just of 10th Avenue and Grant Street, when he died.

The Denver coroner said he died of, surprise, surprise, cyanide poisoning because sodium cyanide is the kind of compound that should be stored in giant brown glass bottles with a lot of skulls and crossbones on them, if your knowledge of chemistry, like mine, comes from watching old Warner Bros. cartoons.

Now this story has all the ingredients to bake a whole batch of crazy YouTube muffins, a la the DIA conspiracy theories (despite the fact that it has been revealed that Dirie was simply an alleged suicidal schizophrenic):

Keep reading » Cyanide death at the Burnsley (and other unwritten mystery novels)

The Olympics are on, and I celebrated the pinnacle of athletic competition like all good Americans: I’m sitting on my ass on a beautiful day watching it on TV.

But because I’m also crazy-addicted to the Internet, I’ve been on my laptop while doing it, which is where I found the following headline on Digg:

So this is what Digg users think of William Spencer.

At first, I got excited.

“Hey, that guy I interviewed back in November has a new video!” I thought.

I was wrong. Instead, 816 people were just discovering the most mind-bending skateboarding video I’ve ever seen (that only incidentally included Denver as a backdrop) a mere 18 months after it hit the Web.

Here’s my wordy summary of William Spencer from my interview:

He’s a Christian school alum, L.A.-via-Loveland-via-Texas transplant, stunt double for Orlando Bloom and more than a million people have watched him turn Denver landmarks into the unlikeliest stunt props in skateboard history.

Twenty-four-year-old William Spencer is living the kind of life that sounds like a teenager’s fantasy.

One thing bugs me, though. Criss Angel? Really? That’s the best comparison you can come up with, Digg? For shame. Criss Angel, while impressive in a makeup-on-a-dude way, is all about gimmicks. Spencer, on the other hand, did a front flip down the steps at Civic Center Park and landed safely on his board. Not much of a comparison.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

I noticed a lot more traffic on the bike path today coming home, which usually means a closure of Colfax. But this time, there were helicopters circling the area, which made me think there was a little more to it. When I went to investigate, I found a block worth of police tape by the Squire Lounge, a crowd of onlookers and a dead body in the middle of the avenue (covered with a sheet) next to a gray car.

The scene of a death at Colfax and High today.

Update: Local news has finally caught up, and it sounds like it was a jaywalker (according to witnesses) which would not be out of the ordinary for that stretch of Colfax. I’ve worried about hitting some of the more aggressive of the bunch myself.

Click through to see video of the scene and a particularly vocal bystander. Keep reading » Someone died on Colfax today