All years are weird. There's nothing especially weird about 2018. But it is the year we most recently experienced so in honor of it ending we'll all talk about how weird it was.
What we specifically want to talk about are all the weird things we learned about Denver in 2018. There were illegal lemonade sales, ugly fish, odd geese, a bench desert and so much more.
If you follow Denverite closely, you may be wondering now, "Is this going to be the Kevin and Ashley Show?" Yes. Yes it is. The Kevin and Ashley show feat. Allan, Andy and Esteban. Grab your truffled parmesan popcorn.
The guy who sold all those "NATIVE" stickers is a transplant
Eric Glade, a transplant from Utah, is the man behind the stickers. And as Andy learned, they sent him on a wild ride.
There's a robot that eats trash and rolls around Cherry Creek
As I said before, when the robots come for us, they will remember we made them eat trash.
Related: We will be remembered by our trash
I mean this figuratively as well as literally.
Kevin just means it literally.
It was illegal for kids to run lemonade stands without a permit
Someone in Stapleton called the police on some poor kids just trying to be kids in May. (Which, what? Who hurt you?)
In September, nearly five years after Colorado legalized recreational marijuana, Denver legalized the sale of lemonade by un-permitted children.
There are some weird geese waddling around City Park
I became obsessed with these storybook-lookin' geese within weeks of first spotting one, and quickly convinced Dave to let Kevin and me go on a literal wild goose chase.
And apparently, rabid skunks were waddling around too
As Allan reported in March, there were nine sightings of the rabid stink-cats in Bear Valley, Harvey Park, Athmar Park and Overland.
:(
Denver has an ugly fish pageant and it's called CARPSLAM
OK it's just called Carpslam but I think it should be said/heard in a monster truck rally radio commercial voice.
Naturally, Kevin attended.
"Grandoozy" was a thing we were going to have to type and say now
It's still how I imagine someone's very Western grandpa describing a large music festival. And now we're stuck with it.
It's now easier than ever to eat locally grown bugs in the Denver area
This is at least the second time Kevin wrote about edible bugs.
A man named Enver visited Denver
While he was here, Enver Siddiky took a lot of photos near big Denver signs in such a way that the letter D was blocked out. We were so delighted we made him our first and probably last Denver Tourist of the Week. (Anyone want to take a shot at the title in 2019 is of course welcome. But you're gonna have to get pretty weird.)
The RiNo Art District didn't have a single public bench
Seriously. Not one place to sit down and hang out without buying something.
In an effort to fix it, Allan reported, they built a pop-up park.
There's a great art collection inside a downtown Denver office building
Kevin was in the Colorado building to photograph someone at their office when we stumbled upon the Dikeou Collection.
Siblings Devon and Pany Dikeou established their private collection in 1998 and opened it to the public in 2003.
Capitol Hill has a lot of stone lions sitting around because Denver was trying to be fancy
A reader asked, so Kevin went around asking: Why are there so many lion statues in Cap Hill?
He also bothered the owner of Lion's Lair about it.
No relation.
I like to imagine a timeline in which Denver is referred to as a lion town instead of a cow town.
There are very deadly mushrooms just hangin' around out there
They're not even supposed to be here. But an Aurora man and his son found one. Then they found another.
It's the first time the Destroying Angel mushroom has turned up here, that we know of, and finder Lazarus Bell donated his specimen to the Denver Botanic Gardens. He also told me he plans to get the mushroom tattooed on his body.
There are elves, leprechauns and gnomes hidden throughout the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Apparently a lot of people already knew this, but we did not, so Kevin and I went looking for them.
I also spoke to Kent Pendleton, who painted the little dudes into the exhibit backgrounds.
Dung beetles have some stuff to teach us about Colorado's past, present and future
Or as Kevin called them, "charismatic little potty-mouths."
One of the world's leading dung beetle experts, Dr. Frank-Thorsten Krell, calls Denver home.
He has a lot of beetles and Kevin learned a lot about them. For example: Denver's dung "isn't their style."
The planter boxes that house the trees at Red Rocks Amphitheatre are kind of a big deal
I learned so, so many things about the boxes I'm often relegated to standing on during Red Rocks shows. Mainly: there's a battle over the best way to preserve them and make them safe, and it dates back to 1999.
One man really can make a difference
Er- one man and his buddy and some T-shirts.
We followed Rob Toftness on his quest to save the chile they once made at Breck on Blake after the restaurant closed and reopened as Cherry Cricket Ballpark.
Spoiler: He won.
Correction: this story originally said Devon and Pany Dikeou are sisters. Pany is Devon's brother.
