Heard around the West
—Betsy Marston
ARIZONA
What a scary prospect, says the Arizona Republic:
You walk into your neighborhood government office, library or grocery,
and a quarter of the workforce is missing. And this could happen
before you know it; by 2020, one in four Arizonans will be over
60, and either retired or ready to retire. Arizona isn’t the
only state with an aging population, but it’s already feeling
the effects. In Yavapai County, for example, more than 35 percent
of residents are 60 or older. The paper has a suggestion for the
disappearing workforce: ‘Boomers, don’t all retire at
once!”
COLORADO
Boulder is back in the news, and this time the brouhaha
is over a pink-dyed poodle named Cici. The Humane Society got police
to ticket Cici’s owner, Joy Douglas, for violating a city
code prohibiting “Dyeing fowl and rabbits,” though the
last anyone looked a poodle is neither fowl nor rabbit. Douglas,
owner of Zing Salon, explained that she tints Cici with Kool-Aid
or beet juice to support breast-cancer awareness; she vows to fight
the ticket in court to keep her pet candy-colored. Online comments
to the Boulder Daily Camera about this latest media-licious
story came fast and furious, though one said, “Please people,
for the love of God, stop making up new and interesting ways to
make our wonderful city look like a bunch of idiots…”
COLORADO
The Aspen Daily News had a field day with April
Fool’s stories and even got Mayor Mick Ireland to do a handstand
on a beer keg for a front-page picture. The point of that stunt
remains murky, but a few of the headlines probably need no explanation:
‘Aspen police solve crime,” ‘Aussie tips 14 percent,
sets record,” and, one that’s easy to visualize given
this year’s huge snowfall: ‘Snow finally melts, revealing
10 dead Aspen Realtors.” Apparently, nobody noticed the Realtors
were missing because the town boasts 600 of the breed: ‘How
are we supposed to know if 10 don’t show up at work?”
One supposedly died while talking on a cell phone in her car as
an ‘epic storm” moved in, and soon, her snow-covered
car became a handy jump for extreme skiers on Red Mountain. ‘The
line was just sick, brah,” said one skier, ‘adding that
if he’d known there was a dead Realtor inside, he would not
have done it. ‘My condolences.’ ”
Betsy Marston is editor of Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News in
Paonia, Colorado (betsym@hcn.org).
Tips of Western oddities are always appreciated and often shared
in the column, Heard around the West.
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