Over the 45 years of my actually being able to do morning radio, afternoon or evening radio, and occasionally all night radio in Denver, Colorado, I’ve had the incredible experiences of people getting up and walking out of the studio when they were scheduled guests.
One of the first was Abbie Hoffman; remember “Steal This Book” Abbie? On trial in Chicago, they ran Pigasus the pig for president. He took a hike out of the KHOW studio because, even though it’s unimaginable that you could offend Abbie Hoffman, I accomplished that. The next one was President hopeful Marianne Williamson, arguably the smartest person to appear in two nights of that great Dem coffee klatch. She also took a hike. Then Sydney Biddle Barrows, the Mayflower Madam, closed her book and walked off when I asked her the difference between what she did for a living and a pimp. She caught a case of the shark jaws and with a sniff said, “I never,” and headed for the exit.
Shining moments all. But the one that was the most laugh out loud obvious, I was working at Brand X, aka KHOW radio and I had a couple of prairie dog saviors come into the studio. “Welcome to my parlor,” said the spider to the fly. And I asked these two little cello shaped activists how they felt about abortion because they were trying to stop the deaths of these prairie rats. They also pulled a hot foot and left in a huff.
So, using all of those experiences I thought to myself why don’t we make a bunch of prairie dog costumes and put them on the Wash Park geese? You see where this is headed.
The City of Denver and the feds swooped down in an illegal raid and confronted these honkers who were molting, lacked any ID cards or papers and forced them into big plastic pens to be crated and carted off to some very questionable locations.
Does this whole scenario sound familiar? I’m told people saw geese drinking out of toilets.
That one goose being delivered on the flatbed truck was me when I was a little boy. And now the only reason the Denver media can look the other way is we’re being told these geese will become dinner for “some hungry families.”
Now as I’ve said many times, my parents raised many ugly children but not a lot of dumb ones. Does anyone think for a minute that people were going be delivering cooked geese to welfare recipients, homeless junkies or, for that matter, anywhere? Just think of how much it costs to swoop down on geese in an early morning raid, round them up into pens, put corn oil on the eggs, another form of abortion, put these geese in crates and then ship them off in trucks to gander heaven to be processed and cooked and kept USDA approved until they are delivered to John Hickenlooper and Michael Hancock’s road home? I’ll bet there ain’t no minimum wage employees, including the government workers, touching one of these birds once.
How much do you think it costs from start to finish to process one of these quackers? If you look at the curtain that Julie Hayden is pointing to, you’ll see a magical figure. I’m guessing three hundred bucks a goose. Any takers?
Anybody think between now and Thanksgiving you’re going to meet anyone who actually ate a goose? At that moment I’ll throw open the window and say, “What day is this little boy?” and he’ll say, “It’s Christmas.”
This is another thing we’ve learned to watch in Denver. Wasn’t the media great? Weren’t the elected officials wonderful? What about the people who gathered in the park to mourn the geese? The woman who said she actually knew two of those geese personally? How can you tell the damn things apart?
You gotta love the city we live in. Its press corps, the elected officials and the federal government came in like a SEAL team raid to get a bunch of geese and the most frightening thing of all, mother nature hates a vacuum. There will be geese up the wazoo next year at this time.
See you same bat time same bat channel tomorrow.
— Peter Boyles
P.S.: If I caught a fish in Wash Park lake or City Park lake would you eat it? Come on. Things are bad enough for the homeless, we don’t need to start this.