If on some crisp fall afternoon you find yourself walking down a tree-lined avenue and must walk past a jailhouse, the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center is the one to see. The exterior is beaming with Indiana limestone to complement the nearby Denver Mint, and visitors are greeted with an epoxy resin terrazzo art floor designed by artist Garrison Roots.

But inside, staff and inmates at the newly christened $159 million prison are dealing with some ugly truths. While the city was rocked recently by the death of an inmate and the continuing investigation into officer involvement in his death, most of the problems have been of a more domestic nature. “It’s like when you build a new home and you find out that something didn’t get put in, or you find a mistake on some kind of amenity,” Captain Frank Gale of the Denver County Sheriff’s Department, told reporter Jonathan Easley. “We have the same issues here, but on a much larger scale.”

Much, much larger. For instance, unhappy inmates have been known to shove pillows or clothing down the toilets — and one of the sewage pipes servicing some of the building’s 559 toilets is too small to accommodate these antics. That has caused clogging and overflow in a number of cells.

Inmates — the jail can hold up to 1,500 of them — have also hammered on the sprinkler heads, which resulted in considerable flooding. This has happened a handful of times, Gale said (although one former inmate told Westword it was upward of thirty times), but with nearly 4,000 sprinkler heads situated throughout the building, Gale’s team needed a quick and creative fix.

“We did a retro-fit on the valve so that it shuts off the water quicker if the sprinkler head is released for anything other than smoke or fi re detection,” he added. The sprinkler heads are still within swinging reach of inmates, but the resulting water damage won’t be nearly as extensive when they connect.

Inmates have even found ways to take advantage of those amenities that were installed specifically for their benefit. Every floor has a self-contained exercise yard with natural light coming through high windows.

“If they’re not standing on something, they won’t be able to see out onto the street,” Gale said. “It’s secure — they can’t get out — but the inmates were climbing up on each other’s shoulders to look out of there.” They were also making catcalls to people walking by on Delaware Street, but that has stopped.

Cannapalooza! Cannabis Festiva, an event booked for Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City on August 21, was designed for thousands of attendees – but only hundreds showed. Maybe potential attendees were already at the THC Music Festival that same weekend in Alma – or maybe folks were feeling burned out after a never-ending stream of local cannabis festivals, expos,conventions and competitions.

“Maybe people are realizing we don’t need a festival every other week,” Vincent Palazzo, of the nonprofit Medical Marijuana Assistance Program of the Rockies, told reporter Joel Warner.

And not only are some of these events poorly attended, but several have been plagued by scandal. The Colorado Cannabis Convention last April almost went up in smoke; the title sponsor, Kush magazine, took the reins at the last minute. And HempCon, a convention in San Jose, California, last month, was blasted for running what appeared to be a marijuana prescription mill.

Still, the cannapalooza craze rolls on. The swanky Plant Medicine Expo and Healthcare Provider Conference will take over the Denver Sheraton Downtown from September 24 to 26. And Kush founder Michael Lerner plans to top the first Kush convention – which, with 20,000 attendees, was reportedly the largest cannabis event anywhere – with KushCon II, a three-day extravaganza featuring benefit concerts and indoor skateboarding ramps at the Colorado Convention Center from December 16 to 18.

“You can’t guarantee success just by putting on an event,” said Lerner. “People want to walk in and say, ‘Wow.’ It has to be fun, entertaining and informative. You have to cover all the bases.” And he plans to have all bases covered in May 2011, when he puts on the first World Cannabis Convention – a showstopper designed to fill all half-million square feet of the Colorado Convention Center.

Ladies first: Here in Colorado, ladies’ nights have survived Steve Horner’s repeated attempts to shut them down, and a New York appeals court has just ruled that ladies’ nights are all right with them, too. The Manhattan-based Second Court of Appeals rejected Manhattan attorney and feministfoe Roy Den Hollander’s claims that ladies’ night deals are unconstitutional, a result of “40 years of lobbying and intimidation, [by] the special interest group called ‘Feminism.’”

Hollander had filed suit against several New York clubs, saying their ladies’-night promotions discriminated against men; since they were licensed by the state, he argued, they were required to adhere to the equal protection clause of the Constitution. The appeals court rejected that argument, saying that nightclubs weren’t “state actors,” and that “liquor licenses are not directly related to the pricing scheme” at the door.

“Now is the time for all good men to fight for their rights before they have no rights left,” proclaims Hollander’s website. He told the New York Daily News that he plans to appeal the appeals court’s ruling -- all the way to the Supreme Court, if he has to.