Call us masters of the obvious. Since the street date of the 2004 edition of Salt Lake City Weekly’s annual Best of Utah happened to coincide with the hallowed holiday of April Fool’s Day, we took it as a sign from on high: Go forth and make stuff up. A few of our
writers embrace this philosophy every week of the year, so it’s not a new concept to us.
In the spirit of some of our fellow tabloid-size weeklies, the national ones that cost actual money found in the supermarket checkout aisle, City Weekly fabricated a dozen or more (we’re not giving away the number) Best of Utah staff picks in honor of our April Fool’s Day publication date. We know our regular readers are smart enough to spot ’em; casual visitors to City Weekly land, well, good luck to you.
We even invented a cute mascot, Carpie the Carp-a-Lope, just because we could. Look for him; he’s a busy fish, or antelope, or whatever.
The rest of the 15th annual Best of Utah, however, is business as usual: The new and perennial favorites you voted for, a few hundred staffer suggestions about local people, places and activities you may not have been hip to (as well as some of our patưnted backhanded “compliments”). And, above all, the most entertaining read to be had on Planet Zion all year, April Fool’s Day or not. Read on, enjoy, and happy hunting for those fakes (Hint: In some instances, they’re not necessarily stranger than the truth).
Editorial: Bill Frost, Ben Fulton, Shane Johnson, Scott Renshaw,
Ann Poore, John Saltas, Jerre Wroble, Katharine Biele, Bobbi Parry,
Ted Scheffler, D.P. Sorensen, Jacob Stringer, Jenny Thomas, Leslie Vreeland.
THE CONSUMER LIFE
BEST CORPORATE CITIZEN
XMission
Pete Ashdown launched Utah’s first Internet service provider on a wing and a prayer in 1993—when most of us still thought http was something you catch in prison. The undaunted Ashdown has grown XMission into the state’s largest independent ISP, and he’s done it keeping in mind those that got him there. Aside from granting free Internet service to nonprofit organizations—no matter their political leanings—Ashdown is active in reinvigorating downtown Salt Lake City while preserving its heritage. And he’s presently taking on bandwidth behemoths Qwest and Comcast, two ISP mini-monopolies bent on sinking UTOPIA, the statewide municipal project that would extend lightning-fast Internet service to underserved areas and potentially make Utah a techno-utopia for businesses. 51 E. 400 South, 539-0852, www.XMission.com.