Administrative Holiday

It's that day again - "where does the time go?", you might well ask.

Of course, just what the meaning of this day depends on the beholder. Here in the noble city of Louisville, this is Oaks Day, which means it's Churchill Downs' annual Grade I stakes race for three-year-old Thoroughbred fillies. But more importantly, it means an excuse to have a pre-Derby celebration and start drinkin' early. Many workplaces and even schools take off for Oaks Day, but no one declares that the holiday is explicitly because of the Oaks, of course - most simply say it is an "administrative holiday."

For others, April 30 means Walpurgis Night (Walpurgisnacht). It's a traditional religious holiday of pre-Christian origin, celebrated by Christian as well as non-Christian communities, past the stroke of midnight and through "The Door Into Summer" - May Day, the beginning of the new season. It's probably the one day of the year that Catholics, pagans, witches, Satanists, and anarchists all almost see eye-to-eye.

Walpurgisnacht is named for Saint Walpurga. The earliest representation of Walpurga, from the early 11th century, depicts her holding stylized stalks of grain. The grain attribute has been interpreted as identifying Walpurga as a Christianized protectress of the grain, the Grain Mother. Farmers fashioned her image in a corn dolly at harvest time, and from this tradition also comes the real origin of the Scarecrow figure in the fields - scaring birds was never its original intention.

Bloated Cow Syndrome

Saw a headline online that said: "Lush Kentucky pastures causing bloat problem". Needless to say, I had to click on that. And I learned something today.

Evidently "frothy bloat" is a major problem in the bovine industry, and recent grazing conditions in Kentucky have been ideal for the condition. The article says frothy bloat is distinctly different from gaseous bloat, which happens more often when cattle are consuming grain.

Once the bloat sets in, death can occur within 1 to 4 hours. Why? How? The article explains:

“Usually frothy bloat happens when cattle are grazing forages that are high in soluble protein combined with rapid fermentation,” said Jeff Lehmkuhler, Extension beef specialist for the UK College of Agriculture. “It produces a stable foam in the rumen that blocks the normal escape of the gas from fermentation through eructation or belching.”

When the gas cannot escape, the cow’s rumen becomes distended similar to blowing up a balloon, and that can impact the animal’s ability to breathe normally because of pressure against the diaphragm, added Michelle Bilderback, UK College of Agriculture Extension veterinarian.

I was around cattle all the time on the old family farm back in Waco, and I never heard of such a thing. But a quick Google search was performed and sure enough, serious cattle farmers discussing cow bloat can be found all over the net. One heartwarming anecdote is told here with the headline "I Stabbed My Cow":

"i stabbed her hard..the whole knife blade went in..i quickly pulled it out..in about three seconds she started quieting down..the gas coming out was keeping the hole open..you could see her stomach going down..jess put a halter on her and slowly led her around..the gas kept coming out..she kept getting smaller and quieter..cathy went in and called the vet.she told him i had already stabbed her..he was amazed ..in 30 years he had never done it nor seen it done..he said all the bloated cows were dead by the time he got there."

MIssing Plane in Hazard Area

From the Associated Press:

HAZARD, Ky. -- Kentucky State Police are searching an area in eastern Kentucky for a plane that may be missing.

Trooper Jody Sims at the Hazard post says officials have spotted something that could be wreckage and are investigating whether it's related to a report of a plane possibly missing.

Trooper Tony Watts says the Federal Aviation Administration in Indianapolis notified police Tuesday afternoon that a plane may have been lost in the vicinity of Clay, Owsley and Leslie counties.

Rescuers are searching the area, but Watts says they can't get an aircraft in the air to help look because of the weather.

Solar Bag Creates UFO Scare

A number of people saw an unidentified flying object over the city of Berea a few days ago. Thanks to the spooky goings-on at the Depot, weird things in the skies aren't that big a deal, but this time one of the puzzled witnesses was none other than Scott Powell, editor of the Berea Citizen.

Powell and his neighbors watched the strange wiggling, undulating UFO for about 10 minutes. Channel 18 News quoted him as saying, "It looked like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis had come up and was flying in the air, because it had that arch shape to it and it was kind of a metallic - it had a shine to it."

As it turned out, the tubular floater wasn't an alien nor a cruise missile and it wasn't even a secret government project. It was merely a giant 50-foot-long solar bag that a local schoolteacher had released into the air as part of a class demonstration of solar energy. Solar bags act like helium balloons (some have risen to over 120,000 feet) but are filled with nothing but ordinary air, heated via convection by the sun's rays.

Yahweh's Philadelphia Remnant Assembly

Whilst making my meandering rounds on the net today, I stumbled across a curious religious site called TNT 777, or "Tomorrow's News - Today". (Are they Early Edition fans?)

Operating from a P.O. box in Bowling Green, this group is called "Yahweh's Philadelphia Remnant Assembly", and their mission statement reads:

"We preach and teach the Gospel/Good News of the soon-coming Kingdom of Yahweh to be established here on this earth ruled by his glorified Son, Yahshua the Anointed One."

They publish newsletters with such thought-provoking articles as "Syncretism: A Deadly Mix" and "Leviticus 23 or Dehioth 1-4?", but after reading them all online, I still have no clear picture of just what it is these people believe (Their "Our Beliefs" page has evidently been under construction for years).


But I did note passing references to Herbert W. Armstrong, the founder of the Worldwide Church of God. You'd think that would be something of a lamp unto my feet to learn more about this "Yahweh's Philadelphia Remnant Assembly", but not so. Even a cursory attempt to suss it out was like wading into the LaBrea tar pits, because the Worldwide Church of God split off into many different factions after Armstrong's death. There's the Restored Church of God, the Global Church of God, the Living Church of God, the Philadelphia Church of God, the United Church of God, the Sabbath Church of God, etc. You can read more about all the post-Armstrong squabbles in Stephen Flurry's book Raising the Ruins.

But that still doesn't tell me what these folks in Bowling Green are up to, nor even what "Philadelphia Remnant" means. Even philadelphiaremnant.com doesn't explain it. Neither does satansrapture.com, but it comes closer to it - apparently it refers to one of the more puzzling passages in the Book of Revelation, about the Biblical-era Church of Philadelphia.

I dunno. It's all over my head. But it is interesting stuff.

Aquatic Bar at Al J's

The bar counter at Al J's is made of translucent glass and modified into an aqaurium, with live fish swimming around and hypnotically compelling you to have just one more Gin Rickey.


They used to have an exotic eel-like fish here - affectionately named "Whiskey" - who was very elusive despite his prodigious length; he preferred to hide under rocks and rarely came out. Used to be, you'd get a free drink if you spotted him. Sadly, he's passed on and gone to that great saloon in the sky.

Floyd's Defeat Mass Grave

This marker in Eastwood Cemetery commemorates the Kentucky pioneers killed or captured by indians in the battle that came to be known as "Floyd's Defeat". This was part of the same incident as the Long Run Massacre, in which Huron and Miami indians killed 76 settlers and soldiers during a two-day period.

The marker, which is located beside the cemetery's fence, indicates that the men are actually buried in a mass grave on the other side (see image below).


Also in Eastwood, you'll find an obelisk marking the battle site and honoring Col. John Floyd and his men, who died, as the inscription states, "in a contest with the Indians in 1781".

Kentucky Hit Hard by McAfee Mistake

After computers all over the nation started going haywire today, antivirus vendor McAfee Inc. confirmed that a software update caused its antivirus program to misidentify a harmless Windows file as a virus. This prevented afflicted computers from rebooting.

The Courier-Journal reports that the Louisville Metro Police computers were especially hit hard by the unexpected glitch, as were local school systems. According to Ben Jackey, a spokesman for Jefferson County Public Schools, some employees reported their computers turning off by themselves. In Lexington, computers in City Hall went down, as well as in hospitals.

The helplessness of many organizations without computers serves to illustrate the grave danger of becoming too overdependent on them to run day-to-day operations.

The Center of Yum!

There's been much speculation about what the new Louisville downtown arena would be named, and now the wondering is over: Louisville-based Yum! Brands has become the naming sponsor for the building, which is now called - wait for it - the KFC Yum! Center.

Kind of a kooky name - rather unwieldy - but I'm sure we'll all get used to it. I predict people's habits will devolve into simply calling it either the "KFC Center" or the "Yum Center" in the end. We'll see which. (I prefer "Yum Center" myself, and without that pesky exclamation point.)

I haven't heard PETA's reaction to this turn of events yet, but something tells me there'll be no joy at vegan central tonight. I did notice some waggish Cards fan on a message board note, "When PETA throws red paint on us as we enter the KFC Yum! Center it won't matter because we'll already be wearing red!" A-hyuk.


But what I want to know is, will they be giving away free KFC on opening day in November? (Hint, hint, hint.)

Cruise Missile Over Louisville?

What the heck is it with things in the sky lately? A cylindrical UFO in Florence, a small plane full of ammo crashes in Louisville Fairgrounds, a Vietnam-era Strikemaster plane has an accident at Bowman Field, a spectacular fireball in the sky over all the midwest, plus the usual yearly air show hoopla at Thunder Over Louisville.


It's a good thing I often tend to be looking upwards anyway.

A friend and I were sitting in my back yard chillin' with some iced tea today when we noticed a plane approaching in the distance. But as it got closer, we realized it was no ordinary plane. It looked like a fairly normal long-bodied plane, but it seemed to be wingless.

As it passed low overhead it became clear that it did have two weird tiny stubby winglets protruding from the center of its sides. It also clearly had more tailfins.

After checking online, I realized that the only type of plane or rocket that fit the description of what we both saw was... a cruise missile. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I'll be the first to admit. Where would a cruise missile be going? They're not the sort of thing one flies exhibitionally. They can't even land.


Must remember to keep my camera with me at all times. You never know what you're going to see going overhead these days.

Death of a Frappuccino

One from our Transylvania Gentlemen blog:


So I went into my usual Starbucks the other day - which lately has become the Starbucks kiosk inside the Target store at the corner of Hubbards Lane and Westport - and got my usual Venti Caramel Frappuccino.

As a longtime connoisseur of the frap, I know every little nuance in its preparation and can instantly discern when something's gone awry in the process. Something here was drastically wrong - it tasted bland and nasty, like skim milk in a colloidal suspension of dishwater. Didn't taste any coffee, didn't even feel like I'd ingested any. The texture was all wrong. The color was pale and wan.

I took it back to complain and the barista apologized, gently breaking it to me that corporate has changed the formula of the frappuccino now in order to make it an all-purpose generic drink that can be more flexible and customizable for those who prefer Soy and such. She actually agreed that the end result of the new formula is a substandard drink, but there's nothing she could do about it.

Supposedly the new fraps are healthier, using real sugar instead of HFCS. As a stalwart opponent of HFCS myself, that's applaudable, but the sweetener is clearly not the whole cause of the problem - it's the lack of the old "base" from which all fraps were made, which is now supplanted by a strictly syrup-squirting regimen. Sorry, y'all, but it's literally undrinkable, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Angry reports from my fellow disgruntled frappologists are popping up online like dandelions after a Spring rain.

Starbucks launches their new and ostensibly improved Crappuccinos in May, but because they stopped production on the old mix base, many stores are already serving the new formula without even mentioning that a shell-game switch has been pulled. I found another Starbucks in Crescent Hill that is still using the old base, and I will buy from them until they run out... and then, sadly, looks like Starbucks and I are through. I'll have to go to a local competitor's frap imitation.


It's a shame, too, because I've always been a very open and very vocal supporter of Starbucks, and I had a solo art exhibition at the Middletown Starbucks a few years back. I've always enjoyed the cognitive dissonance that my pro-Starbucks position instills among the masses of knee-jerk box-dwellers out there.

People always expect a radical hipster bohemian artiste such as myself to take the liberal position that all things corporate and huge are automatically bad. Starbucks has always been a useful tool for me to illustrate to others that if I like a product, I don't give a damn where it came from or whether it's "cool", and that I do not oppose something just because it got big and successful. Things are supposed to get big and successful.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that big companies don't sometimes make bad decisions. The people at the top clearly don't drink fraps themselves, or else their tastebuds are shot to hell, because this new formula is strictly riding that train to "New Coke" epic fail. As far as actual coffee-coffee goes, I grind mine fresh at home and use beans from all kinds of companies from Starbucks to Intelligentsia to Red Hot Roasters. The frappuccinos were the whole reason for my visits to Starbucks, and now that I find we've grown apart, I must say buon viaggio, mio fratello.

Dragon Accident at Bowman Field

A BAC 167 Strikemaster plane that had been scheduled to perform in tomorrow's Thunder Over Louisville air show had a close call with disaster today.

The vintage fighter plane reportedly slid off the runway at Bowman Field after somehow suffering damage its landing gear while attempting to land. It wasn't immediately evident what caused the incident, but according to the Courier-Journal, their current theory is that "a gust of wind caused it to lose lift on its wings".

The plane, nicknamed "The Dragon", is part of an air-show company called Red Star & The Dragon. The show must go on, so the Red Star will fly solo without its partner, I hear.

Although there's probably no connection with the Bowman Field incident, problems with aircraft seem to be on an uptrend lately. A small plane filled with firearms and ammo intended for a gun show went down in Louisville Fairgrounds a week and a half ago.

Elsewhere in the world, Qantas Airlines has had five engine malfunction incidents in the last 16 days. Just last week, an Australian jet ended up grounded when it was realized it had somehow sustained a cracked cockpit during its previous flight. That, in turn, makes the mind wander to the recent rise in near-Earth meteoric material, and/or space junk, which may or may not have caused the fireball in the sky seen over the Midwest. (And then there's the oft-invoked alleged duck collision excuse, which sounds a lot like a Glomar Response cover story to me.)

Fireball in the Sky

Last night I was sitting on my front porch gazing at the sky just in time to see a huge fireball blazing down into the distance and disappearing. I was pleased to have seen such an especially large and close meteor, but thought nothing more about it until this morning.

Then this came to my attention. The skies in northern Illinois lit up last night when a meteor apparently created a strange and enormous ball of fire that flashed for but a second.

See a time-lapse gif of the event here. The lines in the sky are apparently unrelated jet trails.

NBC says the fireball was reported seen from faraway points such as Milwaukee and St. Louis around 10pm last night. I saw no explosive fireball, but I did see the mother of all meteors at right about that time, so I have to wonder if there was more than one, and if what I saw wasn't the same one seen in Illinois. It has also been suggested the phenomena could be space junk re-entering the Earth's atmosphere rather than a meteor.

See video of the fireball over Wisconsin here. This is very similar to what I saw here in Louisville, but I saw no explosion-like flash.

Anyone else see this thing?

Li'l Abner Restaurant?

From the JSH mailbag:

Can you do a blog asking people where Lil Abners was located in Louisville?

Thanks.

This is probably a job for the Filson Club, or for a mission to the library to consult old city directories, but let's see if anyone out there pipes up on this. Who remembers the Li'l Abner's Restaurant in Louisville?

"Head Transplant a Success"

I saw a Louisville Courier-Journal headline reading "Head Transplant A Success" on Mojo's local news RSS feed. Excited, I clicked through to find it was a deceptive bit of humor on someone's part - the story's actually about a marble statue in Clarksville, TN whose damaged head got a replacement. Hmph.

I noticed a commenter on the story, who was also duped and disappointed, had expressed hope that the story was going to be about "science fiction come alive." But in fact, there's nothing sci-fi about head transplants - we have the technology right now to perform them, and we have for many years. The only reason scientists haven't done it (at least publicly) is because of ethical issues.

In 1908, Charles Guthrie succeeded in creating the world's first man-made two-headed dog. He grafted a dog's head onto the side of another dog's neck, with the arteries grafted together in such a way that the blood of the host dog flowed through the second head and then back into the original dog's neck. From there, it then proceeded to the brain and back into circulatory system. A photograph of it can be seen in Guthrie's book Blood Vessel Surgery and Its Applications.


In the 1940s, a short documentary called Experiments in the Revival of Organisms told of Sergey Bryukhonenko's research in keeping decapitated heads alive. Although many suspect today that the film was a staged re-enactment of Bryukhonenko's work rather than actual footage, the scientific proof of his work is well documented, and resulted in a Lenin Prize.

In the 1950s Soviet researcher Vladimir Demikhov transplanted twenty puppy heads. Additionally, the respiratory and partial digestive systems were brought along with the heads as well, with the esophagus expelling waste off the side of the dog. Because this exposed cavity left the dogs susceptible to infection, they didn't live long. The most successful one lasted 29 days.


In 1963, Dr. Robert J. White in Cleveland, Ohio successfully did a head transplant between monkeys. The animal was able to smell, taste, hear, and see. The nerves were left entirely intact, and connecting the brain to a blood supply kept it chemically alive. He repeated these experiments with even greater success in the 1970s and then again in 2001.

It's long been rumored that Walt Disney's severed head is kept in a cryogenically frozen container in some secret location, awaiting the day that he can be brought back to life. Unfortunately, cryonics was a new pursuit in those days, and virtually all cryonics labs froze their heads and bodies improperly. Too much time elapsed between the death and the freezing, the freezing process itself was too slow and gradual when it should be as instantaneous as possible, and the temperature should be far colder than what 1970s-era cryonics labs maintained in their freezers.


With cutting-edge advances in stem cell research, nanotechnology, and other innovations, there's no doubt we could be doing human head transplants today if we really, really, really wanted to - but the idea is still too horrifically Frankensteinish for most to even contemplate.

A Singles Guide to Thunder Over Louisville

So, after the mass-exodus housecleaning of writers that took place at Louisville Mojo recently, I thought I was out. But like Al Pacino, they keep pulling me back in. The newsy content and general free-for-all blogging is gone, and now they're back to strictly being a social network, dating service, hookup haven, meat market, however you wanna phrase it. But they retained the JSH 'cause they recognize the skills. Or something like that. I dunno. Maybe. I guess.

But now the powers that be would prefer that I write with a more honed focus on nightlife and dating and romance, instead of my usual rants about the Easter Bunny and Gene Simmons and Big Love and the mysterious giant radioactive Space Ribbon at the edge of the Solar System. Alrighty then. Can do.

And so it is that I offer my humble suggestions for Louisville Mojo's readership regarding that "Thunder Over Louisville" thing. Read that here.

The Little Colonel

All but forgotten now except to historians, classic film buffs, and a few other people in the know, is the Victorian-age meme of the "Little Colonel".

There's a theatre company in Pewee Valley (just outside Louisville) called the Little Colonel Players; perhaps you've seen their logo with an odd little character in a Napoleonic hat. But from whence did this concept originate?

Annie Fellows Johnston wrote a series of novels dealing with the aristocracy in a small southern town. These were semi-biographical and based on actual local people and places. The stories were set in Lloydsborough Valley, which was actually a fictionalized version of Pewee Valley. Johnston, originally from Indiana, eventually made Pewee Valley her home, and she died there in 1931.


Among the books in the "Little Colonel" series: The Little Colonel in Arizona, The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor, The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation, The Little Colonel's Hero, The Little Colonel's House Party, The Little Colonel's Holiday, The Little Colonel at Boarding School, Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding, and The Little Colonel's Chum, Mary Ware. (From that last one, she spun off a popular series of "Mary Ware" books.) Other books in her decidedly dated oeuvre include Miss Santa Clause of the Pullman, The Rescue of the Princess Winsome, Georgina of the Rainbows, It was the Road to Jericho, Mildred's Inheritance, and Ole Mammy's Torment.

In 1935 a film adaptation was made, starring Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore. And after that, Johnston and her beloved characters seemed to vanish down the memory hole. Lists of popular Kentucky authors - even specifically lists of ones from the Victorian age - often omit Johnston and her "Little Colonel" books.


In the stories, the Little Colonel (a young girl), draws inspiration from "The Old Colonel" (a Southern Gentleman who had lost his arm in the Civil War):

"Along this street one summer morning, nearly thirty years ago, came stepping an old Confederate Colonel. Every one greeted him deferentially. He was always pointed out to new comers. Some people called attention to him because he had given his right arm to the lost cause, some because they thought he resembled Napoleon, and others because they had some amusing tale to tell of his eccentricities. He was always clad in white duck in the summer, and was wrapped in a picturesque military cape in the winter."

The Old Colonel was a thinly-veiled dramatization of one George Washington Weissinger, Jr., a well-known lawyer in Louisville and Middletown. He's buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, but visiting his grave is tricky. According to littlecolonel.com:

Cave Hill Cemetery (the most prestigious burial ground in the region) has records that the Old Colonel was buried on February 25, 1903, his wife two months later. A plot map shows the exact location of the graves. But there are no tombstones or grave markers. Why? We don't know. We also can find nothing about the death of Amelia Pearce Weissinger (born Amelia Neville Pearce), his wife, just before her interment beside him on April 30, 1903.

And David Domine, in his great book Haunts of Old Louisville, reports sightings of an elderly one-armed ghost in a Civil War uniform, fitting the Old Colonel's description perfectly.

The Kentucky Virus

This was just emailed to me and I got a chuckle:

You have just received the "Kentucky Virus"!

As we ain't got no programming experience, this here virus works on the honor system. Please delete all the files from your hard drive and manually forward this virus to ever'body in your address book.

Thanky fer your cooperation,

University of Kentucky
Computer Engineering Dept.

I am admittedly inconsistent in my reactions to the "hillbilly" stereotype - some I oppose, others I endorse. As a hillbilly myself, such idiosyncracies are my birthright, I reckon.

Asleep Twelve Years

The November 2, 1906 issue of the New York Times features a story about an Adair County man who entered a "Rip Van Winkle nap", sleeping for 12 years and still continuing to slumber at the time of the article's appearance. Herchall Grider, 63, was apparently not in a coma but somewhere between a minimally conscious state and a persistent vegetative state, since he was able to be unconsciously fed by his family without choking.


The only other appearance of this story I could find was in the Breckenridge News, Cloverport, KY, Wednesday, November 7, 1906 - oddly, trailing after the New York reporting of it by almost a week. Both stories are similarly worded enough to conclude that one was simply a rewrite of the other - or perhaps both are reworded relayings of a third report elsewhere.

Death Penalty Sought For Nunn

We've been following the strange case of Steve Nunn ever since the murder of his former fiancee, Amanda Ross. A manhunt for Nunn ensued after her body was found, and police tracked him down in a Hart County cemetery where his mother and father (former Gov. Louie B. Nunn) are buried. Reportedly, Nunn fired a pistol into the air when officers arrived, and was discovered to be bleeding profusely - he had slit his own wrists in an attempted suicide.

Fayette County Commonwealth's Attorney Ray Larson says his office has "filed a notice of aggravating circumstance and notice of intent to seek the death penalty in the Nunn case."

The Periodic Table of Comic Books

So why on Earth does the University of Kentucky host something called "The Periodic Table of Comic Books", which seeks to collect and log all instances in which comic books make mention of the elements? Well, hey, why not?


As one might surmise, the collection is weighted heavily towards DC's Metal Men, but the other entries range as far afield as 1941's Neon the Unknown to 2001's Star Trek: Divided We Fall.

Small Plane Crashes in Louisville Fairgrounds

A small single-engine plane crashed tonight at the Kentucky Exposition Center, on Ring Road near Preston Highway and I-65. From the clearly visible FAA Aircraft Registration number on the plane, we can trace the plane to a Allen Harvey Friedlander. The man in the plane, who had be cut out of the cockpit, is expected to survive. No word yet on what went wrong.

Richmond Cemetery Vandalized

The growing trend of cemetery vandalism rears its ugly head once again - this time in one of my very favorite graveyards.

From WLKY:

RICHMOND, Ky. -- The groundskeeper at a central Kentucky cemetery says more than 100 gravestones have been toppled and broken, and some are irreplaceable.

Mike Rice, director of grounds for the Richmond Cemetery, tells the Lexington Herald Leader the overturned stones were discovered Saturday morning.

Rice says the stones date from as recently as last year to back to the 1800s.

Rice was gathering names from the stones Monday in the hope of contacting descendants that might be in the area. He said he couldn’t give an estimate of the damage.

It just goes to show, despite the unusually strict rules for visiting the cemetery, it doesn't mean a thing if you don't have proper security to enforce them.

I'm not going to be able to make it to Madison County this week, but if anyone out there gets a chance to swing by Richmond Cemetery and take some photos, I'd really like to see just how bad the damage is, and which of the historic stones were destroyed. E-mail me.

Happy Easter!

Happy Egg Day from all of us over here at Creeps Headquarters! I've got an article about the Pagan origins of the Easter Bunny up today on my Louisville Mojo column, and Krampus the Cat covets my Easter Basket over on his blog. I'd like to thank the Easter Bunny for watching over us all and blessing us with chocolate effigies of himself which we ceremonially bite the heads off of. I'm also thankful that I no longer do the Project Egg thing every Easter, and thankful that Louisiana's Moist Doorknob Comics (the world's most primitive comic book company) have reportedly finally printed the 4-page RV&OI Easter Comic I did for them several years ago.