Unusual Kentucky

Independence Day

2011-07-04T01:11:00.000-04:00

Happy 4th of July!

In no particular order and off the top of my head, these are some of the things I'm working on for the future, goals for the next few years:

First and foremost, more books. Lots of them. Over the last year, the requests I've received for e-books has increased exponentially. I've not been a fan of e-books myself, but there's no denying that this is the way things are headed. And though I lament the death of paper, if people tell me they want e-books, I listen. I'm talking to several different publishers right now, assessing my options, trying to decide if I want to go through them or if there's any reason not to just start my own e-publishing imprint and cut out the middlemen. I continue to welcome your opinions on the subject of e-books and e-readers.

There are a lot of writing projects cluttering up my desk these days - a couple of crime-detective-noir novels I've been working on, plus projects devoted to specific local subjects like Springheel Jack, The Pope Lick Monster, and Kentucky artists. Theoretically Weird Cemeteries for Sterling is still a go, but it seems to be held up in Development Hell for reasons known only to my editors and publisher. My cemeteries book will see the light of day, however, in the next two years one way or another.

I'm still very excited about working for KyForward, a news website focusing on the Bluegrass area (Lexington and surrounding counties) with a consciously positive, upward-toned sense of civil discourse. Which, as you must know, is all too rare on the internet these days. If you'd like to support such a venture, potential advertisers, please contact them and inquire about ad rates! We're also kicking around the idea of doing video content, including an interview show hosted by yours truly.

And I still love Kentucky Monthly magazine! You can find my column, Commonwealth Curiosities in each issue. If you don't see it at your local newstand or bookstore, bug 'em till they stock it! (Having said that, though, it's a hugely popular magazine and getting more popular all the time; I don't think I've ever seen a reputable store that didn't carry it.)

I'm still a painter first and foremost, although hyping my primitive neo-expressionist outsider-folk-art flavored canvases has taken a back seat in the last couple years to everything else. I aim to rectify that in the weeks and months ahead, with a renewed drive to get these paintings in the hands of as many people as possible, by any means necessary. Do you want a JSH original in your home or office? Talk to me. It's so doable. I offer interest-free payment plans for every budget. (And my Happy & Froggie painting that was featured in the film When Happy Met Froggie is still available, although its price has gone up since the movie was released.)

Something else I've been slowly putting together over the years is material for an Unusual Kentucky museum - something that would be not only a legitimate educational and historical museum, but also take a truly "Weird Kentucky" spin on the whole thing, showing cultural artifacts of the Commonwealth that might be a little - okay, a lot - fringier than what you might see at the Frazier. There have been some nibbles of interest in the concept from parties in both Louisville and Lexington, but I'm holding out until I get a guaranteed deal that gives me control over the place if it's going to be using my name. There are some recent rumblings that give me hope this thing will actually happen, and sooner than later. Keep your fingers crossed with me; it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Those are the primary projects on my front burners, but there's plenty more still bubbling under. My interest in Kentucky's horse industry is going to manifest in some way sooner or later, we'll see. A couple more goals I have: I intend to operate a Steampunk-themed bar and a hillbilly/exotica miniature golf course (the crazy over-the-top kind with giant statues and weird gimmicks like you see down in Pigeon Forge) before I die. All in time. Wait and see. (And when that retro bar does come to life, my bartending blog Transmissions from Agent J will be pressed back into service.)

There's still more. A lot more. This'll do for now though. Stay tuned to JSH News for the latest updates on my dreams and schemes! And remember, I can always be reached, by anyone on the planet, at jshpaint@gmail.com. You can also text me on Twitter or just pick up the phone and call me at 502.649.3378. Find me.

That Was Then, This Is Now

2011-07-03T00:01:00.005-04:00

Tomorrow, July 4th, will be my last post on most of my blogs, for some time to come. I'm increasingly busy with a lot of exciting real-world projects that demand my full attention, and I just don't have as much time to devote to the internet.

That may sound odd, since my internet presence has always been rather over-the-top. But the fact is, this is not the same Internet I originally signed on for. I won't bore you with the details and you'll find I've belabored the point suitably elsewhere, but suffice it to say I'm bored with the internet and I don't like the direction it's going - and by extension, the direction it's taking most of us.

In 1993 I was introduced to the internet by my friend JLK. I was skeptical about the whole idea of it, and the luddite in me was fundamentally opposed to it. However, he was quite persuasive and pointed out to me several key points that the net had to offer. In just a couple of short years I went from being a total noob to being someone whose whole life was represented online - I was also one of the first bloggers, although nobody called it that back in 1994. By 2003 I had a website called Unusual Kentucky, which first had a dot com and then moved to Geocities (which is now archived by Oocities.) The website moved to this blogspot location in 2008 to tie in with the release of my book Weird Kentucky. And I'm sure it will have yet another incarnation down the road; we haven't heard the last of it. But for now, I'm going to spend more time in the real world, not the electronic world.

I'll still be online plenty, of course, checking email and doing research. But as of tomorrow, my contribution to Victorian Squares will diminish severely but not entirely. My blogs Unusual Kentucky, Voraxical Theatre, Revelation Awaits An Appointed Time, Krampus the Cat, Whitewashed Windows and Vacant Stores, Creeps Records, Transmissions from Agent J, and JSHNYC are going into cryogenic sleep.

The JSH Combo blog will probably return if and when that twice-aborted musical project reaches fruition. The Catclaw Theatre Diaries will also be updated when there's relevant news to report. Transylvania Gentlemen will eventually be retooled for the purposes of that organization, but by someone other than myself. I'm still looking forward to cranking out more fiber batts for the Etsy crowd soon, but the exploits will probably not be followed on my Appalachian Voodoo Fibers blog in the foreseeable.

Rebecca and friends over at the Telecrylic Foundation will continue operating my official JSH News blog (with my direct input, of course. I'm too much of a control freak), so that is now more than ever the place to go for the latest "News flash! JSH eats a turkey sandwich!" breaking news. I'm not sure what's up with the actual Telecrylic International blog, but I suspect it's dead in the water since it's going to be superceded by another online archive of my paintings and comics.

I already saw all this writing on the wall back in the winter, when I got rid of all my dot-com websites, including jeffreyscottholland.com, jshnyc.com, jshdc.com, jshla.com, superfrothco.com, catclawtheatre.com, voraxica.com, voraxium.com, and more that I'm probably forgetting. I thought I would miss them all dearly the moment they went offline. I don't.

So what is surviving the purge? After tomorrow, other than JSH News, the best place to keep up with what I'm up to will be:

* My Twitter feed (I don't use it as a social network and you don't have to be a member; in fact, 99.9% of my friends are not on it, they just read it directly on the web same as any other of my blogs)

* My photo blog will also continue for the time being. The mundane details of my day-to-day life will still be over-exposed amply for the handful of people on Earth who care, so between this and my Twitter feed, my stalkers shouldn't feel shut out in the cold.

* My writing blog will still continue to exist. More details about this tomorrow.

Tomorrow, on the fourth of July, we'll get into the good news - all the fun things that I'm working on that'll be better than blogging, and things that I want you, dear reader, to feel free to get involved in! As Jack Lord used to say, "Be here! Aloha!"

The Final Frontier

2011-07-01T12:38:00.020-04:00

It's entirely fitting that Daniel Boone should be the person most recognized as a symbol of Kentucky. Like the greatest men in history, his legend has merged with his original life until even historians aren't entirely sure what's what sometimes. (And some interpretations of quantum physics suggest that even if parts of his legend weren't originally factual to begin with, they retroactively are true now in some sense.)

Imagine what men like Daniel Boone had to endure just to survive in a world that wouldn't slow down and just kept changing, again and again and again. Even the very calendar by which men marked time changed in his lifetime, from the Julian to the Gregorian in 1752. This meant that although his birthdate had been October 22, suddenly everyone around him went along with this new-fangled idea that his birthday was now November 2. It must have truly seemed to him, at that point, that the entire world had well and truly jumped the shark, drunk the Kool-Aid and gone utterly mad. (I know just how he feels.)

Between his birth in 1734 and his death in 1820, he saw a mysterious new land - with thirteen British colonies fighting to survive - turn into an independent nation by way of violent revolution; then he worked to impose order on the chaos of the frontier by forging a new land called Transylvania, only to have it stolen by the state of Virginia. He saw that land eventually wrest itself from Virginia's grip and call itself Kentucky, but then he watched in disgust as it quickly became tainted with the very same governmental bureaucracy and cronyism that had forced the American Revolution to cast off despotic rulers in the first place. Frustrated with lawsuits and debt, Boone fled even further out - into the wilderness that would eventually become Missouri, where he died defeated, disillusioned, and truly terrified of what this continent had so quickly become.

That's not to say that his life was miserable and misspent - by no means. Boone had a blast. You've got to have some real joie de vivre to go boldly where no Pennsylvanian has gone before, and Boone went with a smile. A story is told, reportedly by trailblazer Kasper Mansker, that when one of his expeditions cut their way into a section of the Cumberland area for what they thought was the first time by any white man, they heard a terrifying animal-like yodeling call in the distance. Fearful but undeterred, they bravely trudged on until the horrific caterwauling grew louder. Finally Mansker himself told the party to fall back while he went ahead to investigate. What he found was Daniel Boone, sprawled out on a deerskin blanket on the forest floor, drunk out of his mind and singing at the top of his lungs. Sadly, history does not record what song Boone was butchering.

In his younger days, his kinship with this strange "Dark and Bloody Ground" was strong. He and his brother Squire entered the region at around the spot where Elkhorn City currently stands, and spent a good chunk of the rest of his life here, exploring, trekking, ekeing out a living in terra incognita where he experienced strange prophetic dreams, burning springs, and the devious spirits of the coal and the corn.

Countless more men like Boone tried to tame this soil and its ghosts, each with some success but not quite enough to stave off what was to come. Men like Kaspar Mansker, Henry Scaggs, and John Montgomery aren't household words today like Boone's, but they should be. Unfortunately, that is not the way of history; the names and data of frontiersmen are not memorized in the manner afforded basketball players and rock stars, not in the average man's home and probably not at the Filson Club either.

And though adventurer-explorer-rogue Kit Carson took his six-guns West and didn't do much Kentucky scouting, he was born here - in Madison County, to be precise; Richmond, to be even more so.

The mountain man Jim Bridger also traipsed through a post-Boone Kentucky before finding further freedom out West. However, at the end of the road, Bridger found himself holed up in Missouri, just like Boone, dogged by thievery from the cold unthinking machine of governmental bureaucracy. I'm especially intrigued by a story Bridger liked to tell in his old age - one that has been cited of an example of his sense of humor and proclivity for tall tales - but I see something even deeper and poetic in it.

As Bridger would tell the tale, there was a time he was being doggedly pursued by one hundred Cheyenne warriors out for blood. After being adventurously chased for several miles, during which time he narrowly eluded them at every turn, Bridger suddenly found himself stuck at the end of a box canyon with nowhere to go. The war cries of the Indians grew louder as they closed in on him. At this point in telling the story, Bridger hung his head sadly and let his voice trail off, going silent. After an uncomfortable silence, this prompted his listener to ask, "What happened then, Mr. Bridger?"

Bridger's response: "They killed me."

Another legendary larger-than-life figure was Jesse James (pictured at right with brother Frank.) He was not a Kentuckian per se, but his mother was (she was from Midway in Woodford County) and he spent a lot of time in Kentucky during his checkered career of carousing and crime; enough so that I feel quite comfortable considering him an honorary Kentuckian. It's in that same spirit that I call myself an Estill Countian because my mom's from there and because I spent so much time there in my formative years, even though I technically lived just on the other side of the Estill-Madison border in Waco, and even though I attended school a fur, fur piece away, all the way out to Richmond's Model Laboratory School. And Boone himself was, after all, born in Pennsylvania.

While sitting around drinking at the infamously haunted Talbott Tavern in Bardstown one evening, Jesse James claimed that he saw the murals painted on the walls of an upstairs room coming to life, and shot the walls full of holes in his panic. (Then again, it may have just been the fact that he was three sheets to the wind. And maybe hallucinating on a bad batch of bourbon.) Some speculate he still has buried stolen loot somewhere in the vicinity of Mammoth Cave; perhaps even in the cave itself.

Jesse was no hero and no saint, but he was in possession of a free spirit and an indomitable will, for better or for worse - which is probably more than can be said for an increasing number of American males whose brain's way of processing information is so radically different from his ancestors that he almost cannot be said to be the same species of life form as Mssrs. Boone and James.

"United We Stand, Divided We Fall", says Kentucky's state slogan. And if this pithy saying is merely intended to be applied to the two gentlemen depicted on the flag, well, that's fine. After all, even Lao Tzu, Napoleon and Caesar knew the importance of "Divide and Conquer" as a military motto.

But let us never kid ourselves that it should ever, even for a second, mean that it's better to put one's own personal principles aside in the interest of "making peace" and seriously compromising yourself. Making a contrived sort of peace when you don't really mean it only leads to more bitter battles down the road - just look at international politics or romantic relationships. (Interestingly, the original seal simply showed two gentlemen with arms locked, sometimes actually hugging. Somewhere along the way it became our present seal with a Daniel Boone-looking frontiersman shaking hands with a fop.)

Bill Monroe wasn't the compromising type, and neither were the Everly Brothers. They both dug their heels in for the long term with McCoy-Hatfield sort of feuds - Monroe with the Stanley Brothers, Phil and Don with each other - and though part of me loathes the negativity of the grudge-clinging mud-slinging involved, another part of me respects their determination to stand up for whatever it was they thought was right. (Ultimately, all parties involved finally figured out, a little too late, perhaps, that other unseen outside factors were conspiring to cause their disagreements.)

Maybe the state slogan really means that you yourself, each individual, should be united in your beliefs, your thoughts, your moral and ethical principles, and that you should not be internally divided. Cast off doubt and get yourself some certainty.

"Where is all this leading, Mr. Holland?"

Well, once again we seem to be at one of those times in history where everything is changing so rapidly that we can't seem to keep up with it all and it's messing up a LOT of people's lives - weird thing is, most of them aren't even aware of it yet. But I have hope for the future, because part of my love for this state comes from its power of intention, its will, its backbone - a backbone that's sorely lacking in some other parts of the country. Used to be, Kentucky and Texas were often held up as two of the best examples of the national spine. Texas isn't what it used to be, but I still believe it will also return any day now to its former glory. Kentucky's still one of the best places going on the planet, despite doomsayers, gloomsayers, naysayers, negative nellies and numbskulls who can't see the same things Jesse James saw, who can't feel what Daniel Boone felt.

I feel it. You feel it too, don'tcha?

Ghosts of Sue Bennett College

2011-06-25T21:08:00.002-04:00

In the 19th century, Kentuckian Sue Bennett was a teacher and social activist who sought to improve education in impoverished rural areas. She and her sister Belle Bennett (not to be confused with the vaudeville actress of the same name) raised $40,000 - a considerable sum of money in the late 1800s! - to found their own school. Sue died before the project was completed, and Belle opened it in London, KY in 1897, calling it the Sue Bennett Memorial School in her sister's honor.

After a century of success, Sue Bennett College was forced to close down in 1997. For reasons that are somewhat opaque to me, the Federal Government rescinded their funding, on which they had come to completely depend. Oprah Winfrey tried to intercede by calling attention to the school's plight on her TV show, but it was to no avail. Sue Bennett College joined the graveyard of defunct Kentucky colleges like Southeastern Christian College (Winchester), Bethel College (Hopkinsville), Lees College (Jackson), Lexington Baptist College (Lexington), Urania College (Glasgow), Pleasant J. Potter College, (Bowling Green), and Cedar Bluff College (Woodburn).

The buildings are still there, however. Some have been repurposed but the ghosts of the school remain. According to the Shadowlands: "They say the dorms and the theater are haunted and that Belle Bennett roams the halls all night playing the piano’s turning off and on lights and watching people sleep that still stay there if you go in your sure to find something." (misspelling and typos retained from original source).

Meanwhile, Theresa says: "a former student also shared information on a suicide that ocurred on the 2nd floor of Helm Hall. The apparition of the young lady who hung herself in that dorm is reported to have been seen more often than Belle." (I'm not sure how anyone would know whether the ghost in question is Belle or the suicide victim or someone else entirely, but there you have it.)

The biggest ghost haunting Laurel County seems to be that of the college itself. Many locals are still lamenting its passing, and hoping that some sort of higher education institution might form and put these college buildings back on track to their intended purpose.

Zombie Warning in Florence

2011-06-23T16:41:00.008-04:00

This from Cincinnati.com:

As if orange barrels, speed traps and distracted motorists sharing the road weren’t stressful enough, drivers on southbound Interstate 71/75 Thursday morning were given another warning – beware of the undead.

An electronic highway sign on the interstate near the Ky. 18 exit read: “Nightly lane closures, zombies ahead.”

The sign was apparently hacked, said Nancy Wood, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet spokeswoman.

There's been a spate of these "zombie" sign hacks across the country recently, and the media seems to be generally treating it with kid gloves. Me, I don't consider any form of hacking to be a laughing matter, nor do I have tolerance for those who try to glorify it with terms like "hacktivism", etc.

The sign was supposed to warn drivers of the danger of road work ahead. If whoever changed the message is caught, I hope they throw the book at him so hard it dents his head.

Man Goes Fishing, Catches Bison Skeleton

2011-06-20T16:20:00.005-04:00

According to the Associated Press, a man named Charles Ruphard from Owensboro went on a fishing trip but instead wound up hauling home a giant intact bison skeleton.

Ruphard and his wife, Lee, went fishing June 10 and decided to walk along a river bank, which he declined to identify to protect the site. Ruphard told The Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer his wife saw some bones sticking out of the bank about 10 feet from them and realized the bones were large.

"You could see places of bones sticking out for 7 or 8 feet, and we thought this could be interesting," Ruphard said.

William Silvia, a University of Kentucky animal science professor and researcher in the school's College of Agriculture, reviewed photos of the bones, then retrieved them. Silvia said the bones were a bison, and a colleague who is a state parks naturalist believes that the animal is less than 10,000 years old.

Two hundred years ago, Bison were plentiful in Kentucky, but became scarce in these parts around the very early 19th century. There are several efforts to reintroduce them to Kentucky, with herds at Big Bone Lick and Land Between the Lakes (pictured above.)

Kentucky is also home of the nation's largest bison-farming operations, the Kentucky Bison Company in Goshen.

Celebrity Numerology

2011-06-19T23:59:00.002-04:00

One from the Victorian Squares blog:

Okay, now this is creepy: I just found a "Celebrity Numerology" site that has a page about me, breaking down my personal numerology profile, astrological info, and biorhythm charts.

Even though I think it's all a buncha fried baloney, I have to say some of their observations about me are fascinating. Check out their "Soul Urge" page about me:

Jeffrey Scott Holland wants success in its fullest meaning - wealth, power, and material comforts. He has an enormous ambition. Jeffrey dreams of big projects, great undertakings, and rewards.

Holland is a visionary. He sees the horizon and the promise. In general, Jeffrey Scott Holland also sees the methods necessary to fulfill that promise. But he is not especially good with details; Jeffrey needs others to help him deal with the smaller parts of the picture. His challenge is to make full use of the full spectrum of his abilities, as indicated by his other core numbers. In the same way, Holland must bring forth the best from others and orchestrate their talents toward the realization of his vision. In short, Jeffrey Scott Holland must lead by example, demonstrating the standard for commitment, determination, and excellence.

Pretty wacky, eh? Wait, it gets wackier. This is from their numerological personality profile of me:

He is hard to get to know, and is often withdrawn. It is common for people to see Jeffrey Scott Holland's focus turn inside of himself in the middle of a conversation. Jeffrey has the makings of an intellectual and an aristocrat but he has to guard against arrogance and an attitude of "I have got it all figured out". There have been periods in Jeffrey Scott Holland's life when he had little concern for his clothing or fashion, while at other times he is very aware of his clothing and uses it to make a specific impression. Jeffrey appears dignified no matter how he dresses, but a well groomed seven with a touch of dash definitely has an advantage. Holland's confidence increases when he knows he is well dressed.

Jeffrey Scott Holland is recognized as spiritual and religious, with his very own ideas regarding the purpose of life and the Creator. He is an inspired speaker, but only when discussing subjects that really interest him. Otherwise, Jeffrey is not one for chatter. His love of knowledge and wisdom shows.

Wow, that's actually hitting a little too close to home. In fact, I had some trepidation about next clicking their "Destiny" page about me. Turns out I'm an "11", which it says here is "the most highly charged destiny number" of them all (say it like Jim Morrison):

Jeffrey Scott Holland has always sensed that he is different, but it was an indefinable feeling. Jeffrey is enormously sensitive and aware, especially as a child. This made Holland vulnerable to all conflicts and painful situations. For most of his upbringing, however, Jeffrey Scott Holland did not realize that other people did not possess the same sensitivity, nor did they see the same things he was seeing.

Holland compensated for his sense of separation in childhood by creating an elaborate fantasy world. He daydreamed more than other children. He had a lively imagination and even in adulthood has a hard time separating reality from fantasy.

Jeffrey Scott Holland's challenge is to bring forth his primitive, earthy strength. He needs to be grounded in order to deal with his lightning bolts. The more Jeffrey is able to call upon his inherent human strength, the greater his capacity to take advantage of his extremely sensitive awareness. Once this is accomplished, Holland's antagonist becomes his benefactor.

Jeffrey is highly emotional and dependent upon relationships. Emotionally, he goes up and down with the fortunes of his love life.

He is idealistic, impractical, and at times disorderly. Holland is often unrealistic in his expectations.

His reasons for doing things are usually born of a mixture of logic, emotion, and intuition, which can rarely be explained satisfactorily to his more rational associates.

I don't know whether to be insulted because the unflattering parts are absolutely spot-on, or to be pleased about the hyper-mystical stroking it's giving me at the same time. I think I'm just gonna try to forget about the whole thing and go lay down and listen to The Monkees some more.

Death of Lexington Mall

2011-06-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

The long goodbye of Lexington Mall continues. I recently snapped these photographs of the bulldozers laying waste to the place. If you look really close, you can see a Regis Hairstylists sign in an open space that was once a mall corridor.

Preservationist and clinger-to-the-past though I am, I hold no grudges against the church that's about to be built here. The grudge I hold, rather, is against the executives who sat in an office in some other faraway city and let this property rot for so many years. There was nothing stopping them from enacting any number of proactive efforts to do something with the Mall. Instead, they ignored it and let it slowly dilapidate, giving a major eyesore and embarrassment to Lexington for years.

Al-Qaeda Trial in Kentucky?

2011-06-17T10:15:00.007-04:00

As reported here recently, two Iraqi men - Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohamad Shareef Hammadi - were arrested for conspiring to aid the terrorist group Al-Qaeda from their home base of Bowling Green, KY.

According to FOX News, the FBI claims to have identified two of Alwan's fingerprints on an unexploded bomb that was recovered by U.S. troops in Iraq.

The Obama administration has announced its intention that Alwan and Hammadi be tried in Federal Court in Bowling Green, but Mitch McConnell has voiced opposition to this plan. He fears the risks of holding an unprecedented terrorism trial in Kentucky, and notes the costs and logistics of trying to provide security for everyone involved will be a huge problem.

"There's no reason in the world to be subjecting any American city to all of the complexities and security problems related to trying a foreign terrorist in a U.S. court," McConnell said. And I don't often agree with what Mr. McConnell has to say, but in this instance, I am right there with him. While I don't share his view that the terror suspects should be denied a normal trial and shipped off to a kangaroo tribunal at Guantanamo, I do agree that Kentucky doesn't need to be put at further risk from psychopaths. It's bad enough that so much attention has already been called to Kentucky being directly involved in the alleged death of Osama Bin Laden, and now by holding an Al-Qaeda trial here, we're practically begging for trouble.

I say hold the trial, but hold it somewhere else, not in my backyard. Hold it in the desert someplace, or in an underground bunker or an undisclosed location. President Obama has painted a target on our state's head once already this year, let's not make it even worse than it already is.

Flower Bed

2011-06-15T02:06:00.002-04:00

This waggish gag was seen in someone's yard in the Whipps Millgate area.

United Kentucky Liberation Front?

2011-06-14T21:40:00.003-04:00

According to Louisville.com, a man tried to rally attention for his "United Kentucky Liberation Front" group by sending pornography to Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, John Boehner, Ron Paul, Mitch McConnell and others.

I'm trying to think of another example that might knock this one out of the running for the most monumentally idiotic PR move in the last two hundred years.

I can't think of any. I think this guy's got it sewn up.

This incident apparently occurred last summer, but the man was only taken into custody on June 9. According to the Louisville.com article, "If convicted, Edwards faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison. He faces maximum potential penalties of 30 years in prison, a $500,000 fine and supervised release of at least five years and it could be any term of years including life."

What does porn have to do with liberating Kentucky? Well, this guy says he only added the porn images to his mass e-mail to "get noticed" to help promote his cause. Groan. And what cause, pray tell, is that? This "United Kentucky Liberation Front" advocates the secession of Kentucky from the United States. That in itself actually doesn't sound like such a bad idea to me sometimes, but how many brain cells does it take to understand that doing something like this is only going to turn the public against you and kill any chance your silly organization ever had of ever making any headway in the future?

I googled a bit and found this cut-and-pasted Topix post in which someone from this group laid out their thinking:

It is largly unknown that Kentucky is actually not legally part of the United States. The United Kentucky Liberation Front has recently done some research into the subject and has written this report on it. These are the laws keeping Kentucky an Indepedent nation.
1. Proclamation of 1763 reserved Kentucky for Native Americans, but was broken though it was supposed to stay in effect after the United States took over.(additionally there are no federally or state recognized tribes in this land).
2. In the Treaty of Paris (1783) the British delegation declared only the 13 colonies free states. It also said that loyalist land and property was to stay in their possession, this includes Native American land. This is supported by the fact that none of Florida or Canada became America.
3. In 1784 a constitutional convention was held in Danville in which General James Wilkinson proposed secession from the United States and in 1785 there was a petition to Virginia to become “free and independent”.
4. In 1850 Kentucky was declared a commonwealth, and is the only commonwealth outside the original 13 colonies. Since the original colonies banded together originally as a confederation, implying they were all republics. Therefore Kentucky is an independent republic not banded with the original 13 colonies.
5. Before the civil war, Kentucky was a slave state and declared itself neither Union nor Confederacy. During the war though, it had both a Union and Confederate government and was admitted to the Confederacy in 1861. It was also had the only Union Capital that the Confederacy captured. Additionally Kentucky is the birthplace of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Finally, when Lincoln asked the Governor of Kentucky for troops, Governor Magoffin replied “I will send not a man nor a dollar for the wicked purpose of subduing my sister southern states.” This all proves that Kentucky was technically a state of the Confederacy, but was never readmitted to the Union and was not occupied by the Army during the reconstruction.
6. In the Montevideo Convention (Article 1), which was signed by the United States, states that the state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a permanent population (over 4 million); a defined territory (the state of Kentucky); government (the legislative, executive, and judicial branch of the state of Kentucky); and capacity to enter into relations with the other states (Kentucky was de facto recognized by Spain in 1787, and the Kentucky Government has given awards to numerous foreign officials such as Winston Churchill or Yahya Jammeh).
7. Native American rights are broken by government. There are currently no recognized tribes in Kentucky, even though it was originally set aside for natives. Currently the Cherokee Tribe of kentucky, Kentucky Cherokee Heritage Group, the Ridgetop Shawnee, and the Southern Cherokee Nation of Kentucky are striving for recognition.

Alllllrighty then.

There are so many confused legal points in this diatribe (not to mention misspelling and incoherent grammar) that I'm not even going to bother picking it all apart here. The part about the Native Americans is right on, of course - and I do support the survival efforts of groups like Southern Cherokee Nation of Kentucky. But the Cherokee Nation doesn't need fools like this ruining their cause by mailing porno to Palin. With allies like that, who needs enemies?

Giant IOU

2011-06-13T10:27:00.001-04:00

One from my Visual Slushpile photo blog:

As I've ranted in my blogs before, I'm of two minds on graffiti - having been both a graffiti artist and a property owner whose building was defaced by graffiti in my contradictory past, I take each example of this "art" on a case by case basis. I can't condone any graffiti that defaces someone's home, someone's place of business, or a historical structure. Especially when the work is really, really, really lame, such as this "IOU" tag is.

But I have to say, this one makes me scratch my head in wonderment: how the heck did they do that? It seems spray-painted but the letters are impossibly tall, and I don't think they dragged a scaffolding out there just to do this. I'm guessing they duct-taped the sprayer button down on a can tied to a long stick?

Otis Hidden

2011-06-13T00:06:00.001-04:00

I was curious about the old Otis Hidden Company building in Portland, KY (West of Louisville), and did some Googling.

Turns out Mr. Hidden was in the business of Cabinet Hardware & Floor Coverings, both imported and manufactured, and they once had deluxe retail/office headquarters at 326 W. Main in Louisville, which is now the Hubbuch & Co. building next to Actors Theatre. The factory in Portland must have been for manufacturing and storage.

Mr. Hidden's name also turns up in some sort of legal squabble between a "Kentucky Furniture manufacturing Company" and the Masonic Savings Bank circa 1896, and a genealogy site mentions an Otis Hidden from California who married one Serena Fuqua. Could there have been more than one Otis Hidden? Evidently so, because here's another one who married a Judith Ladd and lived in Vermont.

Midway

2011-06-12T11:58:00.004-04:00

At the halfway point between Frankfort and Lexington you'll find the spooky little town of Midway, so named for its equidistant position which was deliberately chosen by the Lexington-Ohio Railroad Company. Accidentally and coincidentally, it also happens to be equidistant between Versailles and Georgetown.

The site where Midway now stands was once a vast farm owned by a man named John Francisco. Each year, the Francisco's Farm Arts Festival is held in Midway at Equus Run Vineyards, and this year's is coming up soon - June 25 and 26.

The area was once heavily populated by native American mound builders, which no doubt lends to the spooky feeling in the air here.

Other interesting Midway factoids:

John Hunt Morgan stopped here on July 15, 1862, in an effort to trick the Union soldiers chasing him into thinking he was heading towards Frankfort. Morgan instead hid out briefly, then backtracked.

The Porterhouse steak supposedly originated here, at the still-standing Porter House. However, the Oxford English Dictionary credits its development to New York, circa early 19th century, before Midway even existed.

Zerelda Elizabeth Cole James Simms Samuel, mother of Jesse James and mentioned in the Tom Waits song "Diamond in Your Mind", was born here on January 29, 1825.

Fudging the Data

2011-06-09T17:03:00.005-04:00

Two summers ago, I happened across a Wikipedia article about an alleged ghost town in Kentucky what go by name of Fudge.

I don't remember exactly what I was doing that afternoon, but I was probably tussling with stuff relating to my multiple pastimes of theatre, painting, music, writing, eating, and drinking, and hastily whipped up a quickie UnK post basically relaying the info that this Wikipedia page about this ghost town existed. And then wandered off in search of adventure.

Now, two years later, it has come to my attention that - shockeroo - Wikipedia just might be a load of baloney. I know for a fact they're consistently wrong about a number of subjects (including myself!) and I've heard some rumblings on the web that this Fudge article is a fabrication from start to finish.

Unfortunately, these rumblings come from places like the dreaded Topix, which is one of those typical internet message boards where angry people bicker with one another endlessly about nothing. Still, if the people in the Hickman area are all saying they've never ever heard of this "Fudge" place, it makes me wonder.

The usda.gov link that the Wikipedia page provides as a source for the Fudge article contains, in fact, no mention of a Fudge, KY. And some Flaming Lips fans have stated that, contrary to the article, there is no such thing as a video for the song "Chrome Plated Suicide".

Does anyone else have any evidence for this fabled Fudge other than this increasingly suspect Wikipedia article?

Localocracy

2011-06-08T20:49:00.002-04:00

My new column for KyForward, Jeffrey Scott Holland's Kentucky, can be found every Friday on their Localocracy section (look for it in the upper right corner of their index page). The first entry is a bit about the Hunt-Morgan House and some of the folks who have dwelt there.

Dangerous Pole

2011-06-08T11:26:00.002-04:00

This utility pole in Portland, KY has been smashed nearly in two and is toppling dangerously, but continues to be allowed to remain in this state. Isn't someone concerned?

Old Coca-Cola Building, Shelbyville

2011-06-04T13:25:00.004-04:00

Oh, for the good old days when every town, great and small, had a local Coca-Cola bottling plant. Even my small hometown of Richmond had one on Big Hill Avenue (it's now the Richmond Register offices).

This fine intact specimen, built in 1930, can be found in Shelbyville, KY, on your right as you head East out of Shelbyville on US 60.

There was a "for lease" sign out front but some activity was visible inside, so I'm not sure if they meant the whole building or just individual spaces inside it. This realtor's page says it's now "off market".

Al-Qaeda in Kentucky?

2011-06-01T10:42:00.005-04:00

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that two Iraqi men have been accused of conspiring to aid the terrorist group Al-Qaeda from, of all places, Bowling Green, Kentucky - where they've lived since 2009.

According to the CSM:

"Waad Ramadan Alwan and Muhamad Shareef Hammadi, both of Bowling Green, have entered not guilty pleas and are being held pending a pretrial detention hearing. They were charged in a 23-count indictment returned last week.

Mr. Alwan is accused of conspiring to kill US nationals abroad, distributing information on the manufacture and use of improvised explosive devices in Iraq, and plotting to transfer Stinger missiles to Iraq.

Mr. Hammadi is charged with attempting to provide material support to Al Qaeda in Iraq, and conspiring to transfer Stinger missiles."

Nature's Morphology

2011-05-30T22:55:00.004-04:00

Sometimes, strolling through Kentucky's wilderness, I'm struck by the imagery in ordinary nature scenes that can restimulate reactions in the mind. Psychologists call it pareidolia but I think there's something more to it than that. Jung was trying to understand it. Rupert Sheldrake came closer. Maybe The Wizard of Oz got it. Lost definitely did.

Forward is This Way

2011-05-27T11:35:00.007-04:00

There's still a few formatting tweaks forthcoming (the paragraphing is unintentionally oddly spaced out) but my first piece for KyForward is live on the web now! Woo-hoo!

I'm excited to be on board as a part of the KyForward team, because their positive, constructive outlook meshes well with my own stubborn views on newsmedia sensationalism and real winning (as opposed to Charlie Sheen's hijacking of the word.)

KyForward is a brand new site - so new, in fact, it's still under construction and beta as all get out, but come along for the ride with me and watch it continue to grow and flourish in the days and weeks ahead.

I'll be doing a weekly column for KyForward doing my usual unusual thing, as well as spotlight features on notable Kentuckians who are out there achieving, accomplishing, and acting rather than doing nothing. If that sounds like somebody you know - heck, maybe it sounds like you! - call me, email me, send me smoke signals.

Consider the Cobblestones

2011-05-26T22:21:00.004-04:00

One from my Visual Slushpile photo blog:

In downtown Louisville, under every street, the original cobblestone streets are hidden beneath a layer of pavement. And beneath those cobblestones is soil that has not been seen by the eyes of man since the mid-1800s.

Anything that someone chose to hide under a cobblestone in the 19th century, or buried in the ground even before the cobblestone streets were laid, has been hidden very well indeed for a long, long time.

Just you think on that.

Stolen Italian Icon Found at Speed Museum

2011-05-24T17:57:00.004-04:00

Very interesting piece today from the New York Times about a painted gatefold icon that was stolen in Italy in 1971. 40 years after it vanished, it turned up in a dusty back storeroom of Louisville's Speed Museum.

The Speed's not to blame, though - they acquired the piece from a reputable gallery in New York for $38,000 in 1973, just two years after it had been purloined. How it got to that gallery is a matter that is still being investigated by the Department of Homeland Security. (Seriously? Since when do they handle 1970s cold-case files of burglaries in Italy?)

According to the article:

Under a settlement negotiated by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and announced on Monday, the Speed will soon turn over the painting to Homeland Security, which will transfer it to Italian cultural authorities. (The collector who owned the painting in 1971 has since died, and the authorities will be responsible for determining who is entitled to it now.)

Before that, however, the museum will show the painting, which it has not exhibited for at least a decade, from June 9 to July 3 as part of a small exhibit that will, according to the museum’s director, Charles L. Venable, “contextualize it in a larger world of provenance research and repatriation of works of art.”

Storm, 5/23/2011

2011-05-23T20:57:00.003-04:00

Two summers ago, I found myself caught in a spooky pre-tornadic storm as I made my way East on Shelbyville Road and then moved sideward to Westport. It happened all over again today.

Photographs rarely convey just how creepy some storms can be; though these examples aren't as dramatic looking as some of my other storm images, the knowledge that this was part of the same weather system that destroyed Joplin, MO gave me extra incentive to hustle home ASAP.

Genny's Diner

2011-05-22T00:00:00.002-04:00

One from our Whitewashed Windows and Vacant Stores blog:

Although I rarely ate there, Genny's Diner was a Louisville tradition and I will miss it. Their deep-fried "frickled" pickles were a unique local item which you don't see every day.

Owner Frank Faris, after years of battling with the city over his property next door, has been put out of business. Part of it is his own fault: he steadfastly refused to make ordered upkeep improvements to the home, despite court orders to do so. But I think Faris got a raw deal in the end: when he announced his intention to bulldoze the house to make more parking spaces for his diner, a group of concerned citizens got together and colluded to hurriedly designate the dump a "historic home", specifically so he couldn't do what he wanted to with his own property.

And when he still refused to cooperate, a judge ordered him to sell the house. And when he couldn't find a buyer, the judge actually ordered him to give it away for free. Can a judge really do that? Well, this one did, and I didn't hear many people squawking about it.

The way the whole thing turned out for Faris leaves a very unsavory taste in my mouth. It's true that his own behavior is why it all ended in drama and Faris' arrest, but I nevertheless sympathize with Faris for trying to conduct himself as if he was still living in an era when people were allowed to do what they wanted to with their own personal property. Those days are gone, and with their passing we've all lost something bigger than fried pickles.

A gourmet ice cream place called the Comfy Cow is slated to take over the Genny's Diner location. Ironically, they're going to bulldoze it and start over with a new building of their own.

Denunzio's Double Statues

2011-05-21T09:16:00.008-04:00

Off the top of my noggin, I'm hard-pressed to think of another instance where I've seen a grave with two larger-than-life statues, one above the other on a second tier.

This is Joseph Denunzio in Louisville's St. Louis Cemetery; from the dignified pomp of his marker's presentation, you'd be easily led to assume this is the grave of the former mayor of Louisville who shares a similar name - but actually, this Joseph Denunzio was apparently an importer of fruits and vegetables, and they were related. He founded the Denunzio Fruit Company at 108 W. Jefferson Street, which continued to exist at least into the 1940s.

But according to John Kleber's Encyclopedia of Louisville, "his grave monument at Calvary Cemetery shows him in the pose of an auctioneer with produce at his feet." Waitaminute. This is St. Louis Cemetery, not Calvary, and I don't see any produce at his feet, Boss. What gives? Has Kleber made a typo (hey, it happens)? Or could this be our third Joseph Denunzio? This must be the guy, because he does look rather auctioneer-like, and he's clearly leaning against a stack of fruit crates.

The second statue in the stack is the traditional woman-with-anchor Statue of Hope, from the Catholic Virtues (Faith, Hope, Charity) which are in turn derived from 1 Corinthians 13:13:

And now abideth faith, hope, and love, even these three: but the chiefest of these is love.

I'm not sure how "love" and "charity" (caritas) got morphed into it along the way, because the actual original text says ἀγάπη, which is a concept unto itself and loses something in the translation. (ἀγάπη, or Agape, has been defined as "an intentional response to promote well-being when responding to that which has generated ill-being" - in other words, outdoing negativity by throwing more positivity at it.)

Since the traditional Catholic representation of Charity sometimes depicts a woman with children gathering fruit, I would have thought that would have been a more appropriate choice for Louisville's premier fruit purveyor.

Hopscotch House

2011-05-18T21:38:00.009-04:00

The Kentucky Foundation for Women operates a fantastic retreat for women called Hopscotch House, located in a remote rural area East of Louisville. And when I say remote, I mean remote. Getting there like is something of a challenge, like following the route to Snuffy Smith's cabin - going through a winding maze of roads that lead to a narrow path filled with potholes, rocks, and cow-catchers. And in the wintertime when the steep roads are covered in ice, it's nearly impossible. (I know all this because I have given rides out there to a friend who makes use of their facilities, and helped her haul all her stuff inside.)

The Hopscotch House is strictly for women, and even more specifically, if their own self description is to believed, it's really mostly about feminist women:

"Hopscotch House was purchased by the Kentucky Foundation for Women in 1987 and was first used by a group of women writers known as the Wolf Pen Writer’s Colony. In the early 1990’s Hopscotch House became available to other women artists and women’s groups. Over the years, Hopscotch House has served thousands of women including artists, activists, feminists, eco-feminists, art critique groups, drumming circles, quilting groups, social justice groups, girls’ empowerment groups, arts organizations, and social service organizations.

Hopscotch House retreats and residencies provide time and space for Kentucky women artists to create in an environment that inspires, nurtures, and rejuvenates. Stays there encourage self-exploration and personal growth through the land and house resources and the company of other women... Hopscotch House is also a place to engage with a community of feminist social change artists and activists who convene in a nurturing environment. Many people find the sharing of common interests and goals in their work to be a great source of support and inspiration."

But fear not, those of you out there in reader-land who are either cursed with, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, "the misfortune to be a man", or are among my female compatriots whose idea of feminism has more in common with Dita Von Teese and Poison Ivy Rorschach than, say, Susan Brownmiller or Trish Wilson. I'm here to take one for the team, and go behind the scenes with a pictorial tour to show you what few male eyes have ever seen.

Karst Conservancy's Cavernous Concert

2011-05-17T11:39:00.008-04:00

A couple summers ago, I lamented here that Bluegrass concerts inside Rockcastle County's Great Saltpetre Cave, once a great Kentucky tradition, are no longer being performed.

Good news for modern man: the Bluegrass is back! Coming this August, the Music in the Mountain fundraising show will finally put the cave's Echo Auditorium, a huge underground chamber that makes a perfect concert hall, to good use again. The show will feature music by the Renfro Valley Performers doing their "Front Porch Pickin' Show", and the proceeds go to helping maintain and preserve the region's amazing caves and karst.

The show is August 20 at pm, and tickets must be purchased in advance. Call 800.765.7464. Map and directions are here.

(photo at top by Nathan Williams.)

Kentucky Case Ends In Greater Police Powers

2011-05-16T23:46:00.004-04:00

The Supreme Court, in an 8 to 1 decision, has given police greater powers to force their way into your homes, thanks to a Kentucky marijuana case.

Police officers who loudly knock on a door and "hear sounds that suggest evidence is being destroyed" may now legally break down the door and enter your home without a search warrant. That's right, without a search warrant. And what defines "sounds that suggest evidence is being destroyed"? Well, the police get to determine that for themselves. In other words, they've been given carte blanche to do whatever they want. (Like they don't already in some places.)

Residents who "attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame" when police burst in, said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. I think it's amazing that Mr. Alito is already assuming, hypothetically, that the police are automatically in the right and that evidence was really being destroyed. If someone flushes a toilet, does that count as "sounds that suggest evidence is being destroyed"? Or running their sink's garbage disposal?

Historically, police have not been allowed to just bust their way into a home without a search warrant. That's now officially over. Just like a lot of other things.

The Los Angeles Times tells how we got here:

It began when police in Lexington, Ky., were following a suspect who allegedly had sold crack cocaine to an informer and then walked into an apartment building. They did not see which apartment he entered, but when they smelled marijuana smoke come from one of the apartments, they wrongly assumed he had gone into that one. They pounded on the door and called "Police. Police. Police," and heard the sounds of people moving.

At this, the officers announced they were coming in, and they broke down the door. They found Hollis King smoking marijuana, and put him under arrest. They also found powder cocaine. King was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Did you catch that? They "heard the sounds of people moving." That's all. These idiot cops broke down the door - and the WRONG door at that - because they "heard the sounds of people moving." And they got away with it. And now the Supreme Court has handed all other cops in the nation a license to do the exact same thing with impunity.

Law-abiding citizens like you and me now have to fear that some moron is going to bust down our door if they make a huge mistake like these officers did, and smash it down if they "hear us moving."

Ruth-Bader Ginsburg, apparently the only member of the Supreme Court who still has a soul left, dissented from the rest of the herd and said the decision her fellow lawgivers made "arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the 4th Amendment's warrant requirement".

Pickin' Party!

2011-05-15T08:06:00.000-04:00

It won't be long before it's time once again for the Pickin' Party Old-Time Music Festival, which will be held on Memorial Day weekend (May 28-29) at Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area, along the KY-TN border.

This year the party will be emceed by 23-year Kentucky Opry veteran, Scottie Henson. The lineup for the two-day event includes Mark Dvorak, the Dixie Volunteers, the Cumberland River Plowboys, Dan Knowles, Bawn in the Mash (pictured above), Steephill Travelers, Common Thread, Red River Breeze, and Nathan Blake Lynn.

There will also be daily open mic sessions that anyone is free to get in on, so bring an instrument!

Golden Pond Planetarium and Observatory

2011-05-15T00:03:00.002-04:00

One of the state's best-kept astronomy secrets is the Golden Pond Planetarium and Observatory, located at the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area.

The observatory is home to the West Kentucky Amateur Astronomers, who hold meetings on each Saturday closest to the New Moon. The public is invited to attend these meetings. For a complete schedule of WKAA meetings, consult their calendar of events.

General observing at the Golden Pond observatory is done through a 17.5" Dobsonian and two 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes, but also houses a 12.5" custom-built Newtonian telescope that is set up for astro-photography, and there is also a 4.5" refractor set up for Hydrogen-Alpha viewing of the sun.

The planetarium offers exciting regular programs such as Two Small Pieces of Glass (a live documentary on the history of the telescope) and Journey to the Edge of Space and Time, which takes the audience on a journey through celestial objects such as black holes as galaxy clusters.

It's all overseen by the Friends of LBL who could certainly use your donations, membership, and volunteerism.

Photo above: NGC 3628, taken by WKAA member Jay McNeil.

Tree Buds with Mystery Fluff

2011-05-14T18:33:00.001-04:00

One from my Visual Slushpile photo blog:

This mega-close-up shot of tiny buds on a tree branch (they're each smaller than a pea) revealed an even tinier white speck hanging in the air between them. One can just barely discern that it's clinging on one of two almost-invisible strands of web.

Is it a spider egg sac? Or an actual bit of fluffy detritus that floated along and got caught in a web?

My best guess is that it's a young specimen of those weird white insects that look like super-tiny bits of fluff even as adults. I tried a brief stab at googling and didn't see any immediate answers. Apparently a lot of people are in the same boat as me; they've seen it before but can't identify it.

The Armstrong Hotel

2011-05-11T23:42:00.001-04:00

The Armstrong Hotel, which once stood at the corner of 6th and Main in Shelbyville, must have been an interesting place in the good old days. The historical marker notes that it was "known for its good food and lodgings" since 1859, but also for two newsworthy murders.

Henry Denhardt, former Lt. Governor of Kentucky from Bowling Green, was charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Verna Garr Taylor, and tried in LaGrange in November, 1936.

That trial ended in a hung jury, and while free on bail and awaiting his second trial, he was shot to death by Verna's brothers in front of the Armstrong Hotel on September 20, 1937. Denhardt, who had a reputation as a heavy drinker, had just come from a tavern down the street and was about to go back up to his room at the Armstrong.

Verna's brothers got off scot free, incidentally, and to this day no one can say for sure whether Denhardt was guilty or innocent of Verna's murder.

And back during the Civil War, Union guerilla leader Edwin Terrell stopped here on May 26, 1866 while on the run from the law. A posse caught up with him at the Armstrong, and though he tried to escape, he was shot to death nearby after fleeing the Hotel. Terrell sounds like an interesting rogue; according to an article by Stewart Cruickshank:

"Prior to the Civil War it is thought that Edwin Terrell performed in a circus. He reportedly killed a bartender in Baltimore but was acquitted of the charges. Oral tradition has it that Terrell served in the 1st Kentucky Infantry, C.S.A., in 1861. Terrell himself claimed that he'd served under General John Hunt Morgan and had escaped a court martial sentence of death for killing an officer. There is a record of an Edward Terrell enlisting in August 1862 in Morgan's 7th Kentucky Cavalry. This soldier deserted in September."

Hatchet Mailbox

2011-05-11T23:28:00.001-04:00

One from our weird mailboxes department: this fun mailbox of someone named Hatchett, with their namesake represented atop it. Spotted on the way to Lake Shelby.

Abraham Lincoln, Spiritualist?

2011-05-10T20:51:00.010-04:00

I've often read accusations of President Lincoln - our nation's only Kentuckian President - having been an occultist, a pagan, or even an atheist. These sort of things usually come from those sort of people (and I think you know who I mean) who have an agenda in wanting to smear Mr. Lincoln's name.

But far from dashing my respect for him, I actually have greater fascination than ever for ol' Abe after doing some research on his involvement with the Spiritualism religion. Strange as it may seem, The President of the United States and the First Lady actually held seances right in the White House.

To many, Spiritualism may seem not all that different from Theosophy. The main difference, aside from Theosophists having a greater flair for ritual and grand-poobah hats and medals, is that "mediums" like Annie Besant and Helena Blavatsky believed that they were contacting some sort of higher life forms to receive divine wisdom and cosmic knowledge. Spiritualists, on the other hand, just wanted to call up Uncle Davenport on the and ask him how's the food in Heaven. Wikipedia says: "Spiritualists at that time viewed Theosophy as unscientific and both occultist and cult-like. Theosophists viewed Spiritualism as unsophisticated and uncosmopolitan."

But let's face it - what could be more occult than conjuring up the souls of the dead and communicating with them? And some Spiritualists, like Vermont's Achsa W. Sprague, claimed that they used the powers of the spirits to cure their medical ills. This would actually make Sprague and her ilk the first sort-of "faith healers", even before Mary Baker Eddy or William Branham.

In defense of Lincoln, the White House seances were largely organized by his wife Mary Todd (who was also a Kentuckian, born in Lexington). Lincoln very well could have just gone along with it all to appease her.

Even if he was genuinely a believer in it, he may have still taken it only as seriously as people today who go to Psychic Channellers, which is to say, hopefully not much aside from entertainment's sake.

Then, too, the Lincolns' interest in mediums and spiritualists was to try to contact their dead son, who they still grieved for heavily. (And after the President's murder, Mary Todd went even deeper into Spiritualism - and madness.)

On the other hand, Lincoln himself admitted that he "always had a strong tendency to mysticism", and Lincoln's friend and law partner, William Herndon said that Lincoln actually wrote a treatise in defense of Thomas Paine's anti-Christian and anti-religious booklet The Age of Reason in 1835, and that their friend Samuel Hill destroyed it to save Lincoln's political career from the controversy it would have surely caused.

Colonel Simon F. Kase, a powerful railroad lobbyist and Washington insider, wrote a book after Abe's death called The Emancipation Proclamation, How, and By Whom It was Given to President Lincoln in 1861 In it, Kase relates how he and a local Judge decided to attend a seance at a home in Georgetown, out of curiosity. There, they were astounded to see President Lincoln and the First Lady in attendance as well.

Kase reported that a young teenage female medium approached the President, eyes closed in a trance, and lectured him (through a spirit voice speaking through her) on how he must put an end to slavery and how the nation would forever be locked in Civil War until he did so. Lincoln, who entered the Civil War with no intention of abolishing slavery, soon changed his philosophy and took the young psychic's advice.

That girl was Nettie Colburn, who went on to write about her experience in a book called Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?. She tells of how a piano was made by one of the spirit mediums to rise by itself, lifted by the hands of unseen ghosts. Seemingly skeptical, Lincoln joked "I think we can hold down that instrument". He and three others including Col. Kase all sat on the piano, and yet it continued to rise up and down by itself, carrying the President of the United States off the ground with it. Colburn says, "We were convinced that there were no mechanical contrivances to produce the strange result, and Mr. Lincoln expressed himself perfectly satisfied that the motion was caused by some "invisible power."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was himself a Spiritualist, and he said that Lincoln's seance with Nettie was "was one of the most important events in the history of the United States. This spirit message strengthened the President in taking a difficult step to which he was not yet firmly committed."

Post-Derby Blimp

2011-05-09T09:29:00.004-04:00

"Hello, MUFON? I saw this UFO yesterday flying really low over my house. It was sort of sausage-shaped, dark gray, and made an ear-splittingly loud grinding sound that upset all my dogs. Yeah, and it said "Good Year" on the side. Hello? ......hello?"

I suppose it was blimping its way back to wherever it comes from - Blimp, Inc. Central HQ - after the events of the Derby wound down. But I surprised it was cruising at such a low altitude; good thing there are no tall buildings around these parts.

Four Leaf Vinca

2011-05-08T00:00:00.001-04:00

I was taking photos of various flowers, blooms and buds on my property today and happened to notice that a couple of the flowers on the Vinca growing around the edge of the house had only four leaves and a square-shaped center (above), as opposed to the standard blooms with five leaves and star-shaped center (below).

I did a quick glance at Google and neither a web nor an image search for "four leaf Vinca" brings up a damn thing about this being normal. It would seem that what we have here is a mutation. Though the radioactive particles wafting across the nation from Fukushima were naturally the first thing that entered my mind, it must be said that the four-leaf clover is an example of an occasional mutation that's been happening as long as there's been clover - no radiation needed. Still though, I wonder, hmmmmm, yes, I wonder....

(And if you have any interest in seeing my other pitchers o' purty flars, the rest of what I took today will soon end up at my new blog Visual Slushpile, an abyss where my photos for which I have no purpose will be indiscriminately hurled. Unlike our friend JLK's Image of the Week, which has a modicum of effort and forethought in its selection, my blog will be more of a random literal photo-dump of whatever, whenever, no rhyme, no reason.)

Horse Sense

2011-05-07T12:40:00.002-04:00

The mathematical gymnastics involved in picking horses in a race is a bit too much like astrology for me. Some people say it's the horse that matters; others maintain it's all about the jockey. Still others make their decision based on the trainer, while some even place the most stock in the horse's lineage. The data on a racing form is a complicated web of interconnected checks and balances on a horse's viability, and interpreting it can be a headache. Just when you think you've picked a winner, you then notice how poorly it fared in the statistics on its most recent other races.

And in the final analysis, what makes or breaks a winner is often up to factors that aren't even reflected in a handicapper's analysis: the quality of the track, the horse's starting position, and unpredicable elements of chance like whether the jockey or the horse gets a stomach-ache or a muscle cramp just before post time. The way the soil is arranged in one specific spot on the track could result in a slight misstep by a horse that is just enough to make it lose its lead. Nature and physics are filled with almost infinite variables, and you could go mad trying to second-guess them all like Ace Rothstein in Casino.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is just throw up your hands, and throw a random dart at the field. After all, even leaving it to randomity, your odds are far better in a horse race than at, say, poker. There's only a few horses, and no matter what, three of them are going to win, place, and show. I always bet on the underdog and the long shot, because even a stopped clock is right twice a day and if that nag does defy the odds and come in, you're in the money. I also like to pick one that isn't the favorite, but is a close contender. Winning a race with the favorite is a real drag for everyone involved because you don't make any serious money; unless you just like to brag about having won. Me, I like the folding green, the shekels, the scratch, the long dough. (And you're gonna need it after the overpriced mint juleps at Churchill Downs that use Early Times whiskey, which technically isn't even a bourbon.)

But more often than not, I'll select horses just because I find personal relevance in their nomenclature. I like "Decisive Moment" (pictured above) because I feel like the whole world is experiencing one as we speak, plus there have been more than a few story-arc-changing decisive moments in my own personal life in the last several months. Picking a horse for the Downardian symbolism in its name is no sillier than pretending to have done the calculus required to figure all the angles of the mathematical maze presented in any given race. Most guys scoul at their racing form intently with a look of deep cogitation, pretending they know what they're doing, then announce their choice as if it's come about from precision juggling of hundreds of factors in their mind.

They're bluffing.

Just pick a horse and hope you win, Jack. Have some fun with it. This isn't like putting a man on the moon or electing a President. (Then again, many people seem to put more effort and research into their Derby pick than they do their Presidential election pick.) I won the Derby last year and the year before, and I don't even claim to know a thing about handicapping, except basic horse sense.

A True Mint Julep

2011-05-07T12:24:00.006-04:00

A repeat from an entry on my bartending blog Transmissions from Agent J at last year's Derby season:

To paraphrase Mark Twain, everybody talks about the Mint Julep but nobody ever does anything about it.

I recently read some magazine article - can't remember where now - that talked about how played-out, overrated, and overhyped the Mint Julep is. They talked to some bartender who said she rarely is ever called upon to make one, except by the occasional rube tourist at Derby time. The article also stated that although people go through the motions of having Mint Juleps for Derby, few people actually like them and they toss them aside after a few token sips for tradition's sake.

I posit that the reason these people feel this way about the Mint Julep is because they've never actually had one prepared properly. Hint: it doesn't come from a pre-made bottle, it doesn't come from a store-bought syrup, and it doesn't come from a mix. That this goes without saying should go without saying.

If you really want to do it right, follow the poetic instructions of General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. to the absolute letter. Failing that, here's my simple solution that doesn't involve simple syrup:

Granulated sugar
Powdered sugar
Fresh mint leaves
Finely crushed ice
Bourbon

Muddle one pinch of mint with the granulated sugar in a metal Julep cup. Some will tell you to just gently bruise it and not pulverize it, but I say go nuts and pound the hell out of it. The granulated sugar will help give you something to grind against.

Fill the cup to the top with finely crushed ice, fine as a Sno-Cone. Pour bourbon almost to the top, then add your second pinch of mint. It's your second pinch, that will garnish the top, that you want to just mildly bruise and not smush into pieces. Then dust the top generously with powdered sugar.

Those with bourbon-sensitive palates should note that a proper Julep, contrary to how it's commonly fixed, is essentially bourbon with a little mint and a little sugar, NOT mint and sugar with a little bourbon. If you prefer bourbon-based drinks in which you can't taste the bourbon, you might consider the likelihood that bourbon-based drinks are not for you.

Also note that a metal cup is a must - preferably a genuine Julep Cup intended for this purpose, and if it's an antique one (see image of mine above), all the better. If you're doing it in a container made of glass or plastic, don't even bother. Just have a Gin Rickey instead or something.

Alternate versions: if you're dead set on having a Mint Julep even though you don't like bourbon, may I recommend cutting the bourbon somewhat with either Barenjager (my first choice) or Southern Comfort. I suppose eliminating the bourbon entirely in favor of these beverages is permissible - what the hell, it's your drink, buddy - but the thought of it makes the purist in me all fremdschämen.

Obama Visits Fort Campbell

2011-05-06T19:40:00.006-04:00

In his first Presidential visit to Kentucky, President Obama addressed a cheering crowd at Ft. Campbell today for a short (16 minutes) but rousing speech. Acknowledging that more soldiers have been deployed - and killed - from Ft. Campbell than anyplace else in America in the war in Afghanistan, he praised Kentucky's Special Operations forces who were part on last Sunday's raid in Pakistan. He also awarded the commando units the "Presidential Unit Citation", the highest honor a President can give to a military unit.

The identities of those Ft. Campbell soldiers specifically involved are being kept secret to protect from potential terrorist reprisals, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Not everyone is so enthralled with Obama's handling of the situation. Discrepancies abound in the many conflictions versions being told by officials regarding the circumstances of Bin Laden's death. Some are feeling deja vu of Bush's claim that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" that turned out not to be true, as it sinks in now that Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan because that's where Bin Laden supposedly was - and now we're being told "oops, he was in Pakistan all along, sorry." And adminstration officials have stated that Bin Laden's death will have no impact whatsoever on the timetable for withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan.

The President also made no mention of the top-secret experimental stealth super-copter that crashed during the raid. The official explanation being given is that it got "caught in an air vortex" due to temperatures higher than expected. That doesn't exactly sound like much of a super-copter, if you ask me; but they didn't ask me.

Then too, there's the whole can of worms about all the reports that Osama Bin Laden has actually already been dead for years now. FOX News and the Pakistan Observer reported in 2001 that Bin Laden died from a lung complication. There was even an article about Bin Laden's 2001 funeral in an Egyptian newspaper. And in 2002, the FBI's counter-terrorism chief Dale Watson said he believed Bin Laden was probably dead.

Whatever the real truths are behind world events that have caused President Obama's hair to start greying prematurely, I just hope and pray he knows what he's doing. Even though he's keeping the identities of the soldiers a secret, I'm not sure even admitting that Kentucky was involved in the Bin Laden raid is a good idea. Feel me?

Lexington UFO, April 13, 2011

2011-05-04T09:40:00.000-04:00

From the UFO Disclosure Countdown Clock blog comes this MUFON file, allegedly depicting a UFO photographed Over Lexington KY, 4-13-11.

If you look at how sharply in-focus the UFO itself is, as compared to the blurrier tree foliage, however, then we have a problem. The utility pole in the foreground is in focus, the tree branches beyond it are not, and yet the UFO that is presumably far beyond is crystal clear. I'm inclined to say "photoshop fail" here.

Either that, or what we are seeing here is a very tiny object flying around in or near the same field of focus as the utility pole, which I suppose would mean it could be some crazy new super-small spy drone about the size of a milk lid or a Stridex pad or a guitar pick. Or maybe it is a milk lid. Or a Stridex pad. Or a guitar pick.

I dunno. What do you think?

Firefighter's Funeral

2011-05-04T00:02:00.004-04:00

Tuesday afternoon I walked out of Bakery Square in Butchertown to find all Washington Street lined with fire trucks and police cars, all with lights flashing. Thinking some disaster had just occurred, I started taking pictures and tried to find out what was going on. As it turned out, I ran into a friend who's with the Florence, KY police department and he explained that a memorial service was taking place at St. Joseph Catholic Church for a well-loved firefighter, and they were giving him the full send-off in style.

Latest Kentucky Floods of 2011

2011-05-03T14:48:00.006-04:00

While the world watches and waits to see what further ill effects may occur from the Destruction of the Birds Point Levee, the storm fronts keeps moving in, rain keeps coming down, and flood waters keep rising like in the old Johnny Cash song.

Union County is essentially closed off and surrounded by high water now. According to the Henderson Gleaner, Union County schools and postal services are almost completely out. The Union post office has had to make an emergency relocation to nearby Henderson County.

Livingston County is under emergency evacuation as I type this. The evacuations in Smithland are mandatory and police-enforced, while residents of the towns of Iuke, Ledbetter, and Tiline are also being urged to evacuate for their own safety at this hour. Kentucky State Police have set up a temporary command post at Grand Rivers, and will be organizing all Fire, ambulance, and rescue operations from here.

In Fulton County, many worried citizens have been fleeing Hickman. Gov. Beshear has been monitoring the area in person, and said on Tuesday that blowing up the levee in Missouri was the right decision, because it's helping to take the pressure off Kentucky's own floodwalls.

In McCracken County, The Republic is reporting "The National Weather Service in Paducah forecast a crest of 55 feet, or 3 feet above flood stage, on the Ohio River in Paducah".

Kenton County was declared a disaster area last week when floodwaters closed a dozen roads and tornadoes ripped through the area. They, along with most of Northern Kentucky, are listed on today's flood advisory again as I type this.

Calloway County was, according to thenews.org, under a flood warning until this morning, and it will still take a lot of time for the water to go down. There is water over many roads, although none are closed down at this time.

In Jefferson County, flood waters crossed River Road and lapped at the edges of the Yum! Center and at Butchertown's flood walls. Today the water levels of the Ohio River are receding, but heavy rain is expected in the forecast and it remains to be seen whether the flooding here is truly over.

Sand Boils of the New Madrid

2011-05-02T10:06:00.011-04:00

There's something happening here; what it is ain't exactly clear.

At this hour, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have given the go-ahead for the Bird's Point levee on the Mississippi River along the Illinois-Missouri border to be deliberately blown up via a massive shipment of explosives that was quickly barged in last night.

The state of Missouri itself does not want the levee exploded, and has filed a last-ditch effort to get the Supreme Court to stop it. I've seen sources that give differing takes on how Kentucky feels about it, but both versions put Fulton County squarely in the risk region. Apparently Kentucky is, in fact, in favor of the levee's destruction:

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway said his state would join Illinois because failure to blow up the levee could cause an estimated $32 million in damage to Fulton County Kentucky including the town of Hickman nearby.

The town of Cairo has been evacuated against its will, and reports are that hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farmland will be permanently submerged under water by bombing the levee.

So why is this happening?

Two "sand boils" have erupted in nearby Cairo, Illinois, and they're enormous. Workers trying to control these spontaneous volcano-like eruptions of sand and water from deep under the Earth's surface are saying it's the biggest sand boil breakout they've ever seen. The sand boils are a sign of immense water pressure, and fear is that Missouri's aging and weak levee will not be able to stand this pressure much longer before collapsing.

Additionally, sinkholes are popping up everywhere, even in the middle of city streets. The ground is quickly reaching the disaster point of soil liquefaction.

Now, obviously, the levee collapsing would be a bad thing, so I'm not really sure why they think it's such a great idea to jump ahead and destroy it ourselves. The end result will be exactly the same - catastrophic flooding. They say doing it their way, with a controlled detonation, will save the town of Cairo and divert the water elsewhere. But if the sand boils are already in Cairo itself, then I'm confused, boss.

No, the only reason I can fathom to do this - and this is just me speculatin', this isn't something I've heard any public official admit yet - is because a sand boil, according to usgs.gov, is symptomatic of earthquakes. The only logical reason to willingly destroy a levee, ruin farms, and risk dangerous flooding for everyone downriver, is because someone knows something we don't - perhaps that the sand boils are indicating great tectonic pressure and they're trying to stave off an Earthquake on the New Madrid Fault (which is already overdue to blow, some say.)

But will a giant explosion at this site prevent an earthquake - or cause one?

The Invisible Barrier

2011-05-01T10:31:00.002-04:00

One from my writing blog:

There seems to be a weird psychological barrier that keeps Kentuckians from exploring the vast majority of their state - especially between Louisvillians and Lexingtonians. In this month's issue of Kentucky Monthly, I address this mental block and exhort you and yours to get off the internet and acquaint yourself with the 120 counties of Kentucky, most of which I bet dollars to donuts you ain't been in.

Kentucky Monthly is available at fine and discerning bookstores and newsstands everywhere!

Psychic Tour of Wickland

2011-04-29T09:59:00.006-04:00

Ever been to Bardstown's historic Wickland house? Well, maybe tonight's the night you should check it out: A Visit With the Spirits of Wickland, billed as "a psychic tour of the 1826 Plantation house with a small group" is being held this very evening at 7:30pm sharp.

Then again, apparently they do this every Friday.

I'm not really sure what a psychic tour entails. Since it's implied - well, no, heck, it isn't implied, it's actually stated that you'll be visiting with spirits - is this going to be some sort of seance kinda thing? Or, like 1,001 lame TV programs with soulless scammers like Sylvia Browne, is the host going to close his/her eyes at some point and start channeling "Ozmo, the Fifth Ascended Celestial Angel Guide from the Great Magellanic Cloud"? I'd rather go back to 1942 and hang out with Madam Brent behind her beaded curtain and get some phrenology.

It says on the Visit Bardstown site: "Take a 90 minute paranormal family-friendly tour which includes the opportunity to interact through a psychic medium and the friendly spirits who once lived there." Click through that link if you have a strong stomach for fried baloney and hogwash - it runs down a detailed list of the characters, with a highly detailed "backstory" for each of them. I don't know whether it makes me angry or just sad. Both, maybe?

Ask yourself: if you had psychic abilities, would you use your God-given supernatural powers to help mankind, or would you host "ghost tours" of an allegedly haunted house in a small town in Kentucky for a $15 admission price?

Say what you will about Edgar Cayce, but even if he was delusional, he at least loathed the idea of making money off his alleged psychic gifts.

I'm not carping on this because I'm a skeptic - I'm carping on this because I know there are such things as ghosts and psychics and hauntings and channelled entities, and I don't like seeing them presented as goofy tourist attractions. I've had some "psychic" experiences myself, and you don't see me even talking about it, let alone hyping myself as a medium, let alone claiming it's something that can be repeated with guaranteed results, every Friday, week after week, year after year.

Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say.

Okay, okay, I hear ya, "Don't be so wedged, Jeff, it's just all in good fun", right? Fine. Go, have a great time, give yourself some spooky shivers, and tell 'em I sent you by. Reservations are required, so call 502-507-0808 to make yours.

Pearce Cabin

2011-04-29T07:00:00.007-04:00

Also known as The James Pearce House, or the Pearce-Capito House, this is not only the oldest building in New Castle but specifically the first structure built there - circa 1790 or 1791.

Mr. Pearce and his brother erected this home and settled here back when Kentucky was still part of Virginia. It originally was twice the size it is today, but a portion of the home in the rear deteriorated away long ago. It has something of a reputation for being haunted, with frightening sounds and moving objects reported by some who have stayed here over the years.

However, much of New Castle in general has similar ghostly experiences, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's just something that comes with the land in general. Or perhaps it's all emanating from spirits who are displeased at how shoddily their cemetery has been treated.

Ashland Man Sues 136 Companies Over Asbestos

2011-04-28T22:51:00.007-04:00

A man named Ronald Eugene Withrow, who was diagnosed with asbestosis on March 28, 2010, has filed a civil suit against 136 companies that he blames en masse for his diagnosis.

That's according to the West Virginia Record legal journal, who says that Withrow - a resident of Ashland, KY - is claiming each of these 136 companies exposed him to asbestos and asbestos-containing products between 1954 and 1999. The defendants are being sued on "theories of negligence, contaminated buildings, breach of expressed/implied warranty, strict liability, intentional tort, conspiracy, misrepresentations and post-sale duty to warn", according to the journal.

The 136 companies named as defendants are:

3M Company; A.C.F. Industries, Inc.; A.K. Steel Corporation; A.W. Chesterton Company; Ajax Magnathermic Corporation; Aker Kvaerner, Inc.; American Crane and Equipment Corporation; American Electric Power; American Electric Power Service Corporation; Allegheny Energy Service Corporation; Allied Chemical Corporation; Amdura Corporation; Appalachian Power Company; Aristech Chemical Corporation; Ashland Oil, Inc.; Aurora Pump Company; Bay City Crane, Inc.; Borg-Warner Corporation; Brand Insulations, Inc.; Bucyrus International, Inc.; Buffalo Pumps, Inc.; Calgon Carbon Corporation; Cashco, Inc.; Caterpillar, Inc.; Certainteed Corporation; Chevron U.S.A., Inc.; Clark Equipment Company; Cleaver Brooks Company, Inc.; Columbus McKinnon Corporation; Copes-Vulcan, Inc.; Crane Company; Crown, Cork & Seal USA, Inc.; Dezurik, Inc.; Dow Chemical Company; Dravo Corporation; Durabla Manufacturing Company; Eaton Electrical Inc.; El DuPont de Nemours & Co.; Elliott Turbo Machinery Company, Inc.; Fairmont Supply Company; F.B. Wright Company; Flowserve US, Inc. as successor in interest to Bryon Jackson Pumps; Flowserve US, Inc. f/k/a Flowserve FSD Corporation f/k/a Durametallic Corp.; Flowserve US, Inc. f/k/a Durco International, Inc.; Ford Motor Company; Foseco, Inc.; Foster Wheeler Energy Corporation; General Electric Company, Inc.; General Refractories Company; Geo. V. Hamilton, Inc.; Georgia Pacific; the Gorman-Rupp Company; Goulds Pumps, Inc.; Grinnell Corporation; Honeywell International; Honeywell International, Inc.; Huntington Alloys Corporation; I.U. North America, Inc.; IMO Industries, Inc.; Industrial Holdings Corporation; Ingersoll-Rand Company; Insul Company, Inc.; ITT Corporation; I.U. North America, Inc. f/k/a the Gage Company; J.H. France Refractories; John Crane, Inc.; John Deere Company; Joy Technologies, Inc.; Kelsey-Hayes Company; Kentucky Power Company; KES Acquisition Company; Kramig Co.; Lawrence Pumps, Inc.; Lockheed Martin Corporation; Manitowoc Cranes, Inc.; McJunkin Corporation; Metropolitan Life Insurance Company; Milwaukee Valve Company, Inc.; Monongahela Power Company; Morgan Engineering Systems, Inc.; Mueller Steam Specialty; NACCO Materials Handling Group, Inc.; Nagle Pumps; Navistar, Inc.; NIBCO, Inc.; National Service Industries Venture, Inc.; Nitro Industrial Coverings, Inc.; Oakfabco, Inc.; Oglebay Norton Company; Ohio Power Company; Ohio Valley Insulating Company, Inc.; Ohio Valley Electric Corporation; Owens-Illinois, Inc.; P&H Mining Equipment, Inc. Peerless Pumps; Pneumo Abex Corporation; Premier Refractories, Inc.; Rapid American Corporation; Reading Crane; Rhone-Poulenc AG Company; Riley Power, Inc.; Rockwell Automation, Inc.; Ross Brothers Construction Co.; Rust Constructors, Inc.; Rust Engineering & Construction, Inc.; Rust International, Inc.; Schneider Electric USA, Inc.; State Electric Supply Company; Sterling Fluid Systems (USA); South Point Ethanol; Stockham Valves & Fittings; Superior Boiler Works, Inc.; Taco, Inc.; Tasco Insulations, Inc.; the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.; the F.D. Lawrence Electric Company; the Gage Company; Trecco Construction Services, Inc.; Thiem Corp.; UB West Virginia, Inc.; Union Carbide Chemical & Plastics Company; Uniroyal, Inc.; United Engineers and Contractors, Inc.; United Engineers & Constructors, Inc.; Viacom, Inc.; Vimasco Corporation; Warren Pumps, Inc.; Weil-McLain Company; West Virginia State Electric Supply; Westinghouse Air Brake Division of Trane U.S., Inc.; Westinghouse Air Brake and/or Wabco; Whiting Crane; Washington Group International; Yale Materials Handling Corporation; and Zurn Industries, Inc.

I doubt this scattershot approach will work out, but you never know. Many asbestosis and mesothelioma lawsuits are settled out of court. Others, however, like the infamous W.R. Grace case in Libby, Montana, dragged on and on and on. (W.R. Grace, incidentally, is the same company also involved in a trichloroethylene case in Massachusetts, as depicted in the John Travolta film A Civil Action. W.R. Grace also had a plant in New Albany, Indiana, just over the river from Louisville, for many years.)

Murray Reads Maya

2011-04-27T22:33:00.004-04:00

This is an interesting concept: in preparation for Maya Angelou's upcoming appearance at Murray State University in August, Western Kentucky residents are being encouraged, en masse, to study up on her oeuvre before she gets here.

The "Murray Reads Maya" program is being engineered by the good folks at murrayreads.org. Says their site: "The Murray Reads program is designed to bring in the entire community of Murray together through books. There will be different authors throughout the year that will be highlighted, so everyone in the program will read something by the same author."

And the West Kentucky Star says: "Groups such as book clubs, cooking clubs, women’s clubs, children’s story times, elementary, middle school and high school classes, churches, and others are encouraged to use the website to be a part of the program and record which Angelou book they read."

I like this. I like it a lot. I'd love, in fact, to see something like this instituted statewide from a central hub. Like, on a given month, say, Menifee County could be reading Langston Hughes, Boyd County could be reading Thomas DeQuincey, Wolfe County could be reading William Faulkner, Letcher County could be reading Robert Anton Wilson, Jackson County could be reading Hunter S. Thompson, Livingston County could be reading Oliver Onions, and so on, and so forth. (Maybe some county could even be assigned to read me.)

Anchorage Trail Compass Mosaic

2011-04-26T18:46:00.003-04:00

The Anchorage Trail, a beautiful park donated by John and Annette Schnatter, is one of my very favorite places to go on my early-morning coffee walks each day. I'm perpetually fascinated by this giant mosaic compass that can be found in the midst of it.

I don't know why it's here - I mean, there's really no danger of getting lost on the trail (there are even permanently mounted maps on posts at regular intervals), but hey, who needs a reason? It's simply interesting for its own sake and doubly so when you're listening to R.E.M.'s "Stand" on your mp3 player. (And if you're of the Muslim faith, I suppose it could make a very handy makeshift Qibla in a pinch.)

John King

2011-04-25T23:12:00.006-04:00

Last week, while meandering through St. Louis Cemetery in the Highlands of Louisville, I took a couple shots of this imposing grave marker with peculiar architecture. I just liked the look of it.

Tonight, just out of curiosity, I googled the fellow - John King from County Mayo, Ireland - and hit the motherlode. Even with geneaology sites on the web closing in the gaps on many family trees (thanks in large part to the Mormons and their jaw-droppingly complete historical archives in their Granite Mountain Records Vault), sometimes a search isn't very fruitful. But this time, a search brought up this page which tells us more than we could ever want to know about John King.

He married Kate Fox, who was also from County Mayo, Ireland. Then she died on December 28, 1884 and he soon remarried, to Anna Cain - who, interestingly, was also from County Mayo, Ireland.

He had five sons and one daughter. He worked for L&N railroad. He could not read or write but spoke English. In 1900 he lived at 1727 Tyler Avenue, and by 1902 he had moved to 1846 Todd, according to old city directories. At the time of his death due to Bright's Disease in 1924, he was living at 1847 Lytle Street.

John's son William went on to work for L&N railroad himself, lived at 608 31st Street and then 1304 Everett, married Caroline Theodora Droppelman, and died in 1965 at the age of 86 at Norton Hospital. He had Basilar artery thrumbosis from arteriosclerosis and prostate cancer. He attended St. Agnes Catholic Church and was buried at Calvary Cemetery.

John's son Joseph married Delia Burke (from County Mayo, Ireland!) and worked as a "day laborer'. He died in 1927 when he fell off the running board of a moving car.

John's son Timothy worked for a distillery and lived at 1757 Mellwood Avenue. He married an Irish woman named Bridget Haskin. He died of heart problems in 1927 and was buried at Calvary Cemetery.

John's son Patrick was a traveling salesman who married Margaret Agnes Kahoe. Though he lived to 1961, we actually have less data on him than his more short-lived brothers.

The timespace continuum gives me a weird shivery feeling sometimes.

None of this, however, tells me why John's grave is so darn cool looking.

Graves of Old-Time Country Musicians

2011-04-24T17:16:00.004-04:00

Fiddlin' Doc Roberts, Richmond Cemetery, Richmond, KY.

Asa Martin, Hargett First Church of God Cemetery, Hargett, KY.

Bill Monroe, Rosine Cemetery, Rosine, KY.

Armour Cornelison, Jr., Richmond Cemetery, Richmond, KY.

NYC Sues Kentucky Cigarette Company

2011-04-22T09:28:00.008-04:00

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an article about how NYC's Mayor Bloomberg has filed a federal lawsuit against "a Kentucky-based ring of firms" that have allegedly been selling cigarettes in New York City illegally.

How does that work? Well, it's complicated. You can read the WSJ article yourself, and I urge you read other sources on this matter as well, but the bottom line is this: the taxation of cigarettes is essentially a scam (like most taxes). And when it came to the attention of Mr. Bloomberg that someone was selling cigs and not bothering to mess with his insane and unfair bureaucracy, well, of course he's foaming at the mouth. Just as any other mobster would when they found out someone that ain't got ethics was chiselin' in on their fix, see.

If I own a hammer - if I really own it - it's mine and I can do whatever I want with it, including sell it to you at a yard sale. If you own a pack of cigarettes, theoretically it's just as much your property as your hammer. By what right does some old man behind a desk call the cops and call you a "smuggler" if you sell your pack of cigarettes to some housewife in Forest Hills? Especially when that old man is a billionaire many times over already.

Of course, they say "well, governments must tax things, to pay for important things like roads and schools". That's the same line they used when America invaded the Phillipines in 1899 and forced our ways upon their society. And all this unfair taxation (didn't we start this country in order to get away from this in the first place?) is really paying for all sorts of pork-barrel-project garbage that the public didn't ask for, didn't want, and can't do anything about. Just like in the Phillipines.

It's not about politics - both parties do "tax and spend" equally, and both are taxing things that ought not be taxed (they're even seriously talking about taxing soda pop now) - and Bloomberg has never really been able to decide whether he's a Democrat or a Republican anyway. (I am neither, for the record.)

Having said all that, the WSJ lists the Louisville-based "Chavez, Inc." as a primary defendant in the investigation, and they have something of a bad reputation, although that means nothing to me. I don't necessarily believe everything I read on the internet, not even my own blog. According to WFPL, Chavez Inc. was raided by federal agents in late 2009 and all of their assets were seized, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Kentucky has an ongoing civil lawsuit against them.

The report also says, "Lawyers for Chavez have said the company was not legally obligated to collect taxes on out-of-state sales."

Chazez, Inc. has also been in trouble with the FDA for allegedly flouting Obama's reprehensible ban on flavored cigarettes, which instantly left tobacco stores across the nation stuck with product they could no longer sell, including clove cigarettes.

I don't know anything about these Chavez folks - I just read the papers and the internet same as you - but it certainly seems as if much of their activities fall under that growing group of citizens whose activities were once perfectly legal and they were made into criminals overnight by the stroke of some corrupt politician's pen.

The solution, of course, is less taxation, less government, and more outrage when someone nib-noses into another person's business and tries to tell them what they can't do. (I understand this philosophy is a major plank of the Tea Party, but I'm not one of them, either.)

UK's Foot-Puncturing Maniac

2011-04-21T08:30:00.003-04:00

Sick sad world. Just sat down at my desk, Starbucks in hand, feeling good and radiating cheerfulness about mankind on this shiny happy sunny day. And then I find this crazy story from the Lexington Herald-Leader being retweeted by our friend Peter at The Kaintuckeean. Apparently a man is going around the University of Kentucky's W.T. Young Library puncturing people's feet for reasons I can't even begin to speculate on.

"At about 6:15 p.m., a man crawled under a study desk and used an object to puncture someone's foot, police said. The man was described as white, between 5 feet, eight inches and 6 feet tall, with short hair, possibly a buzz cut. He wore a hat and bright orange shorts or shoes. He was last seen walking toward the vending machines in the basement of the library.

UK police later learned of a second, similar assault; this led police to seek the public's help in locating possible suspects. The second incident took place on the same day, at the same location."

Having been a UK student myself, and having worked for years at their radio station WRFL-FM as music director and late-night jazz DJ, I can tell you that there are way too many weirdos and psychos wandering around campus; people who are not students and have no business being there. I remember once having to run over to WRFL in the middle of the night to defuse a scene with a drunken Henry Earl pounding on the radio station door incessantly with all his might, and angrily ranting like a madman. The DJ doing the overnight shift was the only person in the station and she was terrified, not knowing that Henry was (mostly) harmless. When I got there and inquired what the hell he was doing, his response was "I need a cigarette."

Short of turning UK's campus into a total police state, though, I'm not sure how one goes about keeping the crazies out.

Fallen Trees and Flooded Streams

2011-04-21T00:10:00.007-04:00

Last night's storm (it's still last night to me even though this post is dated Thursday because I'm typing it at just a few minutes after midnight, see) was something, wasn't it? Me and Krampus were holed up here on the old JSH Plantation, listening to the hurricane-force winds and emergency sirens, getting ready to take shelter in the center of the house if need be. I spent a couple hours bouncing public and private messages back and forth on Twitter with various peeps-o-mine, which kept my mind occupied until the storm abated enough that I finally fell asleep around 3am.

This morning (Wednesday morning) when I got up, I found that Anchorage had become a landscape of devastated trees - including one that fell on my car and gave it some minor dents and scuffs. Could have been a lot worse, it's obvious to see.

Additionally, the creek is now swollen so far over its banks that vast areas of the nearby park are totally flooded. Between the fallen trees and flood waters, some of the trails are completely impassable now.

Whiskey By The Drink

2011-04-20T23:55:00.002-04:00

I love these old "Whiskey by the Drink" signs, from those bygone Don Draper days when women and television sets wore bunny ears. This one was sighted in Butchertown, at the corner of Mellwood and Brownsboro where it becomes Story Avenue.

Edward Edwards Dead at 77

2011-04-19T00:06:00.000-04:00

The Louisville con man and serial killer Edward W. Edwards is dead. He passed away in prison in Columbus, Ohio two weeks ago and I somehow just now heard about it.

Edwards reportedly died of natural causes, not "prison justice", and it couldn't happen to a more deserving person, but nonetheless I wish he'd lived awhile longer so that police might have more opportunities to elicit more confessions out of his bloated hide. Phil Stanford, in his great book The Peyton-Allan Files, speculates on the possible cold case files still languishing out there that might be Ed's work.

Order Stanford's book here.

The AEGON Center

2011-04-18T19:26:00.007-04:00

The tallest building in Kentucky is Louisville's AEGON Center, designed by Philip Johnson and John Burgee, the architects who brought the world the Puerto de Europa, the PPG Place in Pittsburgh, the Crystal Cathedral of Garden Grove, and the infamous Lipstick Building at NYC's even more infamous corner of 53rd and 3rd.

According to Wikipedia, "the building is constructed of reinforced concrete, as opposed to the steel construction usual for buildings of its height." Interesting. You may make of that what you will. It was completed in 1993, and has held up just fine since then.

Although you can't see it in the close-up photo above, there is a way to get the absolute top of the building by way of a secured ladder-tower leading from the center of the dome's interior, going up to the pinnacle.

There's a photograph of it here on the official U.S. Coast Guard flickr site. I'd love to get up there and take some photos myself.

Hobbs Chapel Cemetery

2011-04-17T19:52:00.005-04:00

After recently having written about the Hobbs Chapel Facade only to learn that there's a cemetery hidden in the woods behind it, I just had to trudge back there again and see it for myself.

As cemeteries go, this one's in really good shape now, though from what I've read online, such wasn't always the case. There's evidence that vandals and losers have made a mess of the place in years past, judging by the headstones that are cracked and seemingly have been cemented back together again. There's also a bunch of broken headstone fragments - many of them quite old - laying in a pile. Apparently no one knows where they go or what to do with them.

There are many interesting markers out here. I especially enjoy stones that tell a little about the person. Here we have the eye-catchingly arabesque design for Ludwell Dangerfield, who died at the Battle of Chaplin Hills, KY at the age of 20 on October 8, 1862.

Then there's William Wade Marshall, born at Marshall's Corners, Pennsylvania in 1837 and died here in Anchorage in 1870. The grave of Samuel Nock doesn't tell us where he died but does mention he was born in Nova Scotia.

Racehorse Themed Grave

2011-04-16T23:36:00.004-04:00

I saw this stunning gravestone with a statue of a racehorse and jockey in the Rose Crest Cemetery, Versailles.

At first I assumed that the gentleman must have been involved in horse racing himself, but I found his obituary online and that's seemingly not the case. Apparently he just loved horses, which is one of the best things that can be said about any man.

Masonic Grave Wreath

2011-04-16T23:29:00.002-04:00

Spotted in the Rose Crest Cemetery on the outskirts of Versailles, this is the first Masonic grave wreath I can recall having ever seen.

Royal Arcanum of Richmond

2011-04-15T20:38:00.009-04:00

Back in my roving antique-dealer days of the late 80s/early 90s, I came into possession of this highly important looking ribbon medal, bearing the words "Royal Arcanum, Richmond, KY, Inst. June 5, 1903."

In those pre-internet days, I was stumped as to who or what the Royal Arcanum were, but I had high hopes of it being some sort of occult secret society who perhaps conducted their clandestine meetings in an isolated field somewhere East of Redhouse, or perhaps in a room accesible only by a secret panel above Jett & Hall Shoes. Who knows what their arcane rites might involve, I mused to myself - perhaps they were an offshoot of the Knights Templar or the O.T.O. or the Brotherhood of Saturn or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or the Thule Society or Ordo A∴A∴ or the Hibernians or the Loyal Order of Moose or the Knights of the Golden Eagle or Aurum Solis or the Bohemian Club or the Council of Nine or the JASON Society or the Cult of the Serpent or the Vril Society or the International Order of Oddfellows or the Concatenated Order of Hoo-Hoo or the Rosicrucians or DeMolay or the Lions Club or the Shriners or the Elks Lodge or the Rotary Club or WISE or the Ruritans or Kiwanis.

Flash ahead to 1998, during my non-roving married-man days, when I put it up on eBay for a reasonable price (I don't recall exactly - probably $9.99) and no one bit. I also did a Yahoo search back then (remember those pre-Google days when Yahoo and AltaVista were the only major search engines?) for the Royal Arcanum and found nothing. Deciding that this must not be as exciting a find as I had hoped, I stuck it away somewhere and didn't think about it again for 13 years.

Now I've stumbled onto it again while rummaging through boxes of junk in storage, and now that we're in a Burroughsian future where everything is online, a quick Googling determined that the Royal Arcanum is still around today and is in the "fraternal life insurance business" and is not all that terribly interesting. At least not compared to, you know, the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers or the Priory of Sion.

Nevertheless, they sure had a cool ribbon back in the day when we Richmonders, along with the rest of the civilized world, understood the importance of pomp and ceremony. Not to mention the true meaning of membership in a true group.

Long Run Cemetery

2011-04-14T00:04:00.001-04:00

Long Run Cemetery is home to some of the most tangential bits of Abraham Lincoln history I've ever seen. Lincolnphiles, pack a lunch and make the trip: this land, which includes the demolished remains of the original Long Run Baptist Church, was where the original boyhood home of Abe's father (Thomas Lincoln) once stood.

Thomas isn't here, alas - he's buried in Illinois - but we do get Abe's grandfather, and we also get Benjamin Bridges, the man to whom Abe's uncle Mordecai sold the family farm.

We also get "The Lincoln Tree", which a helpful sign says was grown from an acorn that came from a tree that Abe stood under while giving a speech in Albion, Illinois. Hmmm. Alrighty then. That's stretching the Lincoln connection just a bit if you ask me; it's kinda like that guy a few years ago who held an exhibition of napkins, silverware and water glasses used by celebrities and obtained from restaurant busboys.

I'm not sure why these signs all say "Historic Middletown, Inc." because Long Run is quite a distance from Middletown.

Abandoned Houses in Woodford County

2011-04-13T18:21:00.003-04:00

Took an unexpected side-road tangent somewhere in Woodford County today and spotted this abandoned house on, if I recall correctly, McCowan's Ferry Road. Didn't have time to get out and scrutinize it closely but it looks wonderful.

Bonus rural decay: saw another one on the same road, but only got to snap this one quick photograph from the moving car, because some impatient truck was right on my behind:

"When Happy Met Froggie" on DVD!

2011-04-13T00:03:00.002-04:00

One from the JSH News blog:

"Morris Book Shop at 408 Southland Drive now has a quantity of the brand new DVD release of When Happy Met Froggie available for sale!

The documentary, which recently had its world premiere in Lexington, includes footage from an interview with Jeffrey Scott Holland discussing his painting of the beloved clown-and-puppet pair whose children's show aired on local TV in the 1970s.

Support indie films and indie bookstores by trekking here to get your copy today!"

The End Times? Not Again!

2011-04-12T07:22:00.009-04:00

"The time is getting closer; I read it on a poster."
- - Alice Cooper.

There's nothing more self-destructive for a representative of one's religious faith to do than to declare a doomsday date. You may get temporary attention and fame, but when the end of the world inevitably doesn't come, you end up discredited and having turned more people against your cause. The kind of people who start these doomsday scenarios probably don't care, though, because they're almost always in it for their own publicity and not concerned about the reputation of the religious faith they've hijacked for their own ends.

Perfect example: last year these billboards started popping up all over the world, proclaiming that the Biblical judgment day will occur on May 21, 2011. These billboards aren't cheap - I think a billboard in Louisville runs between $2000 and $5000 a pop, depending on location and duration. Does the apocalypse really need an ad campaign?

A lot of these billboards are coming from someplace called Family Radio whose website "explains" why the Rapture is coming on May 21 by way of one of the most poorly-written and irrational treatises I've even seen. The date of 2011 is arrived at by piling arbitrary assumptions on top of bad math on top of mangled Biblical quotes on top of failure to realize that people in Biblical-era Jerusalem didn't observe the same calendar as we do.

Of a similar ilk is judgementday2011.com, who needs to learn to spell "judgment" before passing same.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so dangerous. Every time some charismatic kook starts a "world's about to end" meme, there are always gullible people who quit their jobs, throw everything away, and put their lives in total disarray. Some have even committed suicide after the big day passes and Christ didn't show up.

"We Can Know" is another affiliated bunch who are buying billboards, and so is The Latter Rain, whose name suggests connection to the post-William Branham "Latter Rain" movement, including "Joel's Army" - which has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a "rapidly growing apocalyptic movement" who believe they possess "a divine mandate to physically impose Christian "dominion" on non-believers".

Another related group is eBible Fellowship, who are especially proud of their billboards - so much so that their site is almost wholly devoted to bragging about the placement of the ads in most countries of the world. They even have an interactive map that lets you track the progress of their ad campaign. Um, that's nice, guys, but if it really is the end times, don't we really have more important things to do?

Apparently even though the Rapture is on May 21, the actual end of the world for the rest of us won't come until October 21. Okay. I need one of those giant foldout flowcharts that take up two walls in order to map out all the signs and seals and bowls and trumpets; it's all too complicated for me.

Like Ken Ham and his Creationist Museum, these doomsayers are far outside the fringe of mainstream Christianity, but at the same time apparently have a mysterious knack for fundraising. Imagine what these people could have accomplished to combat world problems like hunger and illiteracy, with the staggering amount of money they blew on this self-aggrandizing, masturbatory, mentally ill ad campaign.

Sandy's Hamburgers

2011-04-11T18:25:00.009-04:00

Tonight I've been doing a little research for my proposed fifteen-volume encyclopedic work What Used To Be Where, Back In The Day (and you thought I was joking about that, didn't you?)

In the course of my studies, I just happened across a delightful web page devoted to the long-since-departed Sandy's Restaurant in Louisville. Sandy's, apparently a Scottish-themed burger joint, had a girl in a kilt and a plaid beret for their mascot and served a specialty burger called a "Big Scott". They operated one location in Paducah and three locations in Louisville. Of the Louisville stands, one was at 5009 South Third St. (pictured above in a photograph taken on October 16, 1971) another was at 1007 W. Broadway, and the other was at 1420 Poplar Level Road. The Paducah stand was at 1726 Broadway.

There's nothing like a gang of retro-obsessive hunter-gatherer archivists to restore my faith in the human condition. These people are hardcore serious about reconstructing the lost memory of Sandy's for posterity, as it should be. Here's an example from their site to illustrate their zeal:

"The 1968 Sandy's locations list shows one of these locations as a possible 1967 opening. The 1973 list shows Poplar Level Road as Sandy's #317 and 3rd Street as #318 which points to a 1973 opening. Perhaps these locations were rebuilt as the new mini or maxi Sandy's restaurants as some locations were switching to the new buildout at this time and maybe they were renumbered into the 300 range at that time.

Robby Delius shows yet another scenario by providing both the 1965 and 1969 city directory listings for Louisville which shows Poplar Level and S. Third Street as being in existence in 1965 as well as 1969!"

We need more people like this in America.

And it gets better. It turns out that this lovingly detailed paean to preserving memorabilia related to the Sandy's of Louisville is actually just one page among many in a greater effort to hoard photos, menus, and even signage from every Sandy's restaurant that ever existed on Earth. It could take two hours to absorb it all, and if you're as much a card-carrying member of the Society For The Preservation Of Everything as I am, then you will devote those two hours to this holy work.

But wait, there's more!

Sandy's is just the tip o' the iceberg - that link is actually just one small fraction of Captain Ernie's Showboat, a truly leviathan site that assiduously sniffs out all available effluvia regarding a whole raft of obscure and neglected stuff from our collective childhood of the Midwest - everything from Romper Room to Cactus Jim to the Davenport, Iowa Morning Farm Report!

Life is good.

The Kilowatt Kid

2011-04-11T16:09:00.002-04:00

Cruised by the Frankfort Avenue Art House the other day and spied a new addition to his menagerie: an antique standup of Reddy Kilowatt, inexplicably in Western gear.

Goober and his Kentuckians

2011-04-10T09:13:00.003-04:00

Found this postcard for sale on VintagePostcards.org: a nice shot of Goober and the Kentuckians, suitable for framing.

Who was Goober? I don't even know. This page lists him as "Goober P. Nutt and the Kentuckians" but has no info other than a truly frightening photo wherein Goob's looking like a cross between Howdy Doody, Okie Jones, and the resurrected corpse of Archie. This blog evidently found the same postcard site as I did, but had nothing more to say.

And then there's this eBay auction from our friends at Bright's Antique World down in Franklin, where you can get this poster for "Uncle Remus Hush Puppies Dog Food", which apparently was the sponsor of a Goober and the Kentuckians TV show that aired Fridays at 5:45pm on WSIX-TV. It also uses the exact same promo postcard image.

WSIX-TV, however, is in Nashville. Or should I say, was - it's since morphed into WKRN. And this forum says that Goober, whose real name is Gib Buchanan, got his start on WDZ 1050 in Decatur, IL.

So was Goober even really a Kentuckian? The odds are actually against it, since it was seemingly very hip back in the day to be a Kentuckian, real or imagined - witness Henny Hendrickson's Louisville Serenaders, a bunch of Jersey guys who probably never set foot in Louisville in their lives. And Johnny Hamp's Kentucky Serenaders, based out of Pennsylvania.

Hobbs Chapel Facade

2011-04-07T21:15:00.007-04:00

Like the Heigold Facade, the Hobbs Chapel facade is the remaining front entrance to a building that no longer exists. The original church was built on this site in Anchorage in 1876, and destroyed by a fire in 1954.

Note the Tudor Roses on the front entry gateposts.

Somewhere along the way, someone decided to rescue the abandoned remains of the church and rehabilitate it. The area is now a public park, and a charmingly spooky one at that.

It would appear that the base of this birdbath is actually a piece of debris salvaged from the church.

The sign says "Hobbs Chapel and Cemetery", and I'd always wondered where the heck the graves are. I just did a Google search, and lo and behold, the cemetery is in the woods further back behind the park area, about 300 yards. Guess now I gotta go back and check that out too.

"When Happy Met Froggie" Film Premiere

2011-04-06T09:32:00.007-04:00

Tonight's the night! Scott Hall and Michael Crisp's documentary When Happy Met Froggie makes its world premiere at the Kentucky Theatre in Lexington at 7:30pm.

It tells the true story that Lexingtonians have been longing to hear told - the power and the glory that was a locally-made low-budget TV kid's show called Happy's Hour. Happy's Hour starred Happy the Clown and his puppet sidekick Froggie, plus an obese doppelganger called "Happy II" in the later years. It ran on Lexington's WTVQ-62 (which later became 36) from 1976-1980.

Yours truly makes an appearance in the film, as the producers sent a film crew to my house when they found out I'd painted Happy and Froggie's portrait.

I'll be there on the red carpet tonight for the premiere, come join us! And then find me later, because I'll probably be at Blue Agave Cantina.

More Kangaroo Sightings

2011-04-05T08:56:00.005-04:00

Is it possible that kangaroo escapees from the circus could continue to live and thrive in Kentucky's climate over generations? Wouldn't people see these Kentucky kangaroos? Well, some people apparently have.

We've reported here and in Kentucky Monthly on the anomalous kangaroo sightings in Kentucky, circa 1899 and 1974.

Now there's a new report, from Unusual Kentucky reader Erin Kelley Henry, about kangaroos that she and her mother were eyewitnesses to in 2002. On three separate occasions, a kangaroo was seen hopping around residential areas in Richmond.

Anyone else have a kangaroo sighting they've been withholding all these years?

Storm, 4/4/2011

2011-04-04T11:47:00.004-04:00

Was out wandering in the woods again this morning and a storm started blowing in.

I thought I'd better skidoo since I'd heard reports of the potential for tornadic weather; plus I knew storms and high winds during the night had already knocked out power in parts of downtown and Butchertown.

But I scurried home for nothing - the storm was extremely fast-moving and the dark clouds had already vamoosed to Owsley County by the time I made it back to my car. It's still super-windy out there at the moment, though, so we're not out of the woods yet. So to speak.

Stinkbug Invasion

2011-04-02T00:06:00.001-04:00

This winter I've noticed these dark sepia-colored "stink bugs" (or "shield bugs", as some call them) in my house. Following the Buddhist golden rule of "Do No Harm", I gently escorted these critters out the door and let them go about their buggy way.

As it turns out, my mercy for creepy-crawlies may have been a bit premature. For you see, these were no ordinary stinkbugs. They were the dreaded Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, which is indigenous to China and did not exist in North America until 1998, when an infestation of them manifested out of nowhere in Pennsylvania. Apparently they stowed away in some shipment of items from China, and immediately gained a foothold in the new world.

(Gee thanks China, that's another favor we owe you. And we still haven't forgotten your poisoned cat food, fake eggs, melamine-tainted fish, sewage-fed fish, faulty GM automotive parts, toxic sofas, cancer-causing mattresses, cadmium-laced children's jewelry, and dumplings with ground-up cardboard substituted for ground beef.)

Since then, the stinky plague has spread to 33 states, including Kentucky, which had its first sightings a few months ago. Eight more states have been added to the list since last autumn.

So what's the big deal, since stinkbugs don't sting, don't bite, and don't swarm around your head driving your crazy? Well, they eat like a bug possessed. And they love to gnaw on crops such as tomatoes, apples, pears, soybeans, peppers, corn, grapes, berries, peaches, green beans, cherries, raspberries, and many more. Some farmers have lost their entire crop to stink bugs, and there is no natural predator in North America for them.

When next I see a stinkbug, will I let it live? Probably. I'm soft hearted/headed that way, and also know that statistically one more won't make a difference in the bug - er, big - picture.

View from Victorian Square Parking Garage

2011-04-01T13:01:00.003-04:00

Another from our high views department: these shots were taken yesterday from the top of the Victorian Square parking garage on the corner of Short and Broadway, Lexington.

Note the nice ghost sign for Uneeda Biscuits on the side of the old Jester's building above.

Brown's Tastee Beer Cheese

2011-04-01T12:59:00.001-04:00

One from our Transylvania Gentlemen blog:

I was making my rounds yesterday and stopped into Pisgah to see a man about a horse, and you know I can't go to Pisgah without dropping into my favorite donut shop in the solar system, Doughdaddy's.

This day found me desirous of something savory in addition to my customary box o' cream cheese covered donuts, and so I reached into their beer cheese cooler. They have an admirable selection of Kentucky beer cheeses, including several I've never tried, and the duck selected Brown's Tastee Beer Cheese. The package says they're based in Versailles, but their website says Lawrenceburg. Either way, both fine towns with a beer cheese to be Kentucky-Proud of.

As regular readers must know, the only yardstick by which to measure the greatness of a beer cheese is The Johnny Scale, meaning, how close is it to Johnny Allman's original formula? Friends, it's right up there near the top, alongside River Rat (whose package bears the slogan "Just Like Johnny's") and the new Allman's Beer Cheese which revives Johnny's recipe, thanks to his grandson's noble efforts.

Brown's Tastee meets my core criteria:

1. It's delicious.
2. It's spicy-hot but not stupidly so.
3. It contains beer. (You'd be surprised how many wannabe beer cheese's dont!) However, the beer does not dominate the flavor, nor does the garlic, which is as it should be.
4. It has an approximation of the correct texture, for which there is no word to adequately convey. "Fibrous" doesn't sound right, and "grainy" comes closer but still misleads. But the texture is there.

And when you put it in the freezer with the lid off - not long enough to freeze it solid but just long enough to give it an extra crystalline surface veneer - and knife it into small paper ketchup-cups, it succeeds as a simulacra of what my childhood mind (I had both "photographic memory" and synethesia as a tot) recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s during my visits to Johnny's with my parents.

The texture issue is what often trips up other leading contenders for Allmanesque greatness. Kentucky Ale Beer Cheese, on the other hand, has the texture down, but tastes very different from Johnny's because of the addition of mustard powder to the proceedings. The beer cheese one was served at Johnny's was not quite as spread-like and dip-like as what you buy in a tub today - the nudging of the formula towards being a spread comes from emulation of Hall's, which for many years was the reigning beer cheese in supermarkets, but had a completely version for retail as compared to the actual restaurant's.

UFO Blitz in the Bluegrass Triangle

2011-03-30T21:18:00.007-04:00

Found in the labyrinthine recesses of my archives: a newspaper clipping from a 1978 National Enquirer, exact date indeterminate. Says here that central Kentucky was reportedly experiencing a "UFO blitz" back in those long-gone days of disco and punk.

What exactly did this blitz consist of? According to the article, one of the incidents involved a pair of Madison County firemen called upon to put out a grass fire that turned out to be a "blazing red UFO" - which they then proceeded to follow across Richmond in hot pursuit for over an hour. One of the firemen, Robert Murphy, described it as a "classic" flying-saucer shaped spaceship.

Another case was a preacher and his wife who, and I quote, "encountered a gigantic, dazzling UFO on the way to church." Elmer Hardy, then 73 years old and pastor of Bybee United Methodist Church, said they were driving to Sunday night services when the UFO approached them head-on and hovered above them. "It was about 10 stories high and 20 stories wide, with a zillion lights on it," Hardy is quoted as saying.

Then there's 16-year-old Terry Kirby from Irvine, who the Enquirer says was chopping wood when suddenly a glowing oval-shaped UFO descended upon him. Kirby had the quick wits to run in the the house, grab a polaroid camera, and snap a shot. The article also quotes other Irvine citizens like police chief Marcus Cole, who says there have been many eyewitness of flying saucers in Irvine; and Guy Hatfield, publisher of Citizen Voice & Times, is quoted as defending the experiencers: "These were all solid citizens, with no reason to say it unless they saw one".

Another Irvine sighting report was from a Kentucky State Trooper, Jim Whitaker. He spotted a car-sized UFO with red/white/blue/green pulsating lights hovering over a field in Irvine on "February 19" (presumably 1978). "Whitaker, a veteran of 1,500 flying hours in Navy helicopters, said the craft definitely wasn't a helicopter or airplane." He chased the car for two hours in the Estill County night, and made a very interesting observation: "When an aircraft approached it, the intensity of its lights would die down... and once the aircraft was clear, it would light up again!"

The article, although rather well-written for a tabloid rag, fails to mention the presence of the Blue Grass Army Depot at the epicenter of this "Bluegrass Triangle" of UFO activity they posit.

Reservoir Hill

2011-03-29T22:49:00.002-04:00

This patriotic water tower can be found in Bowling Green's Reservoir Hill Park, where it's a well known local feature. I have a thing about water towers, and this one is right up there near the top of my hit parade along with other notable Kentucky examples as "Florence Y'all", the giant Dixie Cup, and the now-departed Lakeland Asylum suicide tower.

Stalkers and Dollars and Bones

2011-03-28T15:16:00.010-04:00

Life moves pretty fast in the wilderness of Kentucky, and if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Then again, even if you don't go looking for adventure, as often as not adventure finds you.

Not long ago, I was hiking in the woods on a crisp windy morning. As I began my sojourn, I passed a nondescript sort of fellow walking out as I was walking in. Blue flannel shirt, pullover cap, short beard. I gave him the usual guy-nod, and he slightly acknowledged with one of his own.

Now, this was in a large open field area just before you reach the dense forest. When I got to that point, I stopped to open my thermos of coffee and have a slug, and looked around. No one in sight.

Yet, about half an hour later, by which time I'm deep in the heart of darkest America, I hear a sound behind me as I'm crossing a creek on half-submerged rocks. I look back, and I'll be damned if that guy isn't right behind me, standing on the other side of the creek, staring at me with a creepy expressionless face. Uh.... dude. Sup?

Think on this: I know he didn't turn around and start following me as soon as I originally passed him, because I had looked back across the open field and he was nowhere in sight, right? So in order for him to get from wherever he was then to suddenly be standing right behind me now, he had to have ran like hell to catch up with me. Not only ran like hell, but also at some point stop running and then silently start sneaking, in order to get that close to me without me having heard another presence in the forest.

So I'm thinking, this guy is either a park ranger or a pervert. Both, maybe? I reached into my camera case and pulled my camera out and the guy took off. Okay. Pervert it is, then.

I watched him flee until he was out of sight, then continued to listen to the sound of his escape. There was a false stop as he must have paused somewhere along the way, then I heard him trudge off on a slightly different trajectory into the distance.

No sooner had I turned around and continued along the trail I was on, than I came upon a folded dollar bill, laying plainly out in the open. The hell? I looked around, felt guilty for a moment for taking something that wasn't mine, but hey, I'm ten miles from civilization in any direction - obviously whoever lost it isn't going to trudge back out looking for a missing George, right? Finders keepers, losers weepers, right? Anyway, a gust of wind could have blown it into the creek at any moment, right?

Oh yeah. Hmmm.

Logically, then, Mr. Watson, we can conclusively deduce that this dollar, however and by whomever it came to be here, hadn't been here for very long. Still uneasy over the creep who was stalking me, I became even more wary about the dollar bill, folded in such a way that the Illuminati's eye in the pyramid was watching me. I felt like Deckard in Blade Runner finding one of Gaff's origami.

Looking back, the spooky dude and the dollar bill were most likely unconnected, of course. Probably just a coincidence that both incidents occurred within 60 seconds of each other, and within ten feet of each other. But sometimes even when a coincidence is just a coincidence, it still doesn't mean the Universe isn't trying to tell you something.

And on the way back home, I chanced upon a gnawed raccoon carcass with exposed vertebrae - and it hadn't been there on my way in on that same path. Probably dropped there by a hawk or turkey buzzard, who are notorious for clumsily dropping bones in flight. I tend to find a lot of bones in the woods, and often save them for art projects. This one, however, I didn't mess with. The buzzard clearly wasn't finished, and might be back to gnaw on this some more. I felt as if I was being watched - perhaps the bird was watching me from a high treetop, telling me "get away from my lunch." Or perhaps that weird guy was still lurking. Either way: predator.

Is there any overarching message to be gleaned from all this? Oh, probably not; maybe just that nature is filled with opportunities, and not all of them are good. Finders keepers, losers weepers.

Kentucky Rain

2011-03-27T00:00:00.003-04:00

When I was a little kid, I used to play my parents' Elvis records, including the then-brand-new hit "Kentucky Rain", which reached #16 on Billboard's Top 100 charts, and #3 on their Adult Contemporary charts in 1970.

Then, as now, I listened to the song and could only think of one thing: I wanted to know exactly what Kentucky towns Elvis was singing about as he walked and hitchhiked his way across the state!

Being as my stomping ground as a child was the area encompassing Boonesboro, Winchester, Richmond, Berea, Waco, College Hill, Bybee, and Irvine, I often imagined Elvis as the song's protagonist traipsing through these places when I listened to "Kentucky Rain". The line about "thumbing for a ride on this lonely Kentucky backroad" usually conjured up images of Flint Road in Waco, or Redhouse Road in Madison County, between Richmond and Redhouse.

The part where he talks to a couple of old men sitting on a bench outside a general store made me think of a gas station/grocery in Irvine with tobacco-chewing guys sitting out front. (The place is still there, in fact, but I'm drawing a blank about what it's called.)

The song was written by Eddie Rabbitt, who unfortunately died thirteen years ago so we can't ask him if he had any specific locales in mind when he came up with it.

Did the song ever make you picture any familiar Kentucky places in your head? Or am I the only one?

Ásatrú

2011-03-26T18:18:00.008-04:00

Ásatrú, also known sometimes as Odinism, has its basis in Germanic Neopaganism but sprouts tentacles off in many different directions with many different factions, many of whom don't always see eye-to-eye.

In very general terms, Asatru is a polytheistic faith, centered around worship of the ancient Norse Gods and Goddesses. Many of the names of these gods and goddesses remain part of our modern culture, such as in the days of the week: Wednesday is Woden's (Odin/Wotan's) Day, Thursday is Thor's Day, Friday is Freya's Day. Ásatrú - the true Ásatrú - is open to everyone, regardless of gender, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, language, sexual orientation, or any other divisive criteria.

The current leading Ásatrú organization seems to be Ásatrú Alliance, which succeeded something called the Asatru Free Assembly which was also succeeded by something else called the Asatru Folk Assembly. According to Wikipedia, the Asatru Alliance was founded by Michael J. Murray, the former Vice-President of something else yet again, called The Odinist Fellowship.

Confused? Me too. It's like trying to sort out a bucket of nightcrawlers. At night. Let's not even get into the more hardcore "Odinist" types like The Odin Brotherhood, The Odinic Rite, The Odinist Fellowship, Holy Nation of Odin, and Wotanism.

The problem with Asatru/Odinism is that it's too "open source" a concept - the danger with starting a religious organization that you can't maintain strict control over is that before you know it, all kinds of kooks are starting rogue versions of your religion, and using it for unsavory purposes that you didn't intend. And so we have people out there calling themselves Odin worshippers who couldn't be more different from one another, ranging from young left-wing hippie girls to ultra-right-wing shaven-headed nutcases. Still others are merely attracted to the swords and the costumes and the mead, and would probably be better off visiting a Rennaissance Fair than changing their religion.

Because of its anglo-centric nature, it has attracted both gentle Wiccans and psychotic "White Power" supremacists - neither of which, needless to say, want to have anything to do with each other. For the most part, the peaceful ones just want to be left alone, and it's the stupid skinheads with skulls tattooed on their necks who stir up trouble and give the larger body of Ásatrú a major PR liability.

It's enough to make an Ásatrú practitioner throw up their hands and say "to hell with it, I'm just going to go over here and start my own personal Scandinavian-flavored thing and stop using the names "Asatru" or "Odinist" entirely".

And many, in fact, are increasingly doing just that, preferring to keep it vague and unaffiliated, and just calling themselves "heathen" or "pre-Christian" and leaving it at that. Many keep their groups tightly-knit among a close circles of family and friends, and have moved past the idea of belonging to over-arching all-encompassing organizations where you end up side by side with people whose reasons for interest in all things Germanic may be more sinister than yours.

Kentucky has a local Ásatrú chapter located in Hazard, called the Kentucky Ásatrú Alliance. According to their website (which is currently offline for some reason):

"More and more people are moving away from universal religions that assert their path as the "one and only right way" for all humanity, and returing to the tribal paths of their own ancestors. These ancestral "folk ways" are after all, an expression of the totality of the people who developed [with] them as ways of understanding and expressing existence. Since much of our being (both physical and psychological) is passed on to us from our ancestors, their natural spirituality is surely the most compatible with our own instinctual being."

Another site of theirs, FrithNet, is still online but doesn't look to have been updated in over a year. And it in turn links to a worldwide Ásatrú auction site called FeeFum, which shows a little more activity, but not much, and the items being auctioned are predominantly jewelry. And yet another site, Samfelag, ostensibly for networking, also seems little-used.

Does this mean that the Ásatrú faith is in decline? No, far from it. I'd say it most likely means that the kind of people drawn to true Ásatrú would be the kind of people who don't spend a whole lot of time fiddling around on the internet - and for that, I say more power to 'em. Then again, they are on Facebook, which is unfortunate.)

Other Ásatrú organizations around the world seem to still exist - such as Asatru Alliance in Arizona, Asatru Folk Assembly (though their site still says 2008 at the bottom), The Troth in Connecticut, Irminsul Ættir in Washington state, and The Canadian Asatru Portal, who provide an exhaustive array of further Asatru links here.

Given that most seem to be sticklers for historical authenticity, something tells me they're not going to like the upcoming Thor movie, which bases itself on the highly off-model Marvel Comics version and takes it even further off-model.

Chained Rock

2011-03-24T22:48:00.004-04:00

High above the city of Pineville, there stands an immense protruding rock held in place by an old rusty chain. This is "Chained Rock", a peculiar tourist attraction in the Pine Mountain State Resort Park (established in 1924 as Kentucky's first state park).

Accounts vary regarding how the rock got its chain. Some sources say the rock is/was genuinely unstable and the chain is what's saved Pineville from a dangerous rockslide. Others say that was a just a pretense for a publicity stunt to deliberately create the tourist attraction. And still others say that both are to some degree true; that the rock could indeed have fallen without restraint but also that the danger was exaggerated for the sake of a good story.

Furthermore, there are also accounts that the chain was originally put in place because parents had already been telling their children for years not to worry about the very visible outcropping rock falling, and made up a story about how the rock was safely chained in place. After these stories got around, so legend has it, enough out-of-towners started inquiring about the chained rock that the city government decided in 1933, "heck, maybe we really do need to put a chain around it."

And finally, there's also the odd note on the historical plaque (see below) that the chain that was installed in 1933 actually was a replacement for a much earlier pre-existing chain. Puzzling evidence.

The chain itself is said to have been acquired from a rock quarry's steam shovel in Virginia and painstakingly lugged up the mountain by Boy Scouts, the local Kiwanis Club, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and a team of pack mules. It weighs 1.5 tons and is 101 feet long.

Lexington Woman Finds Frog in Beans

2011-03-21T19:45:00.005-04:00

UPI is carrying a story today about a woman in Lexington who was traumatized to find a dead frog inside her can of Wylwood Blue Lake Cut Green Beans.

She told WLEX-TV that she purchased the can of green beans at the Save-A-Lot store on North Broadway in Lexington and described it as "the grossest thing I've ever seen".

Although it's certainly regrettable that a dead frog would turn up in a can of beans, and I certainly would not eat the contents of the can, one should remember where beans come from- nature. A lot of products out there, notably sacks of pinto beans, contain language warning the consumer to go through the contents closely and pick out any "foreign matter" that inevitably finds its way in sometimes.

To me, this isn't nearly as disgusting as when a Louisville family found a dead mouse in a carton of milk - and after they'd already been drinking from it for several days!

Kentucky's State Gun?

2011-03-19T14:34:00.006-04:00

Okay, so Utah has taken the nation once more where no state has gone before: they're now the first to designate an official state gun.

The state gun of Utah is now the Browning M1911 semiautomatic pistol, and Governor Gary Herbert is defending this groundbreaking move from anti-gun critics. "It's about honoring John Moses Browning and paying tribute to the man as an innovator and entrepreneur and someone who has given a lot to the state of Utah," he said. And according to the TPM story linked to above, the Utah State Senate insisted that language be added to the bill that states that the designation in no way condones violence.

I've always seen a lot of similarities between the great state of Utah and our glorious commonwealth. Both have histories speckled with intrigue, exploration, and freethinking in the finest sense of American frontiersman tradition. So it probably won't be too long before somebody in Kentucky legislature decides to join our colleagues to the West and get on the gun tip.

I have some modest propopals here.

The Kentucky Long Rifle would be the most obvious choice, seeing as it was Daniel Boone's favorite rifle. He nicknamed his "Tick-licker", stemming from boasts of his shooting accuracy, hyperbolically stated to be so great that he could shoot a tick off a deer. The Long Rifle has a ridiculously long barrel by modern standards - sometimes more than four feet - and displays very attractively.

However, there's also the popular concept of the Kentucky Dueling Pistol. Without making a specific nod to any single manufacturer, Kentucky could simply appoint the "dueling pistol" to be its official state firearm represented by an image of a pair of them in a velour-lined case.

On the other hand, the Thompson machine gun, or "Tommy Gun", was invented by Kentuckian John Taliaferro Thompson, and a historical nod to him might be analogous to what the folks in Utah did. However, there would be an inevitable outcry from people saying that the gun's association with gangsterism would set the wrong tone.

But in the final analysis, I believe it would be most fitting to honor Kentucky artist J.T. Dockery, who recently celebrated a gallery exhibit of his graphic novel Spud Crazy, by nominating the official Kentucky weapon to be the Spud Gun.

Either that or the Love Gun.

Pope Villa

2011-03-18T13:32:00.007-04:00

Benjamin Henry Latrobe is considered "the Father of American Architecture" in many circles, and perhaps rightly so: he's the brain behind the design of the U.S. Capitol, the Baltimore Basilica, and the U.S. Custom House of New Orleans. Many buildings in Lafayette Square were designed by him, including even portions of the White House.

This being the case, you'd think people would have striven to preserve his residential buildings as well, but no. Of the many homes created by Latrobe, only three remain standing today.

Lexington's Pope Villa (326 Grosvenor Avenue) is best of the three by far by virtue of its peculiar - some have even called it avant-garde - design. According to its official website: "Its plan is unique in American residential architecture: a perfect square, with a domed, circular rotunda in the center of the second story. Latrobe drew inspiration from 16th century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, but unlike Palladio’s villas, the cubic mass of the Pope Villa conceals within itself a surprising sequence of rectilinear and curvilinear rooms, dramatically splashed with light and shadow. Latrobe called these interior effects “scenery”."

Pope Villa's making a big comeback, with plans underway for a full restoration to its old-timey glory, thanks to the still-surviving blueprints found in the Library of Congress. The image above shows Pope Villa as it currently appears, and the image below shows it more as it looked during its heyday. The home was originally designed for Senator John Pope and his wife Eliza.

Augustus Owsley Stanley II

2011-03-16T09:54:00.005-04:00

This past weekend, Owsley Stanley died in a car wreck in Australia. If you've never heard of the man, you probably aren't a Dead-head; which is to say, you should count yourself lucky.

Augustus "Bear" Owsley Stanley II was born in Kentucky to a wealthy political family. His father was a government attorney and his grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley, was the 38th Governor of Kentucky and a member of the United States Senate.

Like similar characters in these circles - notably, another LSD-obsessed Kentuckian, Alfred M. Hubbard - it's hard to make sense of the events that led up to their life's apex. In 1956, Owsley entered the Air Force. In 1958, he became intensely interested in the Russian Bolshoi Ballet, and made the unlikely career change from military pilot to ballet dancer. But by 1963, he was attending UC Berkeley taking classes in electronics, and it's here that he became fascinated with hallucinogenic drugs. He was producing thousands of hits of acid in his bathroom on campus, and from there they quickly spread all over the country to be consumed by the curious. Apparently even Lee Harvey Oswald tried some of Owsley's LSD just before the Kennedy Assassination, according to FBI memo #NO-89-69-80.

By the summer of '65 Owsley was cranking out 300,000 doses per batch, and was possessed with an almost religious zeal to get everyone on the stuff, by any means necessary. Soon he was best friends with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and became their primary LSD supplier. The Grateful Dead practically adopted him as an auxilliary member, becoming a fixture in their entourage as roadie and drug dealer, and it's said their "dancing bear" logo is an homage to him.

One glowing obituary of the man speaks of him as "a colorful figure who would pour acid into a squirt bottle and spray musicians and fans alike at shows". Whether these people in the audience wanted to be sprayed with LSD, even at the height of the flower power craze, is something that apparently didn't concern Owsley. Jerry Garcia, who apparently didn't care either, is quoted as saying: "There’s nothing wrong with Bear that several billion fewer brain cells wouldn’t fix."

Owsley was the Beatles' LSD caterer during the filming of their disastrous Magical Mystery Tour TV special, which was so monumentally hated by BBC viewers that Paul McCartney issued a statement apologizing for the film's acid-addled self-indulgent nature. As Peter Brown in The Love You Make noted, "It was the first time in memory that an artist was obliged to make a public apology for his work."

In typically naive hippiethink, Owsley defended his LSD crusade this way:

"Psychedelics are a gift of nature that brings tribalism to people; they bring an understanding of the ecology of the planet and the interaction of all living things, because that’s one of the first things you become aware of when you take psychedelics—how everything is alive and how everything depends on everything else. You go take a look at every indigenous culture that has a respect for its environment — unlike the hierarchical approach of the feudalistic structures that the world is now run by — and you will find that these people use psychedelics of some sort, usually in a regular, ritualized manner."

This childish assessment is so blatantly false and ridiculous that I don't even think it needs dissecting here; its naivete speaks for itself. Unfortunately, this dangerous sort of thinking still has a foothold today and many young kids are lied to by bargain-basement "shamans" who really believe that harsh brain-damaging unnatural chemicals have some sort of divine connection to ancient tribal cultures, and that therefore, you should ingest them.

Some may feel I'm being too hard on the guy, especially so soon after his death; but I can't underscore enough the number of lives lost and minds ruined by his shenanigans. That "he meant well" is no consolation. As far as I'm concerned, this guy ruined everything that was great about the 1960s.

The Browning Boys

2011-03-14T20:57:00.001-04:00

One from my writing blog:

This month's installment of Commonwealth Curiosities: did you know that the original "Louisville Slugger" Pete Browning and the pioneering Hollywood director Tod Browning (the man who brought us Freaks and the original Bela Lugosi Dracula) were related? And did you know that both these Kentuckians led extremely eccentric lives? Just how eccentric? Pick up the latest copy of Kentucky Monthly and find out!

View from Bakery Square

2011-03-14T20:04:00.003-04:00

One from our high view department: a relatively high crow's-nest view looking down at Butchertown from the top of Bakery Square.

New Yellow Cardinal Sighting

2011-03-13T15:59:00.005-04:00

This just in: a reader from Pikeville sent these two photos and says: "My daughter took these pictures this morning (3-13-2011) through the kitchen window."

Recently, ultra-rare mutant yellow Cardinals were spotted in Boyle County, causing quite a stir in the world of ornithology.

Haunted Christian Science Church?

2011-03-12T21:54:00.006-05:00

There's a ghost story that perenially makes the rounds of, well, those who pass along ghost stories, regarding a haunting on the steps of Louisville's magnificent First Church of Christ, Scientist at 1305 South Third Street.

As the legend goes, a woman in 1918 paced around the front steps of the church, which was the prearranged place where she was to meet her husband. When her husband, who was a soldier stationed at nearby Camp Taylor, never arrived, she took it as a sign that he no longer cared for her.

Okay. That's the first part, and there's something of a leap on logic, rather like a poorly-constructed plot, between that and the next bit: unbeknownst to the woman, her husband had actually died of Spanish Flu, and then she herself died of that very same disease a week later.

Furthermore, the story is sometimes embroidered with the factoid that the woman and her soldier boy were actually not married, and that they had made secret plans to elope to Chicago that very night. But if they were secret plans, and they both died, how did anyone know this and how did that info become part of the story?

And, of course, the tale has the inevitable punchline that even to this day, late at night when the moon is just right, you can sometimes see her ghost still pacing around the steps of the Christian Science church. Yada yada yada.

(I'm pretty sure David Dominé deals with the subject in great detail, and probably much more accurately than the specious and sketchy online accounts I've perused, but I've misplaced my copy. When I find it, and if better data is to be gleaned, I'll update this post.)

I wonder what the parishioners of the First Church of Christ Scientist must think about all this. Apparently some local "ghost tours" take people by the church so they can gawk and hear the hearsay and say "golly, Martha, sure am spooky."

I'm not exactly certain what the Christian Science position is regarding ghosts, but I do know they don't believe in Heaven per se, at least not in the conventionally understood manner. (On the other hand, the term "Holy Ghost" does appear in their writings often.) The faith's founder, Mary Baker Eddy, stated in her autobiography that from the age of eight, she began hearing disembodied voices.

Often confused with The Church of Scientology, the Christian Science religion was formed in February 1866, after Eddy had a severe fall which caused a major spinal injury. According to her own account, Eddy unexpectedly made a full recovery after reading Matthew 9:2. She subsequently claimed to have helped to heal others via Bible Study, and also to have taught others in the precise way to do it most effectively. By 1875, this belief system was fully formed and expressed in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.

Today, Christian Science reading rooms can be found all over the world, and most people have come to look at their newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, as one of the best sources of journalism available.

The Christian Scientist radio program can be heard every Sunday in Louisville at 8:00-8:30am on WAVG-AM 1450, and 9:00-9:30am on WKJK-AM 1080.

Kentucky's Deadliest Tornadoes

2011-03-09T09:18:00.014-05:00

Since we're not in the tornado-heavy plains states, some might find it rather surprising that Kentucky has placed two entries in NOAA's top 25 deadliest tornado systems in U.S. history.

We bottom the list and then top it: Kentucky squeaks in at #25 with Louisville's tornado outbreak of March 27, 1890. This tornado family spawned at least 24 tornadoes that killed 76 people and destroyed 766 buildings between Parkland and Crescent Hill.

Falls City Hall on Louisville's Market Street was destroyed in the storm, killing at least 55 people by one source's tally but around 200 by another. This also has the distinction, by some estimates, of being the highest death toll due to a single building collapse from a tornado in America. Historian Bryan S. Bush writes:

"Most of the lives lost occurred at the Falls City Hall, located on Market Street, within five minutes the building collapsed with two hundred victims trapped in the rubble. Several activities occurred when the tornado hit the building. The Falls City Hall had a dancing class, which took place on the second floor, with sixty mothers and small girls occupying the class. Only twelve escaped the carnage. In another room the Roman Knights held their meeting, in which seven members were present, the Knights lost one man. On the third floor, the Knights and Ladies of Honor held a meeting with 150 members present, but only a few escaped. The Ancient Order of Foresters had eighteen members present in another room, with all members lost."

And if you've ever wondered what the heck this less-than-impressive minimalist sculpture is (see image below) in downtown Louisville, now you know: it's a monument to the 1890 disaster.

Kentucky was also involved in the #1 tornado, which is generally called the "Tri-State Tornado of 1925" but actually struck more than three states: Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Kansas, and possibly other states were hit by this storm system on March 18, 1925.

Louisville wasn't the only part of Kentucky affected by this group of tornados: at least three people died in Pewee Valley; 39 died in an F4 that swept away farms and homes across Allen, Barren, Monroe, and Metcalfe counties; and an F3 passed throgh Marion, Washington, Bourbon, Mercer, Jessamine, and Fayette counties, killing two and injuring 40 before it finally sputtered out near Lexington.

Southern Indiana was also badly ravaged by the twisters. The town of Griffin was nearly completely wiped off the map, and the town of Elizabeth suffered devastation of several farms.

I'm puzzled why the Super Outbreak of April 1974 didn't make NOAA's top 25 charts, because by all accounts 330 people were killed from a series of 148 twisters in 24 hours. Can someone explain this omission to me?

Apparently NOAA is choosing to count each of these tornados as a stand-alone event rather than grouping them all together, yet it is by grouping twisters together that they arrive at the aforementioned "Tri-State" event and the 1890 one.

The photo below shows a tornado from the Super Outbreak approaching Richmond, from Mike Schwendeman by way of april31974.com.

Krampus the Cat!

2011-03-08T23:59:00.001-05:00

Here's a shout out for the original lolcat! Don't forget to check out the official blog of Krampus, the world's best cat. Of course, I could be said to be biased since the aforementioned pet is mine. (Or am I his?) Krampo's blog is updated daily most of the time, with sexy color pictures of his majesty suitable for framing.

Kentucky Coffeetree

2011-03-07T15:48:00.008-05:00

Some of you may think of the coffeehouse in Frankfort when you hear the name, but the Kentucky Coffeetree was briefly our state tree, from 1976 to 1994.

It had originally been the Tulip Poplar, but in 1976 it was discovered that this had never officially been made legal in the Kentucky statutes. Rather than simply make a quiet adjustment to the statutes, the lawmakers felt the thing to do was to totally reopen the issue all over again. Louisville Courier-Journal writer Joe Creason campaigned hard to have the Kentucky Coffeetree appointed our new state tree, and soon he had the masses riled up behind him supporting this change. (Ironically, some say that Creason had originally intended his campaign as a joke, but when the public rallied behind it, he went along with it.)

Early European frontiersmen exploring Kentucky, having run out of coffee, would resort to roasting and grinding the beans of this tree as a (very poor) substitute for their java jones. George Washington was fond of the tree, and mentioned it in his writings. George Rogers Clark gave seeds to Thomas Jefferson, and the resultant trees can still be found on the lawn of Jefferson's Monticello today.

There are only two other species in the genus Gymnocladus, both of which are native to China, which makes me wonder - how came it to these shores? (The idea that Chinese explorers made it to North America long before Columbus is one that's gaining currency.)

This helpful site shows you in copious detail what the Kentucky Coffeetree and its seed pods look like. I can't condone anyone actually trying to make coffee from these seeds, because it just isn't safe. Like Cashews, the seeds are poisonous in their regular state and must be baked or roasted for at least three hours at 300 degrees.

Regarding its distribution, Wikipedia says: "Widely dispersed, but rare. The Kentucky Coffeetree, Gymnocladus dioicus, is considered a rare tree species. "Rare species are those that are so uncommon that they should be monitored to determine whether their populations are becoming threatened". Meanwhile, the Arbor Day Foundation says: "Resistant to disease and able to adapt to a wide variety of soils and climates, the Kentucky Coffeetree is an excellent choice for parks and golf courses. It is also widely used as an ornamental and street tree". Which begs the question, how has it become borderline-endangered if it's so hardy and easily adaptable?