UK's Foot-Puncturing Maniac

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.

Bloated Cow Syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Testicles of Black Bess

John Hunt Morgan (he of the Hunt-Morgan House) is honored for his Civil War service with an ostentatious statue in downtown Lexington (Which is rather odd, since he fought for the Confederacy). Created by Italian sculptor Pompeo Coppini, it depicts the General atop his beloved horse, Black Bess.

As you might surmise from her name, Black Bess was female. Yet Coppini, for reasons opaque to me, declared that it would be more heroic if Morgan was astride a stallion instead of a mare - and so took the extreme artistic license of giving Black Bess prominent testicles.

James Loewen, in his book Lies Across America, wrote about the quaint tradition among UK frat-boys to paint Black Bess' testicles blue and white, and relayed an old, clunkily-written anonymous poem passed along as local folklore:

So darkness comes to Bluegrass men —
Like darkness o'er them falls —
For well we know gentlemen should show
Respect for a lady's balls.

Black Bess was probably named after the English highwayman Dick Turpin's horse, even though some say that Black Bess was strictly fictional, invented for William Harrison Ainsworth's novel 1834 Rookwood and pulp fiction like Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, published in 254 weekly installments beginning in 1867.

Slick Rick's Fatal Attraction

Words truly can't express just how little interest I have in modern commercial sports. And when it comes to basketball in particular, I not only don't care about it, I actively harbor some antipathy towards it.

So it would take something pretty wacky to get me to write about Kentucky basketball on here - maybe like if Kyle Macy got a sex change operation, John Calipari was abducted by aliens (if only!), or if Rajan Rondo was proclaimed to be the 974th Living Eck Master.

Well, something almost that weird happened. For those of you who haven't already heard the details too many times to count:

Rick Pitino had sex with a woman in a restaurant - in a restaurant - subsequently gave her three grand for an abortion (even though no proof was offered that the baby was his), then had a secret meeting with her at the apartment of the team’s equipment manager, who would subsequently marry the woman and then divorce her.

Got that so far? Okay. Then:

The woman attempts to shake Pitino down for her silence on the matter for ten million dollars, new cars, and a house. Pitino decides being blackmailed is not such a good idea, and calls the cops on the extortionist instead. (I can imagine her stunned and stammering "w-w-what?? that wasn't supposed to happen!") Flailing in desperation, she tells police that Pitino had actually raped her on not one, but two occasions. Pitino maintains the sex was consensual.

In other words, it's your typical southern trailer-park feud drama, just played out in Brooks Brothers suits and bad Derby hats instead of NASCAR sleeveless t-shirts and Daisy Dukes.


Strangely, some members of the public are holding Pitino up to greater scorn than Sypher, which is puzzling to me. Pitino has led a very successful and productive life in many, many fields besides sports, and to turn on him over a dalliance that occurred years ago and isn't anyone's business anyway, well, that's just petty. Rick Pitino is still a role model and a hero.

Cosmic Dust in Kentucky

In the January 1914 issue of a professional medical journal called The Medical Council, there's an article entitled "Dust and the Genesis of New Diseases". t provides some fascinating nuggets of antiquated info on the subject of microscopic and near-microscopic dust, a key interest of mine.


A choice chunk of the article:

Cosmic dust, of which thousands of tons annually fall on the Earth, is often charged with living organisms...

Darwin described a fall of strange organisms covering an area of over a million square miles. Weber found myriads of germs in a fall of yellow snow in Peckeloh, Germany... In October 1846 over one hundred unknown organisms were observed as charging a fall of cosmic dust in France. Ehrenberg estimated that forty-five tons of organic forms fell in this shower.

But then, most interestingly of all, it says:

Palestine and Western Kentucky have also been experienced immense showers of dust charged with organic life.

The article's author uses "cosmic dust" to refer to any dust falling from the sky, and freely admits that there is no way to determine with certainty whether the substances in question came from outer space, other worlds, or just blew here from somewhere else on Earth.

A century later, we are now pretty sure that it's the latter, and that any mass rains of living organic materials were somehow deposited by the Jet Stream or other winds. Dust from the Sahara Desert, for example, blows high into the atmosphere and then comes back down to land on Jamaica regularly.

(The huge Bauxite deposits in Jamaica, by the way, are a direct result of millions of years of this trans-Saharan dust migration. Most aluminum soda cans in North America are actually made from this Bauxite, so next time you pop open a can a Coke, ponder that you are holding something derived entirely of ancient Saharan sand particles that made their way to the Caribbean, one particle at a time over millenia, to be mined in the present day and turned into aluminum cans for you and me.)


But we also now know that actual cosmic dust from space is falling on Kentucky today - and everywhere else, for that matter. According to the must-read book The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes:

The Earth is still gathering a hundred tons of space dust every day - to the delight of scientists... "Since every atom in our bodies came from inside of stars", explains astrophysicist Don Brownlee, "by studying these interstellar dust particles, we can learn about our cosmic roots".

The Earth grows fatter every day, snowed under by a continuous microscopic flurry of space specks. Rare as they are, on average, every square yard of the planet should nonetheless receive one speck each day. Statistically, it's a good bet that there's a fresh piece of space dust on the hood of your car daily...

They're everywhere", Brownlee says. "You eat them all the time. Any carpet would have them."

As for the cryptic reference to falls of organic material from space occurring in Kentucky, that may be a reference to the "nostoc" incidents referred to by Charles Fort as....

"The Kentucky Phenomenon."

So it was called, in its day, and now we have an occurrence that attracted a great deal of attention in its own time. Usually these things of the accursed have been hushed up or disregarded—suppressed like the seven black rains of Slains—but, upon March 3, 1876, something occurred, in Bath County, Kentucky, that brought many newspaper correspondents to the scene.

The substance that looked like beef that fell from the sky.

Upon March 3, 1876, at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky—"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible in the sky. It fell in flakes of various sizes; some two inches square, one, three or four inches square. The flake-formation is interesting: later we shall think of it as signifying pressure—somewhere. It was a thick shower, on the ground, on trees, on fences, but it was narrowly localized: or upon a strip of land about 100 yards long and about 50 yards wide. For the first account, see the Scientific American, 34-197, and the New York Times, March 10, 1876.

Meanwhile, the dusty material falling to Earth that is verifiably interstellar in origin is studied routinely in the astrophysics departments of Kentucky universities, such as UK's 2D Dusty project ("2D radiative transfer in astrophysical dust") and Western Kentucky University's paper "Detecting Dust-Generating Stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and Beyond".

Considering that our planet is nestled inside an immense disk of zodiacal dust, there should be plenty of interesting research in this field unto infinity.

Alfred M. Hubbard

The Alfred M. Hubbard story - what little we know of it - is one of the strangest, most mysterious tales of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, skullduggery and adventure I've heard. And of course, he's a good Kentucky boy.

As he himself told the story of his early youth, he was poor, barefoot; a self-described hillbilly from the mountains of Kentucky. Then a pair of angels appeared to him and instructed him to "build something". ("He had these visions, and he learned to trust them early on," Willis Harman, director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences later said of him.)

In 1919, he did indeed build something: he invented the "Hubbard Energy Transformer", an alleged perpetual motion device which garnered nationwide media attention. Hubbard sold half the patent for $75,000 to the Radium Chemical Company of Pittsburgh, PA, after which it was never heard of again.

During Prohibition, Hubbard worked for a gang of bootleggers and smugglers in Seattle using a cab driving company as a front. He built a "ship-to-shore communication device" which he concealed in the trunk of his taxicab, to aid him in making liquor runs over the Canadian border. By some accounts, he was caught and went to prison for 18 months, but by other accounts, he had actually been a secret government agent for the Treasury Department all along, infiltrating the smugglers for Uncle Sam. Even if true, Hubbard was possibly playing both sides of the fence as a double agent: his next gig was running security for the Mafia-run Tropicana Hotel in Vegas.

Hubbard was approached by the OSS (now the CIA) and offered a job: sneaking war munitions into the U.K. before America had formally entered World War II. Eighteen months before Pearl Harbor, Hubbard became a Canadian citizen as part of his cover, and handled millions of dollars which were laundered through the Canadian consulate and financed OSS/CIA covert operations in Europe.

According to researcher Ben Metcalfe in Vancouver Magazine, Hubbard was also involved in the Manhattan Project in some way, probably moving Uranium through Site W.

After the war, Hubbard ran a charter boat company, and was now in the habit of referring to himself as "Captain". Captain Hubbard was now a sudden millionaire somehow, and owned an island off the coast of Vancouver called Dayman Island. President Harry Truman granted him a Presidential Pardon via his Proclamation 2676.

(As if all of this isn't a highly bizarre and improbable-sounding life story already, just wait, it gets weirder...)

In 1950, Hubbard experienced another angelic visitation. The angels told him to watch for something very important to the future of all mankind, which would soon make itself known to him. The next year, he heard about Albert Hoffman's experiments with LSD, and became convinced that this was the breakthrough the angels had spoken of.

Hubbard became obsessed with LSD, and began a major campaign to promote it as the spiritual cure to all humanity's problems. He introduced thousands of prominent people to it, including Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kubrick, and - so he claimed - the Pope. Reports conflict on whether he did this strictly on his own volition, or as part of the CIA's "MK-ULTRA" mind-control LSD experiments. I'm guessing the latter. (Most of the MK-ULTRA documents were destroyed in 1973 by project chief Sidney Gottlieb and CIA Director Richard Helms.)

According to the book Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Hubbard spent much of the 1960s working for Teledyne, which was a major defense subcontractor, for a secret NASA project that involved testing "psychochemical agents" on astronauts and pilots.

Somewhere along the way, Hubbard had acquired a doctorate degree from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, without having actually attended classes. He listed this doctorate as part of his credentials when he went to work for the creepy Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970s. The SRI, which also had MK-ULTRA connections, pioneered the early top-secret military research into paranormal abilities like Remote Viewing. These SRI experiments were headed by some very interesting people like Hal Puthoff, who was also working for that other fellow named Hubbard.

After a failed attempt to set up a new LSD-as-cancer-cure experimentation program in 1978, Hubbard became a hermit in a mobile home in the Arizona desert. He died August 31, 1982, at the age of 81.

What I haven't been able to determine is exactly where in Kentucky Mr. Hubbard was from. Anyone got a clue?


(Thanks to Todd Brendan Fahey, for his seminal research on 'Captain' Al Hubbard"!)

Harry Dean Stanton

Get down on your knees, Planet Earth, and thank Kentucky once again for bringing you raw talent at its best. Harry Dean Stanton, one of Hollywood's greatest maverick actors, and known for being a character offstage as well as on, is a Kentuckian.

Harry was born in Irvine in 1926, and graduated from the University of Kentucky in Lexington before moving on to a theatre and film career in California. His long film oeuvre includes How the West Was Won (1962), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Godfather Part II (1974), Alien (1979), Escape from New York (1981), Repo Man, (1984), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and Inland Empire (2006), among others. Youngsters today probably know him best as Roman Grant, the elder in the Mormon-themed HBO show Big Love.

While he's still kickin', I'd love to do some research about Harry's Lexington years, and find out what clubs, bars and taverns he frequented - it's entirely possible that he and the great writer/pool hustler/drinkin' man Walter Tevis' paths may have crossed, either knowingly or unknowingly. Tevis was born in 1928, and spent a lot of time in both Irvine and Lexington. Since Winchester and Richmond lie directly between Irvine and Lexington (on Route 89 and Highway 25, respectively) it's a certainty that these cities were part of Harry's teenage stomping grounds as well.

Obama effigy hung from noose on UK campus

From polwatchers.typepad.com:

University of Kentucky police are investigating who hung an effigy of Democrat Sen. Barack Obama from a tree on the Lexington campus Wednesday morning.

UK President Lee Todd said that UK police have notified federal authorities of the incident. Todd said a professor saw the effigy on the tree near the Rose Street parking garage across from the Mining and Mineral Resources building this morning and called police. The professor then sent Todd an email notifying him of the incident.

UK police took down the effigy and have it as evidence, Todd said. He called the act "deplorable" and says that type of behavior is not tolerated on UK's campus.

The effigy had a mask of Obama on it and there was a noose around the effigy's neck, Todd said.

And:

Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the Secret Service, confirmed that the federal agency charged with protecting presidents and presidential candidates had been notified and were working with UK police to determine who was responsible.

Donovan said he couldn't go into the specifics of the investigation.

"We take any threat against any of our protectees very, seriously," Donovan said.

Meanwhile, just over the river from Louisville, in Clarksville, IN:

A Clarksville man expressed his opposition to Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy by hanging an inflatable doll made to look like the Democratic nominee from a tree on his front lawn – until his son took it down as reporters gathered at the scene.

“It is not racially motivated,” Kirk Deddo said today as he stood under the tree outside his Potters Lane home. Deddo is white; Obama is the first black to be nominated for president by a major political party.

Gary Leavell, president of the Clark County chapter of the NAACP, said after the scene was described to him, “That’s a direct threat on the life of Obama as far as I’m concerned.”

Leavell said he would ask Clark County Prosecutor Steve Stewart to look into the matter.

Stewart could not be reached for comment. But Jeremy Mull, chief deputy prosecutor, said after making a brief legal search that “it does not appear to be in violation of any Indiana criminal statute.”

But Mull added, “Personally, I find such conduct to be deplorable.”

Grillo the Clown

The first reported sightings of this unique Kentucky eccentric were in the early 1990s, on the streets of towns like Winchester, Paris, and Cynthiana. Nowadays, however, Grillo is mainly found around the downtown/UK areas of Lexington, dressed in his usual outlandish regalia and masks. A self-styled performance artist, street musician, and panhandler, Grillo also has his own rent-a-clown business, but we'd be surprised if anyone has ever hired him.

There are many stories about Grillo's past but all are contradictory. Grillo himself tells radically different versions of his life story when asked. Although his only internet access comes from visits to the public library, he maintains a considerable web presence with numerous sites by and about him.

The stories of Grillo's misadventures and malfeasance are legendary and worthy of compilation in a tome of their own. My favorite Grillo story is the time he actually took up residence in the men's room of a University of Kentucky campus building, to the extent of actually bringing in chairs, lamps, books, and a TV set. Apparently this went on for many weeks, with only a few "Do not remove" signs taped to his stuff being sufficient to keep unquestioning janitors - or anyone else - from messing with his belongings. It was then that I knew Grillo really was a true performance artist!

Thinking I could harness his radioactive powers, I hired Grillo to perform his act at my Clowns in Love art exhibition in New York City and paid for his bus fare, but it was not to be: he showed up at the very end of the show in an altered state of consciousness, made a mess of the place with shaving cream pies for a few minutes, and then departed into the night with my 200 bucks and two bottles of vodka.

Oh well, that's show business.

A couple years back, my indie record label Creeps Records cut a deal to release Grillo's album Grillo Sings the Hits of the 90s (He wanted to call it Blubbering Buttsteaks of Eternal Torment). Despite the painfully low-fidelity nature of the recording we were given, and despite the fact that he's singing these songs acapella, the album is actually selling pretty well, so maybe this is a new career for the clown.

Then again, we also received a report from someone that one cassette recently purchased from Grillo on the street, supposedly of music performance by him, actually turned out to contain the audio portion of a TV broadcast of a 2003 Bengals-Chiefs game.

More about Grillo on page 99 of Weird Kentucky.