High Five!

Nowadays, when someone says "High Five!", there's a very good chance they're making a Borat reference. But it wasn't always so. According to louisville.com:

"It will forever be recorded in etymology books that the late University of Louisville basketball player Derek Smith popularized, if not coined, the term "high five" during the Cards 1979-80 championship season. Whereas the gesture itself started decades before, the origin of the phrase — says none other than the Oxford English Dictionary — took hold in 1980 and found its first print use in an October 1980 issue of Maclean’s Magazine. Smith, it should be noted, did take credit for inventing the language."

Sure enough, a glance at Smith's findagrave page declares him the creator and the originator of the term "high five" not once but twice in the same short paragraph. (Turn to page 209 in your copy of Weird Kentucky for a closer look at Smith's larger-than-life full-body-pictorial gravestone.)

Problem is, there are many sites online, like Outsports, that name baseball star Glenn Burke as the creator of the High Five.

And then there's a site called National High Five Day which says:

"I received an email two weeks ago. It came from Victor Sleets, a resident of Eminence, Kentucky. Mr. Sleets had been introduced to National High Five Day by a friend who thought that based on his unique family history, he might be interested in the holiday. I spoke in detail to Mr. Sleets and his father Lamont on the phone, and based on what they told me about their family’s history, I have no doubt that the true history of the High Five can finally be revealed.

Victor’s father, Lamont Sleets Jr, known to his friends as Mont, is one of the greatest basketball players in Murray State University’s history. Twice named to the Ohio Valley All-Conference team, Mont’s true legacy has not been recognized until now: Mont Sleets invented the High Five as we know it today."

Wow, so maybe the High Five was invented in Kentucky after all? As Borat would also say: "Not!"

The National High Five Day page gives an explanation for Sleets' creation of the term and I have to say it has the same convoluted, reverse-engineered ring to it as when people of today, lacking an explanation for how a Kentucky town got its weird name, simply make something up. Sleets' explanation for how he supposedly invented the High Five is so ludicrous and unlikely-sounding in so many ways and on so many levels, I'm not even going to bother recounting it here.

How do all these wacky rumors begin, anyway? I can personally tell you that as a child growing up in the early 1970s, we were already doing the High Five gesture amongst ourselves, as a distinct separate gesture from the hand-slapping "gimme five" kind of hipster affectation. And it was known as the High Five, by that name, even then.

Wikipedia points out that examples of the High Five can be seen in 1966 footage of Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong, and in a 1941 Abbott & Costello movie during a song-and-dance routine called "Gimme Some Skin, My Friend", just to cite two way-prior examples.

I'm not certain why anyone even cares who created the High Five, or why Kentuckians seem to be so eager to lay claim to it. But that's just another instance of what makes our Kentucky so unusual.

Perhaps I'll start insisting that I'm the guy who started everyone saying, "I feel you, man". (It's on the internet so it must be true!)

Ale 8 One

Ale 8 One, known colloquially as simply "Ale 8", was first created in Winchester, KY by G.L. Wainscott, circa 1926.

It was supposedly inspired by a recipe Wainscott had obtained in Europe many years prior. Exactly what Ale 8's secret formula is, no one knows - but it's clear that Ginger is a key ingredient. Some classify Ale 8 as a Ginger Ale, in fact, but I wouldn't go that far. Hardcore Ginger Ale fans, who are used to spicy solutions like Blenheim's, would probably be disappointed by Ale 8's divine subtlety if they went into it expecting a serious Ginger Ale burning sensation. Ale 8 is also far less carbonated than most soda pop, which also can be somewhat disconcerting for noobs.

Wainscott was a Clark County small-time soda bottler who had been creating and selling fruit-flavored sodas for the local market since 1902. Prior to Ale 8, his most popular product was Roxa-Kola, a cola introduced in 1906.

The odd details of a court case between Wainscott and a Campbellsville retailer of Roxa-Kola can be found here in Volume 153 of The Southwestern Reporter, 1913.


Ale-8-One was actually originally literally called "A Late One", rendered as a visual pun on the label. That visual pun stuck and now a century later, people think it's the other way around.

The Ale-8-One empire continues to be a small, family-owned Kentucky enterprise, currently presided over by Wainscott's descendant Frank A. Rogers III, and moves about 1.5 million cases per year.

According to Wikipedia, "The recipe for Ale-8 is a closely guarded family secret. Reportedly, only two executives — Rogers and Fielding Rogers, Executive Vice-President and heir-apparent to the company — know the exact composition". Then again, Wikipedia also claims that it's a popular Kentucky practice to mix Bourbon and Ale-8, and I've never heard of such a thing. Sounds revolting to me; a waste of good bourbon and good Ale-8. Supposedly the mixed drink in question is called a "Squirrel", which probably goes back to the days when Ale8 had a mascot called Sue the Squirrel and the slogan "Ale 8 One - Share it with a Squirrel".


A more promising Ale-8 combo than Bourbon is barbecue. In 2008, Ale-8-one Barbecue Sauce was launched, based on the private recipe of WLXX-FM morning radio DJs Bandy and Bailey.

400 Mile Yard Sale Across Kentucky

I live for yard sales, flea markets, junk stores, auctions, trading posts, antique malls, and such. And in this economy, "secondary market" stuff is quickly becoming primary.

So it should come as no surprise that you'll find me somewhere in all the hubbub of the 400 Mile Yard Sale across Kentucky.

The sale follows Highway 68 (though there's always plenty more yard sales going on in the periphery each year) from Maysville to Paducah and hitting all points in between - including Paris, Lexington, Nicholasville, Wilmore, Harrodsburg, Danville, Gravel Switch, Lebanon, Campbellsville, Glasgow, Bowling Green, Cadiz, Hopkinsville, and Benton. Yee-haw!


(By the way, Catclaw Theatre is having a yard sale this weekend at 2107 Lakeland Road in the Anchorage area of Louisville. Come on down and say howdy! And if you can't make it, make a donation!)

"Drop the Tunug!"

NUFORC's first UFO report of 2009 comes from Campbellsville, KY, and boy, lemme tell you, it's a humdinger. It's a convoluted and long story, told one stilted sentence at a time, with most sentences separately paragraphed. Here's an excerpt:

I remember the green lights were the color of a green LED such as that you would find on a computer monitor.

I remember I saw one BRIGHT light.

I remember a voice calling saying, "Drop the tunug." It was a robotic voice. I remember calling out, "I do not have anything in my hand." The voice said again, "DROP THE TUNUG."I started running. I remember praying in my head, "LORD, I am not doing ANYTHING wrong.. PLEASE save me. I will always serve you no matter what, so PLEASE help me." I remember this horrible pain going through my legs, and I fell to the ground.

I heard a clicking noise.

I remember someone walking up to me. They put handcuffs on me. I was told to get up, and not to move, or I would be shot with a taser.

I know a LOT about tasers. I remember that I was taken to a building.

It was a building, that i had never seen before.

When I got in, I heard the building making a low pitched humming noise, and there were several machines with lines, and other thangs going across their screen.

I was told to sit down.

I sat down in a little chair which had several buttons and cranks on it.

I saw a red button that said, "For emergencies only." I remember I was told to sit and be quiet or I would be tased again.

I complied.

I was hooked up to a pulse oximeter, which monitored my oxygen levels, and a mask was put on my face.

I remember them saying my oxygen was VERY low.

I was taken to a little room, and was hooked up to an EKG machine which beeped to my heartrate.

I was then told to put my face up against this machine.

I remember my Mom had told me before NEVER to look into something unless I knew what it was.

Of the report, NUFORC states: "This report is an obvious hoax. However, we post it here, in order to illustrate to those who visit our site the type of stupidity our Center often has to put up with. Fittingly, we feel, the source of the hoax prefers to remain anonymous."

Now, you know and I know this story is 99.999999999 likely to be nonsense, and yet I have to say that there really is a truism in covert operations of any kind: if you're up to any top-secret CIA-type skullduggery, all you have to do to make sure no one believes it happened is to make the circumstances really stupid sounding.

As Jack Ruby once purportedly said: "You know why these CIA guys do so much stuff that don't make no sense? 'Cause when you try to tell somebody else about it, you don't make no sense neither."

Do I think for a moment that there's a chance that this is what happened here? Well, no, not really. But it does make me think that when the next team of DARPA/NSA spyboys decide to do some bogus-UFO-related psychological experiments on humans, they'll dress in goofy rubber alien suits and tell their victims to "Drop the Tunug!"

What's the frequency, Kenneth?