Urinating, Meat-handling Man Invades Kroger

The title kinda says it all, doesn't it? Read more on my Louisville Mojo column here.

Gotta love that Dixie Highway.

Exploding house in Florence

A house in Florence went kaboom on Sunday, at the corner of Dixie Highway and Main. From WHAS-TV:

(WHAS11) - Police in northern Kentucky are reviewing video that shows a vacant two-story house exploding and collapsing into a pile of debris.

A surveillance camera at a nearby business captured the explosion in Florence Sunday afternoon.

No one was hurt but the blast sent debris and glass flying in all directions and blew out windows at a nearby office.

"All of sudden out of nowhere, we just had this big boom and explosion and I saw it across the street the house and it looked like just like an explosion right in the middle of the bottom of the house and it just blew out the whole entire bottom half of the house,” said Michael Toner.

It's suspected to be due to a natural gas leak, but no one's certain just yet. From WLWT-TV:

The wreckage of the home came to rest several feet away from its foundation, and firefighters said the home was blown about 20 feet into the air.

Two boys who were in a nearby skate park said they were nearly struck by the wreckage.

"We were right in front of that house and it blew up. The house lifted up, flames went up, debris flying everywhere, glass and wood hitting my car. It was basically like a tornado," said John Bailey.

People as far as two miles away reported hearing and feeling the explosion.

"It kind of looked fake. It was better than a movie -- our car went off the ground and it was pretty sweet, but crazy at the same time," said witness Gage Schultz.

Brown-Forman's Big Bourbon Bottle

One of America's best mimetic water towers is at the Brown-Forman plant on Dixie Highway in Louisville: it's fashioned to look like an enormous bottle of Old Forester bourbon, and can be clearly seen for miles around.

The Behringer-Crawford Museum

The Behringer-Crawford Museum, located near Covington, KY, is a small but amazing collection of all manner of natural wonders and curiosities, highly recommended.

What really tends to pack in the crowds, though, would be the museum's crown jewel of an exhibit: a genuine human shrunken head. Shrunken human heads are increasingly only in the hands of private collectors and as far as I know, this is the only opportunity to view one up close in Kentucky. You don't see shrunken heads at the Speed.

Also in their archives: a hairball taken from the stomach of a cow. Why? I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with The Mad Stone. There's also a two-headed calf, as well as a giant Elk and a stuffed specimen of the now-extinct miniature breed of English terrier. It's a taxidermist's wet dream.

According to their website, a most intriguing event is coming up in 2009: a culinary celebration of Dixie Highway restaurants. Save a table for me.

Dixie Highway

The stretch of Highway 31W, or “Dixie Highway,” that takes one out of Jefferson County has long fascinated me. It may not exactly be a “road less traveled” - in fact, the traffic can often be quite annoying - but it’s a road that many seek to avoid. It should come as no surprise to the reader, then, that’s it’s a road I enjoy greatly, for the very same reasons that others shun it.

Dixie Highway, to many people’s sense of aesthetics and decorum, is ugly. Dirty. Tacky. Businesses abound that still have that beautiful classic 1940s-1960s architecture and signage, which I’ll take any day over the dreary modern homogenized look. One of my favorite places here is Pepper Tackle, a fishing supply store whose sign features a gargantuan fiberglass fish. City officials, who wouldn’t know cultural beauty if it bit the psoriasis off their elbows, have made attempts to have the sign removed over various contrived technicalities. So far the enemy’s efforts have been unsuccessful. The price of eternal awesomeness is eternal vigilance.

Then there’s the plethora of porno stores and adult theaters, which lend a pleasantly gaudy bright pink je ne sais quoi to the area, as do the charming characters seen furtively shuffling and stumbling in and out of them. It’s no Bourbon Street, but the scene nevertheless conjures up a powerful sense of noble lowlife resonance with the denizens of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny".

The porno houses seem to drastically proliferate the closer one gets to Fort Knox. A coincidence, no doubt.

And then there’s Rubbertown, where all sorts of pleasant substances are manufactured, and many more are sloughed off. You’ll know it when you come upon it - look for the giant belching smokestacks. You can’t miss it. You also might smell some funny smells while passing through this area, but don’t worry, they wouldn’t be allowed to send toxic chemicals into the air, right? Responsible and far-sighted men in local and federal government have entire careers devoted to keep that from happening, right?

There’s an environmental activist group in Jefferson County called REACT, which stands for Rubbertown Emergency Action, who describe themselves as a “campaign to stop toxic air pollution coming from ten chemical plants located in the Rubbertown area of Louisville,” and go on to say: “Air monitors located in neighborhoods surrounding the chemical plants revealed that residents have been breathing in at least 18 toxic chemicals at levels sometimes as high as 540 times the health threshold established by the EPA.” The 18 toxic chemicals detected by the air monitors, chemicals such as 1,3-butadiene and vinyl chloride, can cause cancer, cardiovascular disease and central nervous system damage. REACT is a campaign of Rubbertown residents who have finally said, “Enough! We're not taking it anymore”, and are taking action to end Rubbertown's 'killer air.'

The history of Dixie Highway is as convoluted as its terrain. As I understand it, in 1914 it was decided to create a series of highways and roads that were generally regarded to be one unified highway, even though this included side roads, connecting roads, and multiple branches. Today Dixie Highway’s meandering paths have been renamed piecemeal, dependent on location, and now make up portions of other highways, such as U.S. 25. Most Kentuckians no longer refer to these roads as “Dixie Highway,” but the stretch of Highway 31W that we are discussing here is still referred to by that name by its locals.

The Big Fish of Dixie Highway

If you liked The Unfriendly Fish Fountain, here's an even bigger fish to fry. This enormous fiberglas bass decorates the sign for Pepper Tackle on Dixie Highway between Valley Station and Fort Knox. Though it's hard to gauge the size perspective in the picture, the disturbingly lifelike fish is bigger than a pickup truck.