Zombie Warning in Florence

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.

Cylindrical UFO in Florence

From the Latest UFO Sightings blog:

This video is of what I think is a UFO spotted in Florence Ky on Mt. Zion Road. This was about 11:00 PM at night and very cold 19 degrees outside. Several people saw this and you had to look straight up to see it. In the video, it is very dark, but what you are looking for is 3 square lights about the center of the screen. The object in the video stayed stationary, the movement is from me holding the camera." (Author: battlebuggy @ youtube)

Click through to see two different YouTube videos of the incident.

Dance of Death in Northern KY

Franz Liszt's Totentanz ("Dance of Death")is a symphonic piece for piano and orchestra, based on the Gregorian plainchant melody Dies Irae, but with dynamic stylistic innovations that approach atonal avant-garde. Liszt began work on the piece in 1838 and completed it in 1849; then tweaked it further in subsequent years.

Michael Chertock, faculty member at UC's College-Conservatory of Music, will perform "Totentanz" on piano with James R. Cassidy and the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra this weekend:

8 p.m. Saturday at Florence Baptist Church at Mount Zion

3 p.m. Sunday, Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, Covington.


This Gregorian Chant-inspired program also includes Requiem by Maurice Duruflé, featuring the KSO Chorale and the Cincinnati Choral Society. Duruflé wrote it in 1947 as a tribute to his father. The piece, composed for mixed choir with mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists, exists in three different orchestrations: one for organ alone, one for organ with string orchestra, and one for organ and full orchestra.


Also on the bill for the evening: Aaron Jay Kernis’ Musica Celestis, inspired by the fascinating life of the 12th-century clairvoyant Hildegard von Bingen (pictured above). Hildegard is described by Wikipedia as "a Christian mystic, German Benedictine abbess, author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet, channeller, visionary, composer, and polymath."

Tickets are $28 for A section seating and $23 for B section seating. B Section seating is further discounted for Seniors ($18) and students ($10). 859-431-6216 or visit the Kentucky Symphony Orchestra's website.

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.

Hate Group Adopts Florence Highway

From the New York Times:

Kentucky officials were surprised to learn from reporters this year that the National Alliance, a white separatist group, had adopted a highway. The group’s sign honored its late founder, William Pierce, whose novel The Turner Diaries inspired Timothy J. McVeigh to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

Chuck Wolfe, a spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, said officials initially hoped they could terminate the contract, but determined that doing so would open them to costly litigation that might fail.

And from WCPO-TV:

"Diversity and multiculturalism is simply not in any way good for our people, not good for our nation," said Robert Ransdell, Cincinnati coordinator of the National Alliance. "We do believe that essentially the best way is separation, we believe that multiculturalism is essentially death for our people."

The head of Kentucky's Adopt-A-Highway program, Nancy Wood, said she didn't know what the group stood for until 9News brought it to her attention Monday.

"We did not know what this group was about," said Wood. "The KY Transportation Cabinet and the Adopt-A-Highway group doesn't condone racist ideology, so we will take the matter up with our attorney on how to best address the issue."

The KKK pulled a similar PR stunt a few years back in Missouri, and actually fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, which determined that even psychotic organizations have the right to take part in Adopt-a-Highway programs. And if you think that's an unfair characterization, or that such hate-groups are totally marginalized and obsolete nowadays, think again: the Anti-Defamation League warns that the National Alliance is growing in strength. Read this:

A new ADL investigation reveals that the neo-Nazi National Alliance (NA) is the single most dangerous organized hate group in the United States today. In the past several years, dozens of violent crimes, including murders, bombings and robberies have been traced to NA members or appear to have been inspired by the group's propaganda...

The National Alliance is the largest and most active neo-Nazi organization in the nation, with 16 active cells from coast to coast, and a reported membership of 1,000. In the last three years, there has been evidence of NA activity in no fewer than 26 states nationwide.

The NA is led by former Oregon State University physics professor and veteran anti-Semite William L. Pierce, 66. Using the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, Pierce wrote the novel The Turner Diaries, which details a successful world revolution by an all-white army, and the systematic extermination of Blacks, Jews, and other minorities. Many extremists regard The Turner Diaries as an explicit terrorism manual...

The ADL has even more detailed and disturbing data about the National Alliance here.

Horse Industry Leaving KY?

I've received a scary booklet via snail-mail, from the Kentucky Equine Education Project. It says:

Due to expanded gaming, racetracks in Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Florida, Louisiana and other states have substantially increased their race purses. As a result, owners, trainers, horses and the jobs that are associated with them are leaving. It has left Kentucky's racing industry struggling for its life. Race days have been cancelled and Kentucky racetracks are on the verge of closing. Kentucky horse racing, the home of the Derby, is on the verge of meltdown.

Politicians in Frankfort have brushed this problem under the table for years, while jobs and tax dollars have left for other states. If Frankfort doesn't fix the problem soon, Kentucky will lose its signature industry.

Hyperbole? Maybe.

But maybe not. There's more than a handful of grains of truth to what they're saying, as evidenced by recent mainstream news stories about Turfway Park canceling some Monday cards, Recurring rumors of Ellis Park closing down, Churchill Downs struggling for entries, and thehorse.com's report about Keeneland's "downward spiral".

Two UFOs in Northern KY

A post on unitedstatesufo.blogspot.com tells of a UFO sighting in Edgewood, KY:

I was outside smoking a cigarette and as I always do I look up at the sky and star gaze. As I was looking I saw what appeared to be a red orb with a tail of bright white and green. It was moving at a speed that is unimaginable.

Now, me, I would think that a UFO moving "at a speed that is unimaginable" would be zipping by so fast that you couldn't tell what color it was, or what shape it was, or that it was even there. If it's slow enough to look at it and say "huh, looky there", then it's not unimaginably fast. But be that as it may, someone responded to the post with a sighting report of their own:

I live in Florence, Kentucky, which is about 15 minutes away via I-75 South.

Friday, February 13th around 9:30 or so my daughter and I witnessed at first thought to be a bluish falling star.

Quickly, it turned into a large green orb with what appears to best describe as several lights inside. It was not a comet as no tail was visible.

It just came out of the sky and made a slight turn and became large and was gone as if someone turned off the lights.

The Florence Water Tower

For some reason, millions of people have been enthralled and captivated by the fact that this water tower in Florence, KY bears the nonsequitur "Florence Y'all". I remember that as a child, I was too - I remember seeing it at a young age, probably shortly after the sign on the tower had first been painted. Maybe it's a false memory, but I seem to remember there being no apostrophe on the tower's "y'all" back then.

According to local legend, the sign originally said "Florence Mall" but supposedly had to be changed to avoid violating some sort of signage-zoning law that forbade business advertisements being of a certain height. Another rumor states that the sign was actually a mistake that the city couldn't afford to immediately correct, and by the time they could, it had become a popular attraction all its own. (It was a simpler time in the 1970s!)

I won't go so far as to try to debunk these rumors, but I will note that some things sure strike me as odd. If, as the official version of the story goes, the apostrophe was added when changing the word MALL to Y'ALL, it sure is strange that a space exists between the Y and A to accommodate said apostrophe, one that should not be there if things are as we are told.

The official story also says the sides of the M were whited out to create a Y, but I'm just not seeing that when I look at the Y; it would have been an odd M indeed. Finally, the word "Y'all" is already slightly off-center to the left, but if the Y had once been an M and taken up additional space in so doing, it would have been even more off-center to begin with.

NUFORC UFO Roundup

It's been a while since I've checked out NUFORC's files of submitted UFO reports in Kentucky. Here's the latest ones they list:

7/14/2008: Fern Creek, KY. "VERY SMALL OBJECT , MOVING VERY RAPIDLY, AT VERY EXTREME ALTITUDE. THE OBJECT APPEARED TO BE FLYING VERY VERY HIGH AND AT A VERY VERY HIGH RATE OF SPEED.IT MADE NO SUDDEN ZIGS OR ZAGS, IT ONLY FLEW FORWARD, AND WITHOUT SOUND . I'VE SEE MANY PLANES FLYING AT VERY HIGH RANGES BUT NEVER AT THAT KIND OF SPEED!!!! TO THE NAKED EYE THE OBJECT WAS ABOUT THE SIZE OF A PIN HEAD. I DONT BELIEVE IT WAS A METEOR OR MODERN AIRCRAFT."

7/27/2008 : Florence, KY. "I left my boyfriends house in Hebron KY around 1:15am. I was headed south to my home in Crittenden KY. I noticed a large, bright orange light (about a half mile in front of me) in the sky along south-bound I-75 around the Dream Street area. As I got closer I noticed that the light was on the front of what appeared to be a triangular shaped object. It did not appear to be moving. My best GUESStimate was that it was about 50-75 feet in the air. As I drove underneath the object I saw two green lights and one red light, all of which were blinking as opposed to the one in front (the orange one) which was not blinking. I could not tell if the three blinking lights were on the bottom or the side of the object due to the fact that I was passing under it at around 60mph."

7/28/2008 : Mount Sterling, KY. "My children and I watched as blinking lights (red, white, green, and blue on some) moved across the sky at different directions. Then there were several more that even met up and went almost in circles before disappearing. Lastly, we even saw one meet another, then both go in the same direction with one following the other. They were definitely not plane, or helicopters due to the amount of them, lack of noise, and the strange flight behavior. It lasted roughly 30 minutes, and I would've watched longer, but I was getting tired. I wanted to film it, but my small video camera would not have captured it very well due to the dark night and they were pretty high up in the air. Some were barely able to be seen if not for the blinking of the lights. It was amazing and I wish someone else would believe us!"

8/8/2008 : Murray, KY. "Oval object shoots across the sky and explodes in bright flash. My step-brother, his friend, and I were walking down the road. The event occurred between 1:30 to 1:45. First we were just walking we were about 200 yards away from the house. And we all saw a flash of light and, then there was an oval shaped object that shot across the sky with a hissing noise. It left a bright trail that remained even after it was gone. But after it shot across the sky it had seemed to explode in a sudden silent flash."

8/9/2008 : "Two small orbs seen hovering over Dawson Springs, KY at a great distance. The objects were too far up to describe in much detail. There was one object that appeared to emit light or simply reflected sunlight. The other object appeared only for a few seconds and simply appeared as a dark spot. The lighted object moved only a small distance then stopped, moved back and then stopped and did this about 4 times before disappearing. I have taken photos of the objects as well."

(Photo above: UFO spotted over Louisville in 1973.)