Orientation

Doing an "FAQ" of sorts for Unusual Kentucky is something I've been mulling over for quite some time now, and I reckon it's fully mulled. Here's a few handy-dandy tips on how best to utilize this blog to its optimum potential, and some background exposition to help put all this in context.

First, and perhaps foremost, you should know that although I am a writer and journalist, I do not consider blogging to be journalism per se. When blogging, I pretty much type whatever pops into my cabeza in personal-editorial mode. Virtually everything you will read here consists of just what you would expect from the world of UFOs, paranormal, ghosts, conspiracy theory, etc. - vague rumor, hearsay, anecdotal evidence, folklore, legend, and myth. It just comes with the territory. There's already more than enough of that online, so I try to avoid unsourced falsehoods and Junk Data whenever possible, but hey, this is the internet, so caveat emptor, Jack. If you use my blog - or anything else from the internet, for that matter - as a primary source for your doctoral thesis, well, that's your misfortune.

Updating this silly blog takes up less than 1 percent of what I do in life, and the reader is cautioned to keep that in mind. I rarely spend more than a few minutes on a post, and am as often as not typing under the influence of coffee, bourbon, European snuff, or sleep deprivation. This blog is supposed to be a thought-provoking and fun clearinghouse for weird Kentucky memes, usually reported off the top of my head with very little effort (I charge money for that) - if you take it seriously at all, you're taking it way too seriously.


Which brings us to the second point: comment moderation. With the blog's growing popularity, I now get hundreds of spam comments which I must tediously wade through to pick out the real ones. And among those real ones, I tend to leave out the ones that are insulting and wanting to pick a fight. If you have a beef with something I say here, e-mail me directly. I rarely bother to get into prolonged debates with anyone about anything, but I never do with anonymous internet jerks.

I also tend to ignore comments that are non-sequiturs, that are questions or conversation that would be better off addressed to me via e-mail, or that exist only to post a link.


Now, some tips on some features of Blogger itself you may not be aware of. I get a lot of questions asking things like "Where is your post on such-and-such? I can't find it." Even without doing a Google search for your query, you can cross-search this blog in two ways - by the labels (the keyword links at the bottom of each post) which might assist you in your quest, or by the search box in the upper left corner of every Blogger site.


This blog is not optimized for viewing on RSS, or via any other method or device than actually directly viewing the blog at the source and on a regular computer's web browser.

And finally, I get a lot of confused queries from folks who mistakenly believe that I am from NYC or Los Angeles and am writing about Kentucky from a distance and out of ridicule (One nut even sent me a hate letter once that started out "You big city people come to Kentucky just to laugh at us".) To set the record straight, I am a farmboy from Waco, KY on the Madison/Estill County border, and though I maintain painting/photography studios and branch offices in several cities, my home base is still Kentucky and always will be. My entire purpose in this blog is to highlight what a wondrous and exciting place Kentucky really is, and that it is a key part of those things in Heaven and Earth undreamt of in your imagination, Horatio.

And finally finally: I welcome your input and contributions. Send me pics! Send me reports! Not enough stuff here from Calloway County? Rectify that and help me out! Tell me what's good in your neck of the woods.

Alrighty then, agents of Interzone, consider yourselves briefed. Now get out there and file those reports. Go go go. Oo-rah. Semper Fi.

Internet Gossip

A Northern Kentucky woman's reputation is slandered by a gossip website. A Facebook account dishing unsourced dirt about Louisvillians gets shut down. And a Jefferson County 911 phone operator is busted for running a Twitter account devoted to ridiculing the callers. Read about the growing penchant for cowardly anonymous internet gossip in our sick sad world on my latest Louisville Mojo entry!

Blocked!

So, as I type this, I'm in the "Business Center" in the clubhouse at Garden Gate Apartments where I live, which is basically a large conference room with computers. I'm the only one I know who uses it for business purposes, though - it seems universally utilized by other residents for porn, sports, myspace, facebook, mojo, celebrity gossip, video games, and other idle pursuits of the masses.

Recently they've installed some sort of internet filter on their system which renders the internet unusable for anyone doing any type of research. I noticed a bad link to an Eckankar site on a previous UnK post and was fixing it, when I found that Google is now blocked:


Google.com is tagged "Hate and Discrimination"? WTF?

Although Google is blocked, Yahoo is permitted, which is kind of weird since Yahoo carries way more avenues to malicious spyware and havoc-wreaking code on its front page than Google's plain, no-frills site. So I go through Yahoo to get the Eckankar link I sought, and guess what? It won't let me access the Kentucky Eck site because it says they're a cult.


Now forget for a moment that Eckankar isn't really much of a cult - they're more like a new age meditation-hum club - but even if they were a cult, why would cults be automatically blocked just on general principles? Apparently someone somewhere thinks Christianity is the only religion people should be allowed to read about. Sure enough, almost all of the religious groups I linked to in this post are blocked.

Kookier still, the Church of Satan's website is blocked with the additional tag "militant/extremist/terrorist". That's beyond wrong, since Anton LaVey's idea of a Satanist was someone who mainly led a quiet, non-confrontational existence, and sat around alone at home listening to Rudy Vallee 78s while wearing a dime-store plastic halloween horned hat. There are plenty of dangerous and psychotic Satanist-wannabe occult groups out there, but LaVey's group is not among them. Diamanda Galas, like many other "more-demonic-than-thou" types, has dismissed it as "Las Vegas Satanism"... which actually sounds like a compliment to me.


It didn't take me long to realize that in addition to banning specific sites that offended some unknown person's sense of decorum, an apparent secret list of keywords prevents one from accessing the websites of products like the famous Naked Juice health drink and L'eggs Nude Pantyhose.

Most baffling of all, when I tried to search for sites for amateur telescope aficionados, that was banned as well, and the reason given being "pornography"!

Why? I have no idea. Perhaps someone's only frame of reference for the term "amateur" was amateur porn?


I'm not sure what bunch of genuises are responsible for this block-happy net-nanny, but the bottom of each block warning says "SECURESPOT is a registered trademark of D-Link Systems, Inc. Copyright© 2009 Bsecure Technologies, Inc."

This isn't the first time I've encountered computer-related idiocy on this grand a scale, alas. Awhile back, one of our associates found her workplace banning access to virtually the entire internet, which begs the question: why even have the internet, then? Her boss - who knew about as much about the internet as, say, Dilbert's boss - was only following the advice of a company handling his computer services, NetGain (Or, as it was known around the office, "NetLoss"). Reportedly, he was paying an absurd sum for these services which left him with an internet that none of his workers could use - not even for the specific purposes within their job description.

Someday the little children will ask you why civilization collapsed. Tell them it was because we were afraid of information, afraid of people we disagreed with, afraid of ourselves, afraid of everything. A nation of wusses.

Northern Kentucky Monster Hunters

What do you make of this, Professor? I ran across this site while surfing the web.

I can't tell if it's a group of people who are genuinely delusional and living in a self-created online fantasy world, or are just role-playing game geeks. (Oh wait, is there a difference?)

Court rejects Kentucky's attempt to seize web domains

From Online Casino Reports:

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear will appeal a court ruling that stops the state seizing domain names used by Internet gambling sites.

In a 2-1 ruling last Tuesday, the Kentucky Court of Appeals said the state does not have the jurisdiction to seize online casinos' Internet domain names in an effort to keep them from operating in the state. The ruling also said a Franklin Circuit Court judge cannot hold further hearings on the issue.

141 domains had been shortlisted for seizure, including two bingo sites, the hugely popular poker room, Poker Stars, and some major sports betting sites were also slated to be targeted under the move.

Poker advocates welcomed the Court of Appeals' ruling, with Poker Players Alliance Executive Director John Pappas calling it "a tremendous victory for Internet freedom and the rights of Kentucky residents who enjoy playing online poker."

"The Court of Appeals has agreed with the PPA's position that Judge Wingate did not have jurisdiction to issue the order that he entered against these domains and that Secretary Brown had no legitimate right to deprive the citizens of Kentucky of the legal right to play poker online."

However, Kentucky's Secretary of Justice and Public Safety, J. Michael Brown, said that the state would continue to fight the ruling.

As previously reported here and here, this isn't a political blog nor do political matters interest me in the least. I don't really like online gambling, because I think it's strictly for fools. (But then again, I think the same thing about American Idol, and it's still a free country.)

What qualifies this whole issue for Unusual Kentucky is not to take a position in support of online gambling, nor to incite partisan arguments from Democrats, Republicans, or Independents. It's to observe Beshear and Wingate's utter cluelessness about how the internet works, which they are continuing to take to embarrassing extremes. The hypocrisy is further compounded by Beshear's own efforts to bring brick-and-mortar casinos to Kentucky.

It's making Kentucky look naive, stupid, and greedy in the eyes of the rest of the world, and speaking as one of the staunchest defenders of the integrity and value of our fair state, I for one take great offense to it.

World's Stupidest Haunting Reports: Jefferson Mall Restrooms

I've already bemoaned elsewhere the rising flood of junk information on useless websites, and Strange USA is no exception.

The problem with such sites is that they open up a forum where anyone can post anything anytime. And when you're dealing with humans, that's a recipe for disaster. Not only do some people blindly cut-and-paste thirdhand unverifiable tall tales, but some just feel obligated to post and make up something, just so they can take part. Look at sites like Kiss This Guy and Urban Dictionary. Both started out as pretty useful sources of info, but quickly degenerated into their current states where most of the entries are bogus, and apparently made up on the spot by bored schoolkids.

One entry on Strange USA exemplifies the uselessness of unedited online interactivity: a report about Jefferson Mall's restrooms being haunted. It consists of one simple sentence:

The screams of a small boy can be heard coming from the mall`s main restrooms.

Oh. Like all mall restrooms aren't already filled with screaming brats? As if!

Now, if it's a real haunted restroom you want, then drive to the Combs Building on EKU's campus.

Thought Screen Helmet

I first encountered Michael Menkin's Stop Alien Abductions site many years ago, and it doesn't seem to have changed much since then. The site offers instructions for a crudely conceived idea called a "Thought Screen Helmet" which somehow is supposed to protect you from alien abductions by wearing it on your head. According to the site:

The thought screen helmet scrambles telepathic communication between aliens and humans. Aliens cannot immobilize people wearing thought screens nor can they control their minds or communicate with them using their telepathy. When aliens can't communicate or control humans, they do not take them.

The thought screen helmet has effectively stopped several types of aliens from abducting or controlling humans. Only two failures from standard thought screen helmets have been reported since 1998 for people being abducted by aliens themselves. A third failure in 2005 was from a cloth helmet with a smaller area of Velostat which had a Velcro strap which was easily removed by an alien-human hybrid.

A fourth failure in 2007 was with a frail woman who had her helmet removed by two alien-human hybrids who snuck up behind her, tackled her and forcedly removed it. The helmet still works for people being abducted by aliens, but not by their alien-human hybrids who are now integrating into our societies.

I recall emailing the webmaster of this site around 2001 or so, inquiring how the helmet can protect the human brain from alleged telepathic control when it doesn't cover the entire head. Such "telepathic rays", if they really did exist, would be just as able to go through a person's face as the top of their head. In fact, it would be far easier for these rays to penetrate the face, because of the openings in the skull. The response I received was a very angry, hurt, lashing-out rant (in all capital letters) telling me I was obviously an idiot who knew nothing about the complex ways in which the alien-human hybrid conspiracy technology really worked. Okay, fair enough.

The photo shown here is one of Menkin's satisfied customers, captioned "Alien Abductee from Kentucky wearing a Thought Screen Helmet", and bearing this endorsement:

"Since trying Michael Menkin's Helmet, I have not been bothered by alien mind control. Now my thoughts are my own. I have achieved meaningful work and am contributing to society. My life is better than ever before. Thank you Michael for the work you are doing to save all humanity."

Casino industry calls for Kentucky boycott

As previously reported here, Governor Steve Beshear is spearheading a drive to confiscate internet domain names from gambling websites (even ones in other countries) because it is claimed they violate Kentucky law.

This idea, to anyone who has even the most basic clue how the internet works, is barking mad. A Kentucky judge cannot take over a Costa Rican website for violating Kentucky gambling laws any more than an Iranian judge can hijack an American swimsuit site for violating Iranian modesty laws.

Predictably enough, people are not taking this lying down and are now unfortunately calling for a boycott of Kentucky products, especially relating to the racing industry. Needless to say, we at Unusual Kentucky do not support such a boycott, but I can certainly see why a lot of people are ticked off at our Governor right now. I saw this rant today on Online Casino Advisory site:

"We call upon our friends and competitors in the casino news industry to help us reach the public with this call to boycott. If the Poker Players Alliance can get its members to refuse Kentucky products, especially gambling ones, that will send a message to Beshear. If the PPA can get protesters to carry signs in front of Churchill Downs, that would be a public display of our united anger.

If you are a resident of Kentucky, buy your lottery tickets across state borders, or online from another state. If you attend Kentucky tracks, drive to Indiana or other states featuring full racinos. If you live near the state border, buy groceries and cigarettes outside Kentucky."

I don't wish to see our state's economy damaged or hampered in any way, and I call upon Gov. Beshear to please get help and seek the counsel of experts who understand Internet law. This insane scheme to censor websites and confiscate their domain names is doomed to fail, but in the meantime it's obviously going to hurt Kentucky's economy, which we especially don't need at this time when the nation's economy is at an all time low. I also call upon the Democratic Party of Kentucky to quietly take Mr. Beshear aside and attempt to talk some sense into him, before his massive mistake takes the entire party down.

Kentucky vs. the Internet

We've reported on some truly weird Kentucky laws in the past, but this new court ruling from Frankfort has to take the proverbial cake. In case you haven't heard, Governor Steve Beshear has proclaimed, as if by royal fiat, that the state of Kentucky has the right to confiscate the domain names to online gambling sites (even ones in other countries) that, in his view, violate Kentucky anti-gambling laws.

Sounds insane? Sounds illegal? Yes, indeed. And yet Beshear's view is also held, coincidentally enough, by a certain Judge Thomas Wingate in Frankfort. Judge Wingate has ordered owners of 141 online gambling domain names to appear at a court hearing on November 17. And then they have to demonstrate that they're blocking traffic from residents in Kentucky - which of course, they're not. If the sites don't appear or don't comply with the ruling, the rights to their domain names will be forfeited to the state.

Experts, however, take an extremely dim view of Beshear and Wingate's confused idea of how the internet works. The professional Poker organization GPSTS called it "bizarre, far-reaching, and unpleasant", and iMega (Interactive Media Entertainment & Gaming Association), which is an organization championing internet growth and innovation, had this to say:

"Judge Wingate has ignored the clear laws of his own state in coming to a decision that essentially green-lights any jurisdiction - in the U.S. and abroad - to ignore our rights and abuse their power to do away with competition or speech or content with which they oppose, regardless of the law. This is a dark day for Internet freedom."

John Pappas of the Poker Players Alliance is equally outraged at Beshear and Wingate's scheme:

"This action not only unduly restricts the freedom of Kentucky residents to play games of skill online, such as poker, but sets a precedent for censorship of the internet by force.

Many of Governor Beshear's arguments - that online poker is illegal, unregulated and without a mechanism to capture tax revenue - are false. Online poker is not illegal under Kentucky law, it is regulated in its home jurisdiction and the Commonwealth of Kentucky chose not to license and regulate poker websites."

Most disturbing of all to me is that the Governor openly admits that a key part of his reason for committing this constitutional travesty is because he would prefer gambler's dollars to be spent at Keeneland, Churchill Downs, and the Kentucky lottery:

"Illegal and unregulated gambling Web sites - many of which operate from other countries - are leeches on our communities and unfairly undermine Kentucky's horse-racing industry. By seizing those Internet names, the state can require the casino operators to block their sites from being accessed in Kentucky. Kentuckians likely spend tens of millions of dollars on illegal internet gambling sites each year - money that might otherwise go to Kentucky's horse tracks, charitable events and the state lottery."

So, uh, that pretty much reduces his argument to a very petty matter of professional jealousy: 'hey, dese other guys' gambling scams are interfering with OUR gambling scams! Dah, we can't have dat! We'd betta rub 'em out, boss!'

Mind you, I don't give a hoot about online gambling myself. It's strictly for suckers and dopes, if you ask me. But I'll still defend to the death these rubes' constitutional rights to go clickity-clack on any internet site they choose, and to blow their money on said sites.

If allowed to get away with this madness, I guarantee you internet erotica will be next, and then the precedent will be laid to quash political dissent sites and anything else that anyone in any Government anywhere wants to banish from the web. So this isn't just about Poker, it's about setting a legal precedent that allows two-bit politicians and judges to really screw up the internet for everyone else in the world.

Fake Ghost Stories

I'm not real big on mere "ghost stories" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that seemingly everyone has one, and they're usually lacking any useful information.

Too many books about ghosts are simply dry retelling of someone else's hearsay that does serious paranormal investigators little or no good. You know the type - "my Aunt's hairdresser's friend heard a spooky noise in the barn when she was a little girl", etc. This doesn't really serve much purpose, and that's why I tried to keep such junk to a minimum in my Weird Kentucky book.

Compounding the problem are the plethora of internet sites that unquestioningly pass along any sketchy one-sentence rumor of a haunting, just for the sake of having content. One site, Ghosts of America, is particularly offensive to me, because its entries are clearly not only fake, they're randomly computer generated! Examples from their bogus Danville hauntings page, for example, read totally like Mad Libs-style fill-in-the-blank generic ghost story templates, and most don't even make any logical sense:

A lady with her arms severed can often be seen at a coin operated phone in Danville making a phone call.

The phantom of a guy grasping a blood-splattered sword may be seen over and over again examining the surroundings from the highest spot of Berger Knob around midnight.

An armed forces uniform pacing about lacking a body in it has now and then been spotted wandering through a Danville vicinity graveyard. A lot of residents claim this ghost may be the soul of a resident who passed on here in Danville many years ago. In any event, this is a hostile ghost that you shouldn't go looking for.

The ghost of a badly burned female is every now and then made out devastating a shoe beside a deserted highway in the vicinity of Danville before dawn.

The ghost of a train driver has been perceived on many instances in Fort Boonesborough State Park right by the ranger station trying to locate a bag.

A woman lacking a head can sometimes be observed being in an uninhabited structure in Danville. No matter what, it's a creepy ghost that should be stayed away from.

We here at Unusual Kentucky refuse to succumb to mere campfire storytelling without providing at least hard facts like when and where so you folks at home can go inspect the scene for yourselves. The internet's signal-to-noise ratio is increasingly unfavorable, and may soon render it worthless (not just for paranormal research but for all things.)

Alien Grave Drive

I've looked at most of the pages on this site and I still don't really get what it's trying to convey, but it sure makes for an interesting late-night tour of the labyrinth of one man's UFO-obsessed mind.

Apparently, there is an alleged alien crash site in Burnside, KY (Pulaski County), containing not only several large fragments of UFO debris, but also ancient artifacts of an alien civilization scattered amongst the area. One such artifact, pictured below, is said by the site's author to be an "actual alien skull", even though it sure appears to be a small piece of creek-worn sandstone that looks vaguely like a stereotypical big-eyed alien, maybe. If you squint at it. In a dark room. After four shots of Woodford Reserve.

The site is written in such broken English you'd swear it originated in Zhengzhou or something, rather than America. But then again, Kentucky is like a country unto itself in many ways, and this site exemplifies this. Here's a sample:

Do UFO Exist? Of course they Do, We see them all the time, Unidentified Flying Objects. If its Flying and you can't tell what it is then it is a UFO but do Aliens exist? I don't know you tell me, It wasn't until after I took this picture of this petrified wood that I noticed it looked like it had been sawed first on both ends 300 Million Years Ago and then Petrified, You can be the Judge. It sits perfectly flat on the table.

Very puzzling: despite the site's owner David having just made that statement that he doesn't know whether aliens exist, his site also offers what purports to be a "live alien coffin cam" that stays trained on, yes, a coffin on David's property containing a dead alien. Again we quote from the site:

The extraterrestrial has had a quiet time in the sarcophagus without the permanent noises of a networked civilisation.The pious hope "Rest in peace" might not always come true. The crypt is guarded 24-hours-per day and 365-days per year by special security cameras online for everyone to view. The burial graveyard is a electronic wonder as we listen to the mysterious signals.

Internet Censorship Of Intellectual-Technical Information Even Common Scientific words And Covert Online-Personal Surveillance Operations: Even Though The Goverment
Denies The Existence Of Extraterrestrials And UFO'S, Portion Of This Web Page Has Been Censored At The Request Of [CENSORED].

Unfortunately, far as I can tell, the "live cam" image appears to be a simple animated GIF rotating the same images over and over again in a loop. Sigh.

Now, far be it from me to be a debunker - and certainly not for something like this that seems easy as shooting fish in a barrel. But despite the apparent exagerrations and falsehoods presented on David's site, I still hold out some open-mindedness that there could be a grain of truth to the notion of a UFO crash site in Burnside, and I'm still tenuously able to give benefit of the doubt to the idea that the site host is probably a sincere kind of guy and just lacks the ability to present his case in a coherent and believable manner.

Maybe I'll drive down and see his "Alien Grave Drive" UFO museum for myself soon, and get an interview for our blog. I'll keep you posted....