Kentucky: Laziest State?

Another ignominious first for Kentucky: a new CDC study has determined that of the most sedentary and inactive counties in the nation, 4 out of 5 of them are in Kentucky.

Ironically, I just read about this upon returning home from a three hour hike in the woods. Heh.

It kinda irks me that a WKYT-TV story about the CDC report quotes Dr. Scott Black at the University of Kentucky as saying, "If you look at the areas that are particularly inactive, there's not a lot of opportunity for physical activity. There aren't gyms available, fitness centers."

I'm sure Dr. Black meant well, but we didn't have any gyms or fitness centers in the area I grew up in (Waco/College Hill/Bybee/Irvine) and we certainly didn't sit around doing nothing. We went out and did things. Still do. I find the suggestion that "there's not a lot of opportunity for physical activity" without the relatively modern concept of cheesy fitness centers to be absurd and even somewhat offensive.

Of course, growing up we didn't have the internet, video games, and handheld gizmos sucking our attention span anyway. We also didn't ingest high fructose corn syrup, Nutrasweet, Splenda, Acesulfame-K, or genetically modified foods. And kids back then weren't as doped to the gills on needlessly-prescribed zombie meds by evil creeps like Pfizer and Merck.

And interestingly, our grandparents smoked like chimneys and drank like ducks and yet their generation is outliving ours. Ask yourself, what environmental factors are different now?

We've already been declared #1 in the nation for depression, and Manchester has been determined to be double the national average in obesity. This year I urge my fellow Kentuckians to stand up, get up, get out, and prove these gloomy statistics wrong. My modest proposal is not that we need to build more "fitness centers" in rural areas, but that we first need to pull the plug on electronic distractions from what is important and what is real, and then start eating real food instead of Monsanto's monstrosities.

The four counties named by the CDC as most inactive in America are: Carter, Magoffin, McCreary, and Pike.

Burning Springs

Back in the glory days when Kentucky was being explored by Europeans in the 1600s, the early settlers were dazzled by natural gas vents in the Earth, also known as "burning springs". I'm not sure if history records how someone first figured out there was highly flammable gas spewing from these vents, but if a frontiersman bearing a torch happened to walk up to one, I'm sure what happens next would be quite a shock!

Today, Kentucky still has a town named for one such gas vent: Burning Springs, KY in Clay County. Burning Springs was once a bustling place, but its post office closed in 1965 and it's currently listed as an unincorporated community. According to Robert Rennick's "Kentucky Place Names" book:

"A very early settlement, it was named for the ignitable springs of natural gas, in seemingly inexhaustible supply, discovered before 1800 at several sites in the area."

Another Kentucky burning spring was in Magoffin County, which dried up in 1900 after being tapped by an oil & gas company in the 1880s. Today the small community named Burning Fork is a remnant of those days. This spring was a literal spring of water, which emitted from the ground mixed with the natural gas. According to "A Library Of Wonders And Curiosities Found In Nature And Art, Science And Literature", by I. Platt:

A spring here breaks out at the foot of a hill, forming a basin of water about six feet in diameter and two feet deep, at the bottom of which issues a stream of gas, which in volume and force is about equal to the blast forced from a common smith's bellows; but there is no cessation of its force, which is such as to create a violent ebullition in the water. Being heavier than common atmospheric air, the gas, on passing up through the water, constantly occupies the surface, which is still the lower part of an indenture in the earth at that place. On presenting a taper, this gas instantly takes fire, and burns with great brilliancy.

Yet another one was near Beaver Creek in Floyd County, mentioned by Lewis Collins in 1847 his "Historical Sketches of Kentucky". According to Collins, the local gas vent was known as a "place of notoriety" to the early residents of Floyd County, and marveled at how the site "instantly ignites on the application of fire".

Larry Flynt

Kentuckian Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, lays claim to being the world’s most famous pornographer, a title that not everyone would aspire to but one that he seems happy with. (His closest rival, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, is technically not pornography in the strict legal sense. Not to mention it’s boring.)

Flynt was born and raised in Salyersville, KY, population 1,604. (Saaaaaa-lute!) He attended public school there but dropped out at some point, due to problems at home between his bickering parents. Flynt began his enterprising ways at a very early age, bootlegging moonshine in the Magoffin County wilderness.

At the age of 15, Flynt did a stint in the Army and then the Navy. In 1970 he opened a strip club in Cincinnati called the “Hustler Club” and soon followed it up with its own magazine that was an instant hit with its envelope-pushing editorial style. Today the franchise includes a casino and a successful chain of clean, attractive Hustler shops intended to offer a classier alternative to the usual sleazy porn stores.

Flynt’s lasting contribution to society may not be so much for his erotica, however, but for his involvement in legal precedents. The entire legal definition of what constitutes “pornography” was shaped largely because of his pushing the limits of what could be gotten away with during the 70s and 80s. (These definitions, however, have since largely been made irrelevant by the internet.)

In 1976, Flynt fought anti-porn campaigner Charles H. Keating Jr. all the way to the United States Supreme Court on charges of obscenity and organized crime, and beat them. Keating went on to later fame as a convicted felon in the notorious 1989 savings and loan fraud scandal.

In 1983, Flynt refused to reveal his sources for a John DeLorean tape recording that was very embarrassing to the FBI, and showed up in court wearing an American flag as a diaper. For this act of “flag desecration,” he was imprisoned six months.

Also in 1983, Flynt lost a Supreme Court battle over insulting remarks made about rival publisher Kathy Keeton. The case, however, is frequently cited as an example in law school courses today, because of its implications regarding personal jurisdiction over a defendant. Flynt harangued the court with a slew of insults and obscenities and was arrested for contempt of court (the charges were ultimately dismissed).


In 1988, Flynt successfully fought off a libel suit from the Reverend Jerry Falwell, over a satirical advertisement that suggested Falwell had sex with his mother in an outhouse. The Supreme Court sided with Flynt, eight to zero. The Falwell case decision cemented and affirmed the media’s right to satirically poke fun at celebrities in even the most brutal and cruel way.

Two other anti-porn activists, Peggy Ault and Dorchen Leidholdt, tried libel suits of their own after being named in Flynt’s “Asshole of the Month” column in Hustler. Both were dismissed with findings in favor of Hustler.

For most of his career, Flynt has faced legal challenges from the city of Cincinnati, a place which has often had a reputation for being a difficult place to exercise free speech (some constitutional activists have referred to it as "Censornati"). The city reportedly redrew zoning lines to deliberately make Flynt’s Cincinnati bookstore illegal, and sent an underage person in to purchase items there in a sting operation. He faced 26 years in prison but got off with a plea bargain.

Flynt is paralyzed from the waist down after an assassination attempt by White Supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin in Georgia (who claims to have been motivated to kill Flynt because of interracial sex being portrayed in his magazine). He makes an unlikely but effective warrior for First Amendment rights, and will probably be best remembered in this respect, especially after his portrayal by Woody Harrelson in the film The People vs. Larry Flynt.