Post-Tornado Rainbow

Yesterday I thought it was just a typical windy Autumn morning while I was sitting in the Middletown Starbucks. What I didn't know was that most of Kentucky was on a tornado watch, that a tornado had been spotted just over the river in Indiana, and another one had overturned a semi-truck on the Watterson.

Meanwhile, in Scott County, a forming funnel cloud was caught on video, and in Hopkinsville, one tore the roof off a storage building. That may or may not be the same one witnessed by National Weather Service spotters near Pembroke, and then in Dunmor in Muhlenberg County. An enormous tree in Berea toppled in the storm, narrowly missing an entire apartment complex. In Middlesboro, the mall was damaged and the power was knocked out.

To my surprise, one of the baristas came to the center of the room and announced, "uh, everybody, your attention please, we've just been informed that funnel clouds have been seen in Anchorage, so I'm going to have to ask you all to move away from the glass windows and to the rear of the building, for your safety."

And so we all migrated to the back, everyone suddenly intently tapping at their laptops and handhelds, and within seconds, we were all sharing info with each other that we'd gleaned. One guy instantly had a real-time animation from the NWS on his laptop full-screen, and was showing us how it was estimated to be moving at 80MPH and thus would be past us very quickly. It wasn't that long ago that we'd all be huddled around a radio, listening for the latest wire-service news update from the DJ, but now, every citizen with wi-fi internet access is instantly better informed than even that radio DJ of yesteryear.

Though the tornadic front did indeed swiftly pass, the rainstorm on its coattails continued for hours more. But when it was over and blue sky began to peek out from the cloud cover, I caught an odd rainbow that only existed over a portion of very specific clouds - when those clouds shifted, so did the rainbow, and when that cloud system rolled away, the rainbow was gone. Though my eye saw an evenly ordered full spectrum in it, my camera surprisingly did not - at least, not as clearly.

Deer Runs Amok in Fresh Market

According to the Courier-Journal, the Fresh Market in Middletown, KY was terrorized last week by a crazed deer that leaped into the plate glass window and smashed its way into the store. (Perhaps it charged at its own reflection, or perhaps it was the Devil Deer.)

According to the store's manager, the deer - profusely bleeding from its encounter with the glass - "went all through the store and bled all over the place," then eventually ended up collapsing near the back. Metro Police officers arrived about 10 minutes later, the deer approached them, prompting the officers to use their tasers on it.

What happened next is even weirder. Says the news report:

After it was tased, an officer grabbed the deer by its back legs and dragged it out the open door in the back, [police spokeswoman Alicia] Smiley said. Once outside, the deer eventually left the area. The animal has not been seen since, she said...

Wait, so you have a large bleeding and injured deer, and you let it go?? Even if you don't care (and I do) that the creature needs medical attention, aren't you concerned that the deer that you turned loose in a highly populated urban area is going to go cause mayhem and havoc somewhere else?

Has anyone else in that area had a sighting of this errant deer?

Death of a Frappuccino

One from our Transylvania Gentlemen blog:


So I went into my usual Starbucks the other day - which lately has become the Starbucks kiosk inside the Target store at the corner of Hubbards Lane and Westport - and got my usual Venti Caramel Frappuccino.

As a longtime connoisseur of the frap, I know every little nuance in its preparation and can instantly discern when something's gone awry in the process. Something here was drastically wrong - it tasted bland and nasty, like skim milk in a colloidal suspension of dishwater. Didn't taste any coffee, didn't even feel like I'd ingested any. The texture was all wrong. The color was pale and wan.

I took it back to complain and the barista apologized, gently breaking it to me that corporate has changed the formula of the frappuccino now in order to make it an all-purpose generic drink that can be more flexible and customizable for those who prefer Soy and such. She actually agreed that the end result of the new formula is a substandard drink, but there's nothing she could do about it.

Supposedly the new fraps are healthier, using real sugar instead of HFCS. As a stalwart opponent of HFCS myself, that's applaudable, but the sweetener is clearly not the whole cause of the problem - it's the lack of the old "base" from which all fraps were made, which is now supplanted by a strictly syrup-squirting regimen. Sorry, y'all, but it's literally undrinkable, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Angry reports from my fellow disgruntled frappologists are popping up online like dandelions after a Spring rain.

Starbucks launches their new and ostensibly improved Crappuccinos in May, but because they stopped production on the old mix base, many stores are already serving the new formula without even mentioning that a shell-game switch has been pulled. I found another Starbucks in Crescent Hill that is still using the old base, and I will buy from them until they run out... and then, sadly, looks like Starbucks and I are through. I'll have to go to a local competitor's frap imitation.


It's a shame, too, because I've always been a very open and very vocal supporter of Starbucks, and I had a solo art exhibition at the Middletown Starbucks a few years back. I've always enjoyed the cognitive dissonance that my pro-Starbucks position instills among the masses of knee-jerk box-dwellers out there.

People always expect a radical hipster bohemian artiste such as myself to take the liberal position that all things corporate and huge are automatically bad. Starbucks has always been a useful tool for me to illustrate to others that if I like a product, I don't give a damn where it came from or whether it's "cool", and that I do not oppose something just because it got big and successful. Things are supposed to get big and successful.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that big companies don't sometimes make bad decisions. The people at the top clearly don't drink fraps themselves, or else their tastebuds are shot to hell, because this new formula is strictly riding that train to "New Coke" epic fail. As far as actual coffee-coffee goes, I grind mine fresh at home and use beans from all kinds of companies from Starbucks to Intelligentsia to Red Hot Roasters. The frappuccinos were the whole reason for my visits to Starbucks, and now that I find we've grown apart, I must say buon viaggio, mio fratello.

The Little Colonel

All but forgotten now except to historians, classic film buffs, and a few other people in the know, is the Victorian-age meme of the "Little Colonel".

There's a theatre company in Pewee Valley (just outside Louisville) called the Little Colonel Players; perhaps you've seen their logo with an odd little character in a Napoleonic hat. But from whence did this concept originate?

Annie Fellows Johnston wrote a series of novels dealing with the aristocracy in a small southern town. These were semi-biographical and based on actual local people and places. The stories were set in Lloydsborough Valley, which was actually a fictionalized version of Pewee Valley. Johnston, originally from Indiana, eventually made Pewee Valley her home, and she died there in 1931.


Among the books in the "Little Colonel" series: The Little Colonel in Arizona, The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor, The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation, The Little Colonel's Hero, The Little Colonel's House Party, The Little Colonel's Holiday, The Little Colonel at Boarding School, Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding, and The Little Colonel's Chum, Mary Ware. (From that last one, she spun off a popular series of "Mary Ware" books.) Other books in her decidedly dated oeuvre include Miss Santa Clause of the Pullman, The Rescue of the Princess Winsome, Georgina of the Rainbows, It was the Road to Jericho, Mildred's Inheritance, and Ole Mammy's Torment.

In 1935 a film adaptation was made, starring Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore. And after that, Johnston and her beloved characters seemed to vanish down the memory hole. Lists of popular Kentucky authors - even specifically lists of ones from the Victorian age - often omit Johnston and her "Little Colonel" books.


In the stories, the Little Colonel (a young girl), draws inspiration from "The Old Colonel" (a Southern Gentleman who had lost his arm in the Civil War):

"Along this street one summer morning, nearly thirty years ago, came stepping an old Confederate Colonel. Every one greeted him deferentially. He was always pointed out to new comers. Some people called attention to him because he had given his right arm to the lost cause, some because they thought he resembled Napoleon, and others because they had some amusing tale to tell of his eccentricities. He was always clad in white duck in the summer, and was wrapped in a picturesque military cape in the winter."

The Old Colonel was a thinly-veiled dramatization of one George Washington Weissinger, Jr., a well-known lawyer in Louisville and Middletown. He's buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, but visiting his grave is tricky. According to littlecolonel.com:

Cave Hill Cemetery (the most prestigious burial ground in the region) has records that the Old Colonel was buried on February 25, 1903, his wife two months later. A plot map shows the exact location of the graves. But there are no tombstones or grave markers. Why? We don't know. We also can find nothing about the death of Amelia Pearce Weissinger (born Amelia Neville Pearce), his wife, just before her interment beside him on April 30, 1903.

And David Domine, in his great book Haunts of Old Louisville, reports sightings of an elderly one-armed ghost in a Civil War uniform, fitting the Old Colonel's description perfectly.

Possum Skull

This past weekend, I encountered a happy little possum skull while taking my morning coffee-constitutional in Middletown.

FREE: Eck-Adams Bench

From our retro-living blog Revelation Awaits An Appointed Time:


Free to a good home: this is a late 1950s/early 1960s two-seater waiting room bench. It was manufactured by the mysterious Eck-Adams company that apparently began business in the 1930s.


I obtained it from Electric Blue Print's going out of business sale a few years back and kept it in my art studio at the Cinderblock Gallery for some time after that. Has been used very little. It's a bit dusty from having been in storage for the last year but looks great and is devastatingly sturdy in that way that only retro furniture can be.


Want it? It's yours, come haul it away. It's in Middletown on the East edge of Louisville. Just e-mail me.

Middletown's First Gas Station

From our Whitewashed Windows and Vacant Stores blog:



Here's an example of a nice old abandoned building that someone actually did the right thing with.

Originally this was an Aetna gas station (in those days Aetna was an oil company, not an insurance firm) and later a Deem station, which was the forerunner of today's J.F. Deem Oil & Gas. It was Middletown's very first gas station.




According to the sign out front, after the 1930s the building went through other tenants such as Wright's Dry Cleaners, a taxicab company, and the Middletown Medical Center (must have been just an info kiosk - I don't see what else a medical center could do with this building that's smaller than my living room), then ended up in the city's hands in 1996. The building was restored to some semblance of its 1920s-30s glory and today it stands empty but impressive, as a sort of museum exhibit unto itself.




This mummified gas station can be found at the corner of Main Street and Harrison Avenue in downtown Middletown.

Mark's Pig

It's another sighting of one of those black-and-white concrete pigs, identical to the ones spotted at Joe's Older Than Dirt Diner in Lyndon and Ole Hickory Pit Barbecue. Somewhere, there must be something like "Crazy Clyde's Barbecue Restaurant Supply, Inc." that all these places are getting their pigs from.

Middletown UFO

I've been chewing over whether or not to mention this, but Saturday night a friend and I saw a UFO slowly and silently moving over our heads in downtown Middletown, KY.

Keep in mind that a UFO means just what it says - an object that is flying and is unidentified. I'm not inclined to think the device came from Martians, but I am open to the idea that it was some sort of covert experimental aircraft. (On the other hand, how covert could it be if they're flying it directly overhead?)

It was traveling very low and very slowly - far slower than a normal plane should have seemed to take to travel overhead so low-flying. The shape of the craft was hard to determine but it did have wings and it did have right-of-way lights, so this would seem to discount aliens. I don't think any entities from other planets would have bothered to consult the FAA airworthiness standards code.

Or would they?

Anyway, the problem with the running lights was this: their placement relative to the body of the object gave the effect of making the wings seem extremely, impossibly, short and stubby. Impossible for a conventional airplane, anyway. I couldn't really see the wings at all, but the lights seemed a little too close to the center of the object. An additional large slow strobing light was rhythmically fading in and out, briefly illuminating part of the underside of the hull of the whatever-it-was.

The biggest problem with it was its silence. To be flying so low, we heard almost no sound emanating from it, except for an almost-subsonic pulsing hum. That's really, more than anything else, what lent a sci-fi sense of cognitive dissonance to the whole thing.

If what we saw was in fact a Triangle UFO like the one seen near McAlester, OK, then the shortness of the placement of the lights would suddenly make sense, of a sort. Assuming this is what we saw, then the two rear points of the triangle were lit while the front was not. These rear-point lights could then, logically, be what I assumed had been lights in the center of wings. Also, the center pulsing light would have been back of center instead of dead center (which seems to be the case in the photo above, of a Belgian triangle UFO).

The Triangle UFO hypothesis is especially compelling in light of the reports of triangular craft in Louisville and in Stanton back in the Spring.

Most likely, it was nothing. But it was certainly an interesting nothing. And one never knows, really, what's hidden in plain sight. (You know what Ferris Bueller says about stopping to look around you. And you know what Jack Burton always says at a time like this.)

Guitars and Graves

Middletown, KY:



Georgetown, KY:



Louisville, KY:





Middletown, KY:




Morgantown, KY:



(Read more about Arnold Shultz here.)

Questionable Potatoes

As Sting (the singer, not the wrestler) once said, I'm like a canary in a coalmine. Sensitive soul that I am, I can detect one part per zillion of certain bad substances in our food and our air.

I can instantly tell when I've been dosed with toxic death-sludge like Nutrasweet and Splenda, even when those around me report no ill effects (because they've consumed so much of it they're in a permanent adaptive state). I also can sense when there's pesticide recently sprayed in a place even when it can't be smelled, and usually have to excuse myself and get outta Dodge when I encounter such poisons.

Am I being oversensitive? Maybe, maybe not. As a painter, I breathe enough toxins as it is, on my own volition, and my liberal use of European-style snuff (the kind you actually sniff) and the hyper-fermented Brazilian elixir known as Cachaca guarantees I'll never be anyone's poster child for straight-edge. But at least let me choose my own methods of cellular deterioration, and not ingest poisons against my will, hidden in consumer products in ways they never used to be.

Blah blabbity blah, Jeff, get to the point. Okay. I picked up this here bag of potatoes at the Kroger in Middletown, KY. I was astounded that it was only a buck-fifty, and yet it had some crazy-huge spuds in it, one of which was the size of a shoe, kid you not. Should have taken a photo of that before I baked it up.

After eating said megaspud, both myself and a friend who ate the other half began experiencing not-so-subtle nervous-system disruption and wooziness, and later that evening, insomnia. When sleep finally came, it was filled with crazy fever dreams, the same kind I had when I ate some of those famous and now-banned taco shells made with genetically modified corn (also a Kroger item, interestingly). It was a bad trip, friends.

I tried to track down the source of these spuds, but the packaging doesn't even have a freakin' brand name. The bag just says "Potatoes". It does say the taters were "Packed for W&W Co., Whiting, WI", but "packed for" doesn't really tell you anything about the source of the actual product. And a Google search for this mysterious W&W Company brought up nil, zippo, goose egg.


I cut one of the smallest ones in half and noted that unlike "real" potatoes, these stay fresh looking indefinitely. Potatoes are supposed to be like apples - the flesh inside starts turning brown with oxidation soon after you cut it open - but the first photo of the cut spud above was taken 6 hours after cutting, and the one below was taken the next day. Some slight shrinkage was noted the next day, and some fine white drying of the potato juice occuring around the edge, but that's about it. These russets should have been dark brown and dessicated by now.

Nitrogen gas and sulfating agents are often used to promote tatery freshness, but it seems there's more than just that at work here. Ugh.

Anyway, there's my Kentucky consumer alert for the day, for those of you who would rather not eat potentially genetically modified space-age Monsanto frankenfoods. I don't know that these potatoes are such, but they act like such, and so I'm swearing them off.

Tomato Farm Redux

Back in the Spring, I wrote about an abandoned tomato farm that had some cool old remnants of its glory days hidden amongst the foliage, near the border of Jeffersontown and Middletown.

Well, recently these signs have appeared in front. Looks like somebody's got big plans to build a strip-mall here, including a new bank. (Oddly, another new bank is currently being built - and is almost finished - a block down the street, about 10 seconds away.)

This comes not long after a similar sign popped up not too far away, for a similar planned retail cluster which will demolish a quaint corner of older homes.

Don't we already have enough empty and unwanted shopping centers?

Police Doughnuts' Arrested Development

Bad cops - no donut.

Just two months after this law enforcement-themed bakery opened and I raved about it here, it's defunct.... or is it? More details on our Whitewashed Windows and Vacant Stores blog.

Inflatable Ape

Normally, inflatable promotional gee-gaws don't impress me. I loathe the inflatable snowmen, santas, and reindeer that clog up people's yards at Christmas time, and those air-powered humanoid figures that flail around wildly in front of auto shops, BBQ joints and car washes really give me the heeby-jeebies.

But something about this giant inflatable gorilla struck a resonant chord with me. I don't know why. It certainly helps that he's big as a house.

The soiree is just down the street from me. It's the Hillbilly Outfield Derby Party, raising money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Abandoned Block in Middletown

I've always admired this abandoned retail store building in Middletown, and decided it was high time to document it.



But then I realized that the house behind it was also empty, abandoned, and in disrepair. So, I trudged onward to take some photos of it also...




...and only then did it dawn on me that the house next door to it was yet another abandoned one! What the heck's going on around here?




Then I saw this sign by the road, in front of the whole area. Arghhhh. Well, that's just great. More cool old buildings destroyed to make from for crappy cookie-cutter modern ugly strip-mall retail space that will probably sit empty and unrented for some time to come... just like the unwanted shopping center that was built where John Riley's Green Garage used to be.

Mammatus over Middletown

Mammatus clouds starting to form over Garden Gate in Middletown, KY, day before yesterday. Mammatus clouds are among the most mysterious of atmospheric phenomena, as scientists still cannot figure out why or how they are formed. Theories involve everything from gravity waves to something called Kelvin–Helmholtz Instability.

Police Doughnuts

This is possibly the weirdest donut shop I've ever set foot in.

First of all is the concept. Police Doughnuts. At first I wasn't sure if this meant donuts for policemen, donuts made by policemen, or both, or neither. A huge police van stays parked out front bearing their insignia, and though it's not as hip as the Spinelli's van, I salute their wackiness.

Then there's the hours. The place opens at 7am, they make just one batch of donuts, and they close whenever they sell out. Either they're doing a terrific business already or they just aren't making many donuts to start with, because I've been out there as early as 9:30am and found them closed.

(But...but... the whole reason cops are associated with donuts in the first place is because Krispy Kreme-type places and convenience stores have historically always been open late, and thus popular with third-shift patrolmen. So, shouldn't Police Doughnuts be open all night instead of just an hour of frenzied trading at the crack of dawn?)

And then when you walk into the place, you notice that 5/6 of the place is empty. No tables or chairs. Nothing. You walk toward the back to a cash register and a dry-erase-marker sign listing only three or four types of donuts for sale (Today it was Glazed, Chocolate, Blueberry and Maple.) There are no sugar-free, gluten-free, or "light" options, and a sign on the door says "Warning! Counting calories? Keep Out!" I love it. It's the total opposite of my other favorite Kentucky donuteria, Doughdaddy's, which offers you a staggering amount of choices.

There is no glass display case. No donuts are actually seen in the store. You read the short list, make your decision, tell the cashier, and she disappears into the back to fetch your donuts. It's all rather bizarre.

All that matters in the end, though, is the product: is it any good? Oh yeah. Oh hell yeah. I'm addicted to their maple donut and hope they gradually branch out into more flavors as their business grows.


As it turns out, the store is the brainchild of Ken Borders, a former State Trooper and arson detective who opened it just a few weeks ago. Although he had never been in the restaurant or bakery business before and knew nothing about it, he saw a Food Network program about doughnuts and decided to jump into it. Now that's the true American entrepreneurial spirit that I like to see!

Go to Police Doughnuts. Go early. It's near the corner of Shelbyville Road and Juneau Drive in Middletown. Tell 'em I sent you by!