James Best

You probably know James Best as the man who played Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard, or perhaps as Jim Lindsey on The Andy Griffith Show , but he's actually had a long and checkered career in the world of film - he was in The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart (1954), Seven Angry Men (1955), Forbidden Planet with Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen (1956), Cole Younger, Gunfighter (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Ride Lonesome with Randolph Scott and Lee Van Cleef (1959), Three on a Couch (1966), Firecreek with Jimmy Stewart (1968), Ode to Billy Joe (1976) and Hooper with Burt Reynolds and Adam West (1978).

(But me, archivist of moldy old b-movies that I am, I know him best as the star of 1959's The Killer Shrews with Ken Curtis!)


He's also made over 280 TV show appearances including The DuPont Show with June Allyson, The Adventures of Kit Carson, Frontier, Sheriff of Cochise, Pony Express, Stories of the Century, Behind Closed Doors, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel,Trackdown, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Tombstone Territory, Whispering Smith, The Twilight Zone, Overland Trail, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Man and the Challenge, Combat, The Mod Squad, I Spy, Perry Mason, The Incredible Hulk, The Fugitive, Stagecoach West, and In the Heat of the Night.

And, as you've probably figured out if you've read this far, Mr. Best is a good Kentucky boy! He was born and raised in Powderly, a small town in Muhlenberg County, and his uncle was none other than Ike Everly, the country music bandleader who spawned the Everly Brothers. An even more surprising branch in the family tree, Best is the father-in-law of Michael Damian.


James Best will be back in his native Kentucky TODAY, March 5th, at the >Dale Hollow Lake Hunting and Fishing Expo. It starts at 9am and runs till 8pm, admission is FREE, and special lodge room rates for the weekend are only 50 smackers. Call 1-800-325-2282 for more information, and tell 'em I sent you by!

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.

Paradise

The John Prine song "Paradise" - which has been performed by everyone from Dwight Yoakam to Jimmy Buffett to Jackie DeShannon to Hayseed Dixie - is actually about a real Kentucky coal town by the name of Paradise.

Well, it was a real town, anyway. Now its a ghost town, having been defunct since 1967, Very little of it remains today, joining the list of other Kentucky cities-now-gone including Cannel City, Fudge, and Scuffletown.

Click here for photos of the old Paradise in its glory days, on muhlenbergcountyky.com. Their photo above shows Green River Boats at Paradise, circa 1900.