Free Newspaper Kiosks

This morning I noticed these big red permanent stickers slapped all over every one of the newspaper/magazine kiosks in front of the Kroger on Linn Station Road.


I always wondered if these publications actually asked permission to stick these ugly things all over town, or if they just do it, guerilla-style, and wait for someone to challenge it. There's a handwritten notice on some of the stickers, giving the owners of the respective doohickeys to come and get them in one week or they'll be thrown away. Anyone want some lovely and attractive free paper kiosks, suitable for decorating your apartment in delightful "decline of western civilization" style?

I find these accursed things to be almost as much an eyesore and a blight as plastic signs, so I certainly won't shed a tear to see 'em go.


What I don't get is why they used stickers that were obviously originally intended to be slapped on an illegally-parked vehicle (threatening the newspaper boxes to be "ticketed or towed" is laughably surreal) and why the number to call for more information has a 513 (Ohio) area code.

Mayor Punches Newspaper Editor

From the Associated Press:

PIKEVILLE, Ky. — A Kentucky newspaper editor who says he was punched in the face by a small-town mayor has agreed to drop an assault complaint after the mayor issued a public apology.

Jerry Boggs is editor of the Appalachian News-Express in Pikeville. He said in a complaint that Pikeville Mayor Frank Justice II was angry about an article in the newspaper and confronted him at a sports bar Tuesday night. The article reported on a political donation by Justice's business that helped fund an attack ad in a local campaign.

The criminal complaint reported that others at Champs Bar and Grill pulled Justice away from Boggs. Justice released a statement apologizing for "the aggravation and duress" that he caused Boggs. Boggs said Thursday he wants to put the matter behind him.

Joseph Mulhattan

Another dubious Kentucky first: we can boast being the home of the undisputed king of media liars.

No, no, I don't mean Ann Coulter - she's from Connecticut. I mean Joseph Mulhattan, the traveling salesman from Louisville who wrote bogus newspaper articles as a sideline.

Mulhattan released hundreds of journalistic hoax memes into the ecosystem in the late 19th and early 20th century, many of which are still infectious to this very day. (Case in point: last summer I was puzzling over an 1878 report of a mummy-filled cave in Glasgow whose grandeur reportedly surpassed even Mammoth Cave's. As it turns out, the story was pure Mulhattan cruft.)

While traipsing around as a door to door shill for various companies such as the Kentucky Jeans Company, W.B. Belknap & Company, Hart & Company, and Rankins-Snyder Hardware, Mulhattan developed the odd hobby of mischievously submitting fake news stories to various newspapers using various pseudonyms (the enigmatic "Orange Blossom" was his favorite nom de plume). Most newspaper editors were apparently too rushed and/or too desperate for material to bother fact-checking Mulhattan's folderol, and the crazier the story, the more likely it would see print.

As a certain old German paper hanger once said, the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.

Keven McQueen, in his great book Offbeat Kentuckians, tells of a Mulhattan hoax published in the Lexington Transcript. Purportedly, a Richmond man named Patrick Cunningham developed a mysterious magical liquid that, when rubbed on one's body, made oneself impervious to snakebite. Any snake that bit a human so treated with the elixir, said Mulhattan, would be both poisoned and electrocuted. Mulhattan went on to say that Cunningham had personally killed 17,000 snakes in Madison County alone in one summer with this magic potion, and that many other Kentuckians were begging him for assistance in snake-eradication efforts (Among them, one J.B. Parks of Kingston, Isaac Lumley of Lexington, and even Mayor Garner of Winchester).

Mulhattan is widely believed to have been the source of a fake news story regarding a man named David Lang from Gallatin, TN who supposedly vanished into thin air in full view of witnesses and then could be heard crying for help as a disembodied voice. Ambrose Bierce, who loved to mix fiction with fact, took the idea and expanded it into two different short stories - Charles Ashmore's Trail and The Difficulty in Crossing a Field. The story was treated as fact in the 1950s by Fate Magazine and by Frank Edwards in his book Stranger Than Science. In 1999, the avant-garde composer David Lang wrote an opera based on the myth that used his namesake. Art imitates life - or in this case, an imitation of life.

In 1887, Mulhattan wrote an article stating that George Washington's tomb had been opened and it was discovered that the former President had somehow ossified into a stone-like mummy, and that it would be erected like a statue. Tens of thousands of people fell for this hoax, even though it was sort of a retread of one he'd done earlier, in an 1875 report that Washington and Lincoln's corpses would be exhumed and put on public display for the Centennial celebration.

Another Mulhattan media prank: he claimed that a noted Kentucky astronomer, one "Professor Klein", had announced that the star of Bethlehem returned to Earth every 300 years, and that it was due to reappear in our skies again. Mulhattan's article whipped the astronomers of the world into a frenzy, taking great lengths to write rebuttals to the editors of newspapers, disputing his claims.


Mulhattan would have loved the Internet and probably would have been one of its most notorious trolls. Then again, the net is so loaded with disinfo and junk data that he may have just blended in with the crowd and been just another timewaster among many.

In his twilight years, Mulhattan wasn't so much fun. He descended into alcoholism and was frequently arrested for vagrancy, nuisance, and public intoxication charges. He died alone and broke in Louisville.

Ordo Templi Orientis in Kentucky

I like to keep up with unusual religions (you may have noticed by now that I rarely use the word "cult") and am often surprised to see the variety of belief systems one can find in our fair state.

Why, there's even a Louisville O.T.O. chapter, believe it or not.

The O.T.O., or Ordo Templi Orientis, is described on their own website as a "hierarchical, religious membership organization" whose mission is to "effect and promote the doctrines and practices of the philosophical and religious system known as Thelema, with particular emphasis on cultivating the ideals of individual liberty, self-discipline, self-knowledge, and universal brotherhood".

Though the group was founded in Germany in the late 19th century by Karl Kellner and Theodor Reuss, it is most famous today because of Aleister Crowley, who joined in 1910 and was running the British lodge by 1912. Because of his drug experimentation, hedonistic sex magick rituals, and general disdain for a significant portion of mankind, he was dubbed "The Wickedest Man In the World" by critics and wags in the media.

Crowley once said: "the O.T.O. is in possession of one supreme secret. The whole of its system is directed towards communicating to its members, by progressively plain hints, this all-important instruction."


The Louisville O.T.O. publishes a quarterly paper called the Fleur de Lis, which, much like the Eastern Accent before it, features a "Peanuts"-inspired comic strip called "Crowley Brown".

Madam Brent

Today this scrap of a 1942 Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper fell out of an old book - a 1930s RCA catalog of radio tubes that I bought in Madison County in the late 1980s. I've shlepped the book around the many different places I've lived since then, and never noticed the scrap tucked into it until 2009.

The scrap seems deliberately torn out of the paper for the purpose of saving Madam Brent's advertisement, since the reverse side is only a truncated portion of an article.

I can't stop staring at it, wondering what it must have been like to drive down Preston Street (before it become Preston Highway) to a "tent and trailer" to see Madam Brent while World War Two raged on. And the longer I stare at the ad, other questions enter my head. Even in a 1942 economy, how did someone support themselves giving "special readings" way out past the edge of town for fifty cents? And being open for business from 10am to 9pm, seven days a week?

Was Madam Brent possibly, just possibly, selling something else besides psychic readings?

Uncle Josh

A now-lost meme of a century ago, the concept of "Uncle Josh" is one that may take considerable unwinding to retroactively understand, rather like untangling a mass of spaghetti strand by strand.

Some of those strands are presented here in piecemeal fashion:

The above image is from the Mount Vernon Signal newspaper, January 14, 1910. A "Brown's Comedy Company" put on a three-act play called "Uncle Josh". Of this theatrical troupe and this play, we know precious little. But we do know that this show was concurrent with another Uncle Josh, a character played by famous vaudeville comedian Cal Stewart, who had a successful string of comedy records in this persona. Says the Wikipedia:

He is best remembered for his comic monologues in which he played "Uncle Josh" Weathersby, a resident of a mythical New England farming town called "Punkin Center."

Born in Charlotte County, Virginia in 1856, Stewart spent his early life working in circuses, medicine shows and vaudeville to great acclaim as "Uncle Josh Weathersby from Way Down East". It was on the road that he befriended Mark Twain and later Will Rogers, two men who shared similar wit in comedy.

Around 1897, Thomas Edison's studios hired him to cut several cylinder recordings of his famous speeches and songs. They were well received by the public, and launched an entire series of recordings based on the Uncle Josh character. Stewart's trademark on these recordings are the easily recognizable laugh that precedes his speeches.

Best-selling recordings included “Uncle Josh’s Arrival in New York” (1898), “I’m Old But I’m Awfully Tough (Laughing Song)” (1898), “Jim Lawson’s Horse Trade With Deacon Witherspoon” (1901), “Uncle Josh’s Huskin’ Bee Dance” (1901) and “Uncle Josh Buys an Automobile” (1903).

However, it's not that simple: although Cal Stewart supposedly developed the character (though most Vaudeville characters were pinched from even earlier, antiquated sources) of Uncle Josh, there were at least two other performers that recorded for Edison as Uncle Josh Weathersby. Someone named Dan Quinn recorded "Uncle Josh At The Midway" in 1987, and Andrew Keefe recorded three "Uncle Josh" cylinders ("I'm Old But I'm Awfully Tough", "Uncle Josh In A Department Store", and "Uncle Josh In A Chinese Laundry") in 1905. Decrepit-music scholars still argue to this day about whether some other Uncle Josh records are Stewart, Quinn, Keefe, or someone else entirely.

And then there were the "Uncle Josh" movies, which although created by Edison and feature a rural rube, don't seem to be the same character. Charles Manley played this variant of Uncle Josh in "Uncle Josh's Nightmare" (1900), "Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel" (1902), and "Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show" (1902). (Manley, incidentally, was one of the actors onstage at Ford's Theatre when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.)


Then there's "Uncle Josh" Graves, bluegrass dobroist who was born in the 1920s, and the century-old Uncle Josh Bait Company which, despite its name, was founded by a man named Alan P. Jones.



What does it all mean? Where will it all lead? And why must I know?

The Bluegrass Blade

One of America's earliest "radical" freethinking weekly newspapers, The Bluegrass Blade, was published in Lexington, KY from 1884 to 1910. Its editor, Charles Chilton Moore, presented his paper as an atheist alternative to other local Kentucky papers that were, in his view, tainted by religion.

Although Moore's paper promoted civil rights and other liberal causes, he also came down on the side of conservatives when it came to alcohol prohibition, which he supported.

He was jailed twice for the paper's content:

In 1894 he spent two months in jail in Paris, KY, for stating "If there is a devil, Bourbon County is nearer and dearer to his heart than any place of its size on earth." I'm not sure what exactly what was against the law about making such a statement back then.

In 1898 he was arrested for blasphemy, promoting "free love", and sending obscene material through the U.S. Mail. I'm still trying to find out exactly what it was that was deemed obscene. He served five months of a two-year sentence in Federal prison.

Moore, ever waggish, deliberately published the Blade on Sundays and refused to acknowledge the Julian calendar until the day he died in 1907. The paper struggled on without him until it folded in 1910.