New Yellow Cardinal Sighting

This just in: a reader from Pikeville sent these two photos and says: "My daughter took these pictures this morning (3-13-2011) through the kitchen window."


Recently, ultra-rare mutant yellow Cardinals were spotted in Boyle County, causing quite a stir in the world of ornithology.

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.

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.

The Tan Man of Pike County

William Lynwood Montell, in his Haunted houses and family ghosts of Kentucky, tells of a strange "Tan Man" haunting in Harmons Branch, KY.

Montell interviewed two different women reporting firsthand sightings of the "Tan Man". One of them, just 13 at the time, was riding a trail bike in the middle of nowhere and suddenly saw him - an ordinary, nondescript-looking man dressed in khaki or tan shirt and pants. But as she got closer to him, he disappeared. This Tan Man, so the family believed, began following them, and anything weird that ever happened after that was seemingly ascribed to him.

I'm not a skeptic by any means, but I find it interesting that almost every form of paranormal phenomena has been attributed to the Tan Man: physical manifestations, disappearing, seeing mist, feeling cold spots, hearing a flute playing by itself, hearing a piano playing by itself, feeling air in a room get "heavier", hearing unexplained footsteps, doors opening and closing by themselves, smelling sweet rose-like scents, feeling caresses of invisible hands, seeing movements from the corner of one's eye, seeing a "smoke-like blob", a locked screen door becoming unlocked, a bed shaking violently, candles going out, mystery lights projected from nowhere against a wall spinning in a circle, television and stereo volumes going up and down by themselves, missing and reappearing keys, an accosted child, a terrified dog, and lightbulbs burning out inexplicably fast. There's even an anecdote about contacting the Tan Man with a Ouija Board, and getting a barrage of obscenities!

Every myth contains a kernel of truth at its center, though, and I'd be very interested in learning more about the actual eyewitness sightings of the man in tan, even if everything else said about him was lily-gilding.