Lewis Cemetery, West Liberty

Nicosia's Roadside Weirdness blog is back after a hiatus! She's making up for lost time with a plethora of new posts all at once - check 'em out! One in particular that caught my eye was this post about a quaint little cemetery on 519 (pictured from her blog above), near the Rowan-Morgan County line. I'm pretty sure this is Lewis Cemetery. There's also the Howard Cemetery not far away.

Lizards for Liquor

From News of the Weird:

In Morehead, Ky., in December, two men, ages 44 and 18, were charged with theft for allegedly swiping an 18-inch-long bearded dragon lizard from the Eagles Landing Pet Hospital and trying, in two beverage stores, to exchange it for liquor.

The full story, found on WHAS-TV, gets even kookier: they also took it a gun shop and tried unsuccessfully to pawn it.

Stupider still, when they entered the pet hospital to steal the lizard, they signed in at the front desk with real name, address, and phone number.

Kentucky Dropstones

Though Glacial Dropstones are a phenonema found all around the world, Kentucky is one of several states especially good for finding them - this is partially because it has a high quotient of roadcuts through mountains that remain largely untouched since their creation. (For this same reason, Kentucky's a great place for fossil-hunting, too. I've gathered many a trilobite from the rocky roadcuts at the side of Kentucky highways.)

What are dropstones? They're rocks - ranging from boulders to pebbles - that occupy an anomalous place in the geologic record. A few are the results of volcanic eruption, but the vast majority of them got there because they were carried there by glaciers in prehistory. These dropstones occur all over the planet, indicating that the entire world was once encased in ice.

According to Frank R. Ettensohn's recent scientific report called Kentucky Dropstones and the Case for Late Devonian Alpine Glaciation in the Appalachian Basin (USA) with Implications for Appalachian Tectonics and Black-Shale Sedimentation:

A nearly three-ton, granitic boulder was found embedded within uppermost parts of the Upper Devonian (Famennian; praesulcata Zone) Cleveland Shale Member of the Ohio Shale in Rowan County, northeastern Kentucky, and most recently, an in-situ boulder was noted from the subsurface Bedford Shale in eastern Kentucky. Other, anomalous, igneous and metamorphic boulders have been found near Cleveland exposures in the area, but none were in situ, prompting previous workers to ascribe their origins to ice-rafting in proposed, Pleistocene proglacial lakes, accompanying glaciation to the north. The in-situ nature of the new find, dated age of the boulder lithology (470 Ma), as well as compositional aspects of this and other likely dropstone boulders, strongly suggest Appalachian origins.

Giant Muskellunge

According to the new edition of the Kentucky Fishing and Boating Guide, a 14-year-old Mt. Sterling girl named Sarah Terry recently caught this record-breaking muskellunge (commonly called "muskies") in Cave Run Lake, Rowan County.