Death of Taylor's Billiards

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??

The last great old-school pool hall in Madison County is gone. I just happened to be in Richmond recently and decided to get a couple of "Jasonburgers" (so nicknamed by fans of the owner and cook) and found it closed down and empty inside. How could such a thing happen?

Then I realized that ALL the shops on the whole First Street block were shut down. One's even in the process of being torn down. Since First Street was one of the last interesting and useful blocks in Richmond that still had any character or integrity, doesn't it just figure that someone would of course want to get rid of it? I've gone to see many a band on that block over the years, from the silly (A Styx cover band) to the sublime (Southern Culture On The Skids), and I've even BEEN that band several times, with my old musical combos like The Kentuckians, Cheeseburger & Fries, and Formula LX-321.

Most importantly, historically speaking, the great Kentucky author Walter Tevis used to do much of his drinkin', smokin', and pool sharkin' here back in the day, and for that reason alone, this place should have been named a protected historic site.

The mysterious motorcyclist-savant "Buckhorn" (see page 110 in the Weird Kentucky book) also dwelled here daily, hawking wristwatches, fountain pens, pocket knives, zippo lighters, antique silver cigarette cases, and other doodads from the virtual general store that was the inside of his denim coat.

You'd walk through the filthy screen door to find an ancient green countertop, with discolored places worn from decades of elbows. You'd find a seat on an ancient stool held together with duct tape, and you'd be likely to have a tobacco farmer sitting beside you on your left and an attorney on your right.

The mighty Jason would open the fridge, pluck balls of raw burger that had been prepared in the early morning hours, and spatula them flat on an ancient grill that was caked in the carbon-black grease of a century, much like the one Kerouac described in Visions of Cody. Then he'd reach into a huge bucket filled with freshly hand-cut french fries immersed in icewater, and drop them onto the grill as well. A dozen oddball characters shouting orders at him (and calls for "another beer over here!") and Jason always managed to keep his cool and never screw up a single order. I heard rumors that he's a master golfer when not in his cook's apron, and this cool probably serves him well.

If you ordered a beer, it came from a glass-doored cooler unit right in front of you. If you ordered a soft drink, Jason or one of his minions would get fifty cents out of the cash register, walk all the way down to the pool-table area to a Coke machine there, purchase your drink from it, and come back to the counter to bring you the can. I always thought that was a peculiar and wonderfully Southern way of doing it.

People smoked at Taylor's. Hard to imagine in this confused and sterile modern world, but they gleefully smoked like chimneys at good ol' Taylor's - cigs, cigars, pipes, not to mention dip, snuff and chaw. They drank and they smoked and listened to George Jones and smoked some more, then they ate meat and consorted with whores and then drank some more. Some even occasionally played pool.

There were photographs of the place's early history on the wall, along with an old sun-bleached and nicotine-stained nude photo of some woman with a 1960s hairdo. There was still an antiquated cigarette machine, even though political correctness had eliminated them from most other places in America. There was a 1920s-looking wood-and-glass showcase filled with sad-looking store-bought snack cakes that nobody ever ate. There was a giant greasy old handpainted menu overhead whose prices were no longer correct but they left it up for show. There was also a greasy sign above the grill that said "We serve the best burgers in the Universe".

And with that, I'd have to agree. I will miss Taylor's. Goddamnit.

"I Love Earth"

It looks like it was done by a dying man fingerpainting in his own blood as his final goodbye message, but I'm pretty sure this says "I love Earth".

Earth's okay, I guess, if you've never been to the Pleiades. It's hard as hell to get a decent egg cream there though.

Johnny Depp

Depp, born in Owensboro, KY, is well known for his offbeat and bizarre choices of film roles, and yet somehow he's managed to maintain a career-long hot streak unparalleled in Hollywood, in films such as Edward Scissorhands, Corpse Bride, Ed Wood, Benny and Joon, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Dead Man.

Is the real Depp as weird as his characters? I certainly hope so. Knowing that the man proudly owns a used kleenex that Jack Kerouac once blew his nose on makes me suspect the answer is yes.

Thomas Cruise Mapother IV

You know, I personally don't think he's all that weird or unusual, but I'm including him here because I understand that some people do. (I don't get the whole furor over him jumping on Oprah's couch - I see other stars do far sillier things for attention, every single day of the week.) Cruise (real name: Thomas Cruise Mapother IV) lived in Kentucky as a child and was a paper boy for the Louisville Courier-Journal, although his family was often uprooted as his father's line of work kept them moving around.

Cruise, known for films such as Magnolia, War of the Worlds, Minority Report, Interview with a Vampire, and fellow Kentuckian Walter Tevis' The Color of Money, currently devotes much of his time to activities with that spooky space-age religion but still finds time to visit Kentucky occasionally, visiting relatives and associates and, of course, attending the Derby.

He'll always be one of the finest actors in Hollywood, for my money, regardless of what controversial hi-jinks he gets up to next (and his upcoming Nazi movie is sure to provide plenty of that!).

The Death of Hunter S. Thompson

The great anti-establishment icon of the 1970s and 1980s, Kentuckian Hunter S. Thompson, allegedly took his own life with a handgun in his Aspen, CO home on February 20, 2005. He left the single word "counselor" typed haphazardly in the center of a sheet of paper in his typewriter.

He had been in a phone conversation with his wife, asking her to come home from the gym to help him on a column he was writing. Suddenly, his wife says, he went silent on the other end of the phone. He didn't hang up the phone, he simply stopped talking. She heard no shot.

I repeat: she heard no shot.

Shortly before his "suicide," Thompson had been an increasingly outspoken critic of the U.S. Government's role in 9-11, and was said to be working on a massive exposé alleging the Bush administration's complicity in the World Trade Center attacks. As Mack White says:

"Thompson's family says he was not depressed, nor was he in enough pain to kill himself. In fact, by all reports, he was quite happy. He was talking on the phone to his wife, getting ready to work on his column, when he decided it would be wise to kill himself, so that he could go out (we are told) while still at the top of his form, even though this would mean not finishing his column or his expose on 9/11 (potentially the most important thing he would ever write)?..."

In Thompson's own words: "the US government was going to benefit, and the White House people, the republican administration to take the mind of the public off of the crashing economy….And I have spent enough time on the inside of, well in the White House and you know, campaigns and I've known enough people who do these things, think this way, to know that the public version of the news or whatever event, is never really what happened."

Though his best-known work is the breakthrough "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," for my money his finest hour is his 1959 novel "The Rum Diary." In it, he writes like the early Jack Kerouac's dark twin, and sums the era up with Burroughs-like incisiveness: "I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles -- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going."

Quite unlike William S. Burroughs, however, Thompson was that rare breed of writer who, myth and hype aside, really did write better under the influence of drugs and madness. As critic Kurt Loder has stated, Thompson spawned a whole generation of young slacker writers trying in vain to follow in his footsteps, failing to understand that Thompson was already an accomplished seasoned journalist before he became a walking pharmacy.

Bill Murray portrayed Thompson in the incredibly low-budget film Where the Buffalo Roam, and irritated fellow cast members of Saturday Night Live to no end after picking up Thompson's mannerisms while preparing for the part. Fellow Kentuckian Johnny Depp, who played him in the film adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, will reprise the role in an upcoming film The Rum Diary.

Alien Grave Drive

I've looked at most of the pages on this site and I still don't really get what it's trying to convey, but it sure makes for an interesting late-night tour of the labyrinth of one man's UFO-obsessed mind.

Apparently, there is an alleged alien crash site in Burnside, KY (Pulaski County), containing not only several large fragments of UFO debris, but also ancient artifacts of an alien civilization scattered amongst the area. One such artifact, pictured below, is said by the site's author to be an "actual alien skull", even though it sure appears to be a small piece of creek-worn sandstone that looks vaguely like a stereotypical big-eyed alien, maybe. If you squint at it. In a dark room. After four shots of Woodford Reserve.

The site is written in such broken English you'd swear it originated in Zhengzhou or something, rather than America. But then again, Kentucky is like a country unto itself in many ways, and this site exemplifies this. Here's a sample:

Do UFO Exist? Of course they Do, We see them all the time, Unidentified Flying Objects. If its Flying and you can't tell what it is then it is a UFO but do Aliens exist? I don't know you tell me, It wasn't until after I took this picture of this petrified wood that I noticed it looked like it had been sawed first on both ends 300 Million Years Ago and then Petrified, You can be the Judge. It sits perfectly flat on the table.

Very puzzling: despite the site's owner David having just made that statement that he doesn't know whether aliens exist, his site also offers what purports to be a "live alien coffin cam" that stays trained on, yes, a coffin on David's property containing a dead alien. Again we quote from the site:

The extraterrestrial has had a quiet time in the sarcophagus without the permanent noises of a networked civilisation.The pious hope "Rest in peace" might not always come true. The crypt is guarded 24-hours-per day and 365-days per year by special security cameras online for everyone to view. The burial graveyard is a electronic wonder as we listen to the mysterious signals.

Internet Censorship Of Intellectual-Technical Information Even Common Scientific words And Covert Online-Personal Surveillance Operations: Even Though The Goverment
Denies The Existence Of Extraterrestrials And UFO'S, Portion Of This Web Page Has Been Censored At The Request Of [CENSORED].

Unfortunately, far as I can tell, the "live cam" image appears to be a simple animated GIF rotating the same images over and over again in a loop. Sigh.

Now, far be it from me to be a debunker - and certainly not for something like this that seems easy as shooting fish in a barrel. But despite the apparent exagerrations and falsehoods presented on David's site, I still hold out some open-mindedness that there could be a grain of truth to the notion of a UFO crash site in Burnside, and I'm still tenuously able to give benefit of the doubt to the idea that the site host is probably a sincere kind of guy and just lacks the ability to present his case in a coherent and believable manner.

Maybe I'll drive down and see his "Alien Grave Drive" UFO museum for myself soon, and get an interview for our blog. I'll keep you posted....

Statue in the Window

This statue of a lady has stood in the window of this house on Jefferson Street in Lexington for years. In 1992 a friend and I were walking down the street at night and the sight of this pale figure peering down nearly frightened us out of our skins for several moments, before we realized we were seeing a statue.

What does it mean? We have no idea, but it sure is creepy.

The Haunted Restrooms of EKU

In the early 1990s I received a firsthand account from a former Eastern Kentucky University janitor, who affirmed having witnessed the "glimpse from the corner of your eye" variety of ghosts in several of the restrooms in the Bert Combs Building.

Specifically, both sets of the third and fourth floor men's restrooms were said to be haunted (there's a men's room on diagonally opposite sides of each floor). The former EKU employee said he often felt an eerie presence in the rooms with him while cleaning the place up at the end of the day. He gradually grew accustomed to the entities, and reported that another janitor corroborated his story.

Hillbilly Days in Pikeville

I've already vented, ranted, and pedanted about the suppression of the "hillbilly" concept on my previous entry about The Li'l Abner Motel, so I won't beat that dead horse again here.

Okay, maybe just a little.

Suffice it to say that some people find this festival uncool because it chooses to embrace the old-fashioned garish Snuffy Smith hillbilly stereotype in this brave new modern space-age Splenda-drinkin' wi-fi world. Some think it makes Kentuckians "look bad" and "look silly" (as if the two were synonymous). I love it for the very same reasons those uptight folks despise it. After all, I am a hillbilly myself. I think they should declare being a hillbilly to be designated as an "alternative lifestyle", protected from discrimination by law.

However, the Pikeville Hillbilly Days isn't just a good excuse to run around in overalls and a corncob pipe - it's for a good cause. The event, which began in 1977, is a fundraiser benefitting kids at the Shriner's Children's Hospital in Lexington. It was started by Howard "Dirty Ear" Stratton and "Shady" Grady Kinney, two Shriners with the Hillbilly Clan Outhouse No. 2 in Pikeville.

Central Rock Company

Today is CRC day, commemorating the great obscure 1980s Madison County garage band Central Rock Company, who I played with back in the day. Drink a toast tonight to all weird teenage bands that existed mostly in their own bedrooms and backyards.

Who are Central Rock Company? Historian Mitchell Newport, in his 2003 treatise That Low Gruesome Sound, described them this way:

"Central Rock Company - who took their name from a local quarry business - were two high school misfits (Shay Quillen and Kurt Adams) who performed a highly peculiar act. It consisted mostly of jumping up and down with way too much teen angst and singing mostly acapella versions of 1980s hits mixed with original tunes of their own, such as "Polka De Pineapple", "Upon Hearing That Supergirl Is Dead", and "Penis". Sometimes they were backed up by a motley gang of local kids (called "the CRC Dismembers"). Jeffrey Scott Holland also played guitar on some of their studio sessions for JLK Records, and at an infamous party gig in Shay's back yard. After a handful of cassette releases that did generate some attention in their community, CRC dissipated in 1987. Strangely, these highly adrenalin-pumped kids, whose puerile and childish antics were rivaled only by RV & OI, abruptly grew up and moved on past such silliness. At least for a while."

And what exactly is CRC Day? Well, it's an old tradition increasingly practiced only by old-guard enthusiasts of the "Creeps Scene", commemorating a line from their song "Sitting In My Room" where chants, "It's the 29th of June and I'm sitting in my room".

So now you know.

Johnny Allman's Restaurant

Johnny Allman's Restaurant was located along the Kentucky River in Boonesboro, not far from the present location of Hall's Restaurant. From the 1940s to the 1970s, it was a immensely well-loved spot, with mobsters, businessmen, bikers and "river rats" side by side, enjoying the fine food and the fine view overlooking the river. Even Sweet Evening Breeze was a regular diner there (and sometimes caused a stir by choosing to use the men's restroom).

Beer Cheese was invented at Allman's Restaurant in the 1940s. There are many who would have you believe that Hall's invented it. They did not. Today Hall's offers a very similar, but not quite the same version of Beer Cheese in their restaurant. The "Hall's Snappy Spread" sold commercially in stores is a totally different formula and nothing like what you get in the actual restaurant.

Allman's went up in a gigantic fire in the 1970s. I'll never forget the day my family and I drove down there about 6pm for dinner, only to find nothing left but a charred skeleton of the building, still smoldering. Allman's was such an institution that it was unthinkable that they wouldn't rebuild. So everyone waited. And waited. But the new Allman's never came.

All that remains now are the memories of that Beer Cheese that can never be tasted again, and scraps of effluvia such as those pictured here. We are attempting to track down pictures of the restaurant in its heyday. Do you have photos of Allman's Restaurant? Please e-mail us if so!

Did I say their beer cheese could never be tasted again? Well, that's not exactly true. Bob Tabor of Winchester is keeping the original Allman's recipe alive with his River Rat Beer Cheese which started out available strictly in the central Kentucky area but now is branching out all over the state. When I first tasted it, I almost cried. It is indeed, as their slogan states, "Just Like Johnny's".

The Fake Fort Boonesboro

Coming into Boonesboro off I-75, you'll see several signs directing you towards Fort Boonesboro, leading you down into a valley off the right-hand side of the road where a huge and majestic fort awaits you impressively. Problem is, it's not Fort Boonesboro.

It's a somewhat fanciful "replica" of the original Fort, which no longer exists. This Fort is a strangely clean and pristine shaker-like community with many buildings containing profoundly unhappy-looking people in period clothing, giving capsule dissertations on soap making, whittling, wooden toy making, and other rustic stuff.

Historical accuracy here is, well, shaky. The setting looks and feels about as authentic as, say, the final season of Little House on the Prairie than the rugged primitive shelter the real Fort was. Everyone is clean and dapper in their machine-stitched polyester colonial duds. The plaque at the Fort's massive gates tries to give the impression that this is the actual original Fort, and only uses the word "replica" deep in the text.

The real Fort Boonesboro is depicted as being much smaller in size in this old idealized drawing - see below - which is in itself is believed by many historians to be already highly exaggerated.



Even the towering stone monument out front in the parking lot, which at a glance seems to be a tribute to the Fort settlers, is actually a self-congratulatory tribute to the people who built this Disneyesque simulacra, with a complete list of all their names. I'm not making this up.

As we were taking these pictures, a family from North Carolina rolled up and eagerly headed to the Fort, marveling at Daniel Boone's amazing handiwork. Far be it from me to pop their bubble. As a tourist attraction, I suppose one could do worse, but I'd like to see a lot more done with this Fort-replica concept to guarantee more repeat visitors to our state, and less disenchantment and disappointment.



Incidentally, the fake-Fort people tend to spell it "Boonesborough", which is kind of ironic, adding "ugh" to Boonesboro. We here at Unusual Kentucky prefer the more elegant shorter spelling.