Mystery Bat Disease

As I write this, it's only a couple of hours since Dr. Margaret Chan grimly announced to the world that we're now officially in a Level Six Pandemic for the virus that causes Swine Flu, marking the first global pandemic in nearly half a century. The first Kentucky cases were reported back in April.

Concerned though I am about the humans, I'm also very concerned about life in general on this planet (and others) - and therefore have spent what some might call an inordinate portion of the afternoon fretting about Kentucky's bat population:

According to this news story, Bat expert Merlin Tuttle addressed the House Natural Resources Committee regarding a brand-new malady called "White-nose Syndrome":

A mysterious disease that has killed a million bats in nine states is headed toward Kentucky caves that hold three endangered species of the flying mammals, lawmakers in Washington were told Thursday.

Scientists have been unable to determine where the disease came from or how to stop it.

Officials first noticed the disease in New York in 2007. Then a caver came forward with a photo taken a year earlier that showed bats with white noses.

The government has closed all caves in national forests in the east, including an estimated 1,000 caves in Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest.

Scientists don't think people can "catch" white-nose syndrome, but there was a suggestion at the hearing that a public worried about the disease would stay away from commercial caves, hurting tourism.

David Carradine in Lexington

One of the all-time greats of Hollywood, David Carradine, best known for his roles in the Kung Fu TV series and the Kill Bill films, recently left this world on an odd note.

On June 4, 2009, he was found dead in a hotel room in Bangkok, Thailand. A police official said Carradine was found hanging by a rope in the room's closet with his hands tied together and a shoelace tied around his genitals. According to ABC News, crime scene photos show the actor was wearing what appear to be fishnets and a wig at the time of death, and of course the media/internet merchants of negativity are having a ball with that bit of gossip.

Authorities are still trying to determine whether or not foul play may have been involved. (Considering that his wrists were tied together, seems like a no-brainer to me.)

Artifact Attic has recently unearthed footage of David Carradine performing with his band at the Midwest Entertainment Industry Conference in Lexington, KY, 2003. Click here to see it.

Ice Cream Corner

In keeping with our fetish for our fair state's rapidly vanishing mom-n-pop ice cream stores, here's one from our Whitewashed Windows and Vacant Stores blog.

The Ice Cream Corner sits dead at 2100 W. Broadway in Russell, KY (on the outskirts of Louisville).

It's been dead as far back as whenever the Google Maps Street View images were taken.

Brown-Forman's Big Bourbon Bottle

One of America's best mimetic water towers is at the Brown-Forman plant on Dixie Highway in Louisville: it's fashioned to look like an enormous bottle of Old Forester bourbon, and can be clearly seen for miles around.

Gun Grave

Speaking of guns, I've always liked this grave in Eastwood Cemetery, with a Sun n' Gun motif.

Guns and Bibles at New Bethel

Like many of my entries on this blog, I'm including this not because I think it's all that unusual myself, but because I understand that a lot of other people do.

The New Bethel Church in Valley Station, KY has announced an "Open Carry Celebration" in which members of their flock are encouraged to bring their guns to Church on Saturday, June 27th. Keith Olbermann on MSNBC has been having a field day with this, heckling Pastor Ken Pagano for what they see as a laughable cognitive dissonance.

But speaking as someone who is NOT a big fan of guns, I still don't see what all the uproar is about. The guns have to be unloaded and holstered, so it's not like everyone's going to fire a shot every time the preacher says "can I get a Amen?"

Pagano says it's his way of celebrating the Second Amendment and America's freedoms. I can't really scoff at that. Since I care more about the Constitution than I do anyone's sense of religious decorum, I have to give it my blessing. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

Anyway, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and Pagano's probably loving the attention. To answer his critics, I suggest that Pagano employ this variation on my own eternal favorite bottom-line conversation-ender: if you don't like it, go start your own church and then you can do it your way.

Squirrelly's Magic Tea Room

Part of Bearno's On The Bridge, 131 W. Main Street in Louisville, is devoted to something called Squirrelly's Magic Tea Room. I'm not really sure what that is.

Every Saturday night, Squirrelly's Tea Room hosts something called Stormin' Norman and the Galt House Ghost. I'm not really sure what those are.


Someone called Madame Zelda does palm readings in a special spooky enclave on the premises. I'm not really sure who she is, nor why she's depicted scrying into a crystal ball on the poster outside if she's a palm reader.


They were closed when I was there, but I'll return to check the place out soon. A couple of people I talked to nearby said vague things about the whole building being haunted because it used to be the original Galt House, circa 1837. Signs in the place allude to these hauntings but give precious little data.

Surprisingly, Google searches for the relevant keywords weren't much help.

The Labyrinth of Sacred Oak Grove

For some whose frame of reference for the word "labyrinth" would be a muppet musical starring David Bowie, a couple of quick notes:

A true labyrinth is an elaborately winding path, either one that is rendered as an image or one that is a literal 3-D path one can follow on foot.

Some labyrinths are not just open paths, but completely closed-in corridors or tunnels, such as the one built to hold the Minotaur in Greek mythology, or the one in which the detective monks find themselves lost in Umberto Eco's classic The Name of the Rose. In both stories, the heroes find their way out of the labyrinth by winding a thread by which one's steps can be retraced. (Incidentally, this is precisely where we derive the modern term "clue" - from "clew", an ancient nautical term for cord, rope, twine or thread.) Technically, these were maze-type labyrinths, with multiple path options branching off.

What we're concerned with here is the open-air path style of labyrinth, an excellent example of which can be experienced at the Sacred Oak Grove, an alternative-spirituality retreat in Sorgho, KY, Daviess County. The Labyrinth of Sacred Oak Grove is based on the one in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Chartres, France, built in 1201.

Sacred Oak Grove's mission statement is "to create, improvise and nuture a sacred transformational environment, in order to remember, validate and illuminate our divine connection". It's the project of Clarice O'Bryan, who describes herself on her website as "teacher, healer, dancer, intuitive masseuse".


There's also a smaller, but very interesting, open-path labyrinth at Hopscotch House, a women's retreat off Wolf Pen Branch in Prospect.

Coal Industry Pressuring Obama?

There's a recent article in the Lexington Herald-Leader about a puzzling reversal - or what seems to be one - in Obama's policy on strip-mining:

The celebration was short for the Obama administration's expected crackdown on devastating coal-mining practices in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Back in March, the applause and good press rolled in.

A retooled Environmental Protection Agency, under administrator Lisa Jackson, announced that it was formally questioning a couple of mountaintop-removal permit applications and would scrutinize others for compliance with the Clean Water Act and other federal laws.

With considerably less fanfare, the EPA last month quietly informed a congressman from West Virginia that it had given the green light to 42 permit applications while raising concerns about six others in the Corps of Engineers' Huntington district.

There hasn't been time for a thorough review of 42 mining permits, so we can only assume that the administration caved to pressure from coal interests.

That assumption is confirmed by the Los Angeles Times which reports that there was a "series of White House meetings with coal companies and advocates," including U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall, D-West Virginia, and West Virginia's Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin.

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.

Berea College v. Kentucky

It never fails to weird me out just how different a world this was, not so long ago. The story of Berea College v. Kentucky is a reality-check we all need occasionally.

In July 1904, the state of Kentucky passed the mind-bogglingly unconstitutional "Day Law", which prohibited any person, any group of people, or any corporation from teaching black and white students in the same school. Further, it forbade a school running "separate but equal" black and white branches within 25 miles of each other.

The law was specifically cooked up to put a stop to Madison County's Berea College, which was the only racially integrated school in Kentucky. Berea College fought back hard, and took their case to the Kentucky Court of Appeals. They lost. The Court asserted that "the purity of racial blood" was "deeper and more important than the matter of choice".

Then Berea appealed it further, to the U.S. Supreme Court. And that's the really weird part... they lost.

The vast majority of the Supreme Court ruled against Berea College, with only John Marshall Harlan and William R. Day dissenting.

Thanks to this ruling, the door became wide open for all states to forbid integrated schooling in all public and even private institutions. It wasn't until 1950 that Kentucky amended the Day Law to allow integration. 19-freakin'-fifty. Unbelievable. And in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education put an end to Government-enforced racial segregation - at least officially, since many refused to accept it for years to come.

And that's precisely when the whole country turned upside down.


In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black children from entering the Little Rock High School building. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Arkansas to force the National Guard to stand down, essentially creating a momentary literal civil war.

In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace stated in his inaugural address, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" to great applause. He then personally went to the University of Alabama and stopped two black students from enrolling. (Wallace considered Happy Chandler, Governor of Kentucky, as his running mate in his 1968 Presidential campaign, but dropped him when it was realized Chandler had been an ardent supporter of Jackie Robinson.)

Subsequently, civil rights crusaders Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy were all shot and killed. Wallace himself was also shot in 1972, though he survived confined to a wheelchair until 1998.

And to think the whole mess began because State Representative Carl Day of Breathitt County proposed the Day Law, which passed 73 to 5 in Kentucky's House of Representatives and 28 to 5 in Kentucky's Senate.


Photo above: George Wallace with NASA head James Webb and Operation Paperclip ex-Nazi Wernher Von Braun.

Climax Cave

I've been in many Kentucky caves but I don't think Rockcastle County's Climax Cave is one of them. I just happened to read about it tonight while researching something else, as so often happens with this here internet thingie.

Someone named Jenna Martin has a very interesting report of a trip to the cave in 2000, an excerpt from which follows:

Climax is one of those caves that, once you get to a certain landmark, you can wander around the many passages and not get lost because they all, for the most part, lead back to that main room. We did some exploring. We sat in one passageway for a bit and let the bats zoom by our faces. And we carried on some deep, philosophical discussions while we crawled through the mud. Good times. Around 1 am, we decided to head for the exit. With some caves, you have to exit where you came in because the passage eventually becomes impassible. Climax, though, has a separate exit that spits us out into a hilly cow field with a winding trail that brings us about a mile down the road from the church. In the middle of the night, you not only have to watch out for giant cow patties all over the place, but you also have to pass one of those ancient, scary-movie cemeteries with the complimentary creaking iron gated archway while hearing what we imagine to be wild, rabid dogs barking and howling in the not-so-distant distance. Creepy as hell, but if you call yourself a caver, you've gotta at least pretend you've got some balls.

We turned the last corner before we got to the exit. Before us, lining the 30 foot high and about 50 foot wide mouth of Climax, were about 100 or so lit candles. For years and years, this area has been thought to be highly paranormally active. (Not to mention all of the creepy "Deliverance" parallels we've noticed, on occasion.) Spirit hunters attribute ghost sightings and strange events to civil war activities that occurred in the area, extreme suffering of people living and dying in these "hollows", and the bizarre fundamentalist religions and occult rituals that were practiced by reclusive clans of Kentucky mountain people.

Climax Cave can be entered by way of an opening near the Climax Baptist Church, which is located in the small town of Climax, KY (home of Climax Mountain Spring Water). If you go, note that Climax Cave is closed from September through April, to allow the indigenous population of endangered Indiana Bats some quality alone-time.

Climax Cave is 1.554 miles long, which puts it at #626 in the Top 1000 Longest Caves in the USA.


These photos were filched from here. Click it to see some more great photos of Climax Cave.