Tom Cruise Climbs Burj Khalifa

Kentuckian Tom Cruise was recently spotted filming a scene for his upcoming Mission Impossible IV, perched atop the tallest building in the world - Dubai's Burj Khalifa. The Burj Khalifa was also examined on this blog here last year, when Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, came to Lexington.

Cruise's latest daring film shoot - which gives me vertigo just to think about it - came during the Islamic Eid al-Adha (عيد الأضحى‎), a religious holiday also known as "the festival of sacrifice". By doing his own dangerous stunt work, Cruise very nearly sacrificed himself by spending such a long time clinging to the top of the tallest structure ever created! In the past few weeks, he's also been seen swinging, Spider-man style, from a cable tethered to the building and - as in the photo above - hanging upside down from one of its highest windows.


(Fun facts about the Burj Khalifa: it's the tallest building on Earth, has the world's longest elevator shaft and the world's fastest elevators, has the world's highest outdoor observation deck, the world's highest Mosque, and the world's highest swimming pool at the 76th floor. It's so tall, you can see it for 60 miles away, and the weather at the top is at least 6 degrees colder with winds sometimes reaching 90 miles per hour.)

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.

Rudell Stitch

One from our Transylvania Gentlemen blog:


On a recent visit to Louisville's troubled Eastern Cemetery, I noticed a grave I'd somehow always overlooked in my taphophilic expeditions - that of the great champion boxer Rudell Stitch.

Stitch started boxing locally in Kentucky in 1956, and by 1959 he was at Madison Square Garden fighting Gaspar "El Indio" Ortega. At the time of his death in 1960, Stitch ranked second in the world in Welterweight and was well on his way to becoming champion.

Stitch's heroism outside the ring earned him accolades as well, and ultimately led to his demise. In 1959, he saved a man from drowning in the accursed Ohio River, an act for which he was awarded the Carnegie Hero Fund medal of honor.

And the following summer, it happened again - only not with a happy ending. From Wikipedia:

On June 5, 1960, Stitch went fishing with Bud Bruner, Bruner's son, and Charles Oliver, a friend. They were fishing on a rock shelf below the McAlpine Locks and Dam when Oliver slipped. He grabbed Stitch, and they both went into the Ohio River. As he was swimming back to shore, Stitch heard Oliver yelling and went back to get him. Stitch and Oliver, both weighed downed by heavy waders and coats, disappeared in the turbulent water. Their bodies were found by the Coast Guard hours later.

For his tremendous sacrifice, Stitch posthumously received another medal from the Carnegie Hero Fund. Only three other people have received two Carnegie Hero Fund medals.

Given Stitch's importance, I'm surprised he was laid to rest in Eastern Cemetery rather than Cave Hill. It was, as we now know, an unfortunate choice. In 1989 came the sickening revelation that Eastern Cemetery officials had been secretly burying multiple people in the same grave since the 1920s, and that many people's remains were never even interred. What happened to their remains? No one knows.

Stitch's wife, Rosa Mae Huguely, died in 1964 but for some reason her death inscription remains blank. I don't know whether she end up being buried somewhere else, or whether she's here and nobody ever got around to noting it properly on the stone?


I hereby make a motion that Stitch's body - if, in fact, the Hannibal Lecters that ran this cemetery did indeed bury him as they were supposed to - be moved to another cemetery. One with the prestige befitting a Kentucky hero of his stature, and one with even a modicum of security.

Mary Richardson's Defaced Grave

I hadn't been in Eastern Cemetery lately and decided to drop in there this past weekend, to check on its latest state of decay. I am pleased to report that the volunteer preservationists have been doing some good works - many gravestones that have been toppled and laid face down in the mud for years have been hoisted back up and remounted onto the bases of the markers.

Unfortunately, the ongoing vandalism seems to be getting worse. For all the remounted stones I saw, I also witnessed many more knocked over that hadn't been so the last time I was here.


And then I saw this grave. Someone took an astonishing amount of effort to eradicate the person's name from it. Manufacturers of gravestones engrave the lettering very deep, so you really, really, really have to want to remove a name in order to get it done, and you probably have to spend hours working at it.

So the question before us is, why would someone go to so much trouble to obliterate this person's name? And not only the name, but the dates of birth and death. My first thought was that some idiot kids did this, but you know and I know that kids of today probably don't have the attention span necessary to devote so much time and elbow-grease to any task, not even one of evil mischief and of their own desire. No, I hate to say it, but I feel like somebody really hated somebody here, enough to desecrate their final resting place - and in so doing, perhaps remove the last trace of evidence that this person even existed.


Well, they failed. They left untouched the text on the reverse side of the tombstone, which is for one Joseph Richardson 1901-1974. So once we know that Richardson is the surname for our mystery person, it becomes clear when we look at her side again. And from there, after close scrutiny, I'm certain the name is "Mary".

Someone out there has to know who these people were. Anyone?

Cemetery Deer

What is it with deer? They're stalking me. Everywhere I go nowadays, I encounter deer, even in the city. I never used to see them so often, not even when I lived in the wilderness of Waco, KY - with the sole exception of the now-infamous "Devil Deer" incident.

But now I see them everywhere (to quote Hank Thompson) and they're popping up in urban settings with greater frequency as mankind continues to encroach on what dwindling wild space is left to them. One even barged into the Middletown Fresh Market a few months ago.

And last fall (holy moley - I just checked and it was exactly a year ago today and I didn't even realize it when I started writing this. Now that's weird!) I was driving Westbound on I-64 at night through Franklin County, and ran over an enormous deer. I didn't run into it, I ran over it. Now, the impact was great, to be sure, but aside from a really skull-joggling staccato double-WHAM!! as each set of tires bounced over the unfortunate buck, it was relatively untraumatic. I have pretty darn good reflexes, or so I like to flatter myself, and managed to keep the car straight and continue driving with relative calm.

It wasn't until I got home that it really started sinking on me how incredible the whole thing was. It's like in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson look at the bulletholes in the wall behind them and can't figure out why they aren't dead. I kept picturing - and still picture to this day - the frozen-in-time snapshot my mind took of the moment just before impact. The deer's considerable rack should have been run over by my driver-side tires, and it's a minor miracle that my tires weren't punctured by them.

But then it's a major miracle that I'm even alive at all. When I tell the story to people, many have been incredulous - "you ran over a deer in a Volvo station wagon and didn't wreck? Is that even possible?" I admit it doesn't sound possible at all, and yet it happened. And all I lost was a muffler.

I recently saw a news story where a Brownsville man driving one of those monster-sized heavy-duty pickup trucks collided with a deer in Grayson County. If any vehicle could squash a deer, you would expect it would be one of those, right? Nope. The impact sent him flipping over repeatedly, totalling his vehicle.

And just this past weekend, someone died in a deer collision in Harold, KY (Floyd County).

The statistics for deer/vehicle impact fatalities are so grim that a number of organizations exist to monitor the problem, such as Deer Crash.



Anyway, I said all that to say all this: I was in Louisville's Calvary Cemetery the other day, and came face to face with Bambi. We stared each other down for a couple minutes before the little doe decided she didn't want her picture taken.

Something Olde's Ghost

Years ago, during my Lovejoy-esque period as a roving rogue antique dealer, I had booths in flea market/antique mall booths all across central Kentucky, from Mt.Vernon to Lexington to Irvine. And when you're dealing with such a quantity of raw materials from the physical world, soaked with all the history and psychic emotional residue that ends up attached to these items (if you believe in such things), it could drive a man insane.

And, some might say, it did the same to me.

If you believe that objects could have a will of their own and that they can express displeasure about being someplace they don't want to be, imagine surrounding yourself with antiques - much of which originally entered the market because their former owner died - and you can end up getting bad vibes all over yourself like baby powder or craft glitter.

Those were some strange times indeed, and they could provide fodder for countless ghost-story books - no doubt, sooner or later, I will write them. All in time.

But one particular incident that comes to mind was a ghost, poltergeist, entity, manifestation, what-have-you, that haunted the Something Olde Antique Mall on Chestnut Street in Berea. I haven't been by there in a long time, but as far as I know, the mall is still there and the ghost probably is too.

The building itself was converted from an old Western Auto store from the 50s, but who knows what was on the site prior to that. The upstairs of the place was entirely devoted to old books, with an elaborate array of shelves built to accomodate them. Soon after I moved into the place as a dealer, I learned that everyone there was quite spooked by the goings-on above our heads.

Even when nobody was upstairs, you could often hear footsteps walking across the floor directly above our heads. Now, there's no way to convey this via text, but you'll just have to take my word for it that I know the sounds that old creaky buildings can make, and that these sounds were not typical of those red-herring noises of settling foundation, expanding/contracting floorboards, or rattling ductwork. No, these were clear footsteps no different from the ones made when a real person was up there walking - you could even discern that the steps were consistent with a man of some weight, wearing shoes with hard clompy-sounding soles.

"See? There it is again!" someone would shout, and we'd all go running up there immediately. And of course, there was nothing. Those who stayed downstairs would invariably report that the footsteps stopped while we were on our way up. It was, truly, one of the weirdest things I've ever seen - or, rather, didn't see.

Lo and behold, a Google search for Something Olde Antique Mall brought up this old archived news article from Berea Online, and it interviews the shop's owner, Karen Todd, on the matter:

Strange things began to occur after the bookstore opened. People reported hearing the sounds of footsteps overhead when the upstairs rooms were presumably empty. And one piece of furniture back in a dark corner of the store is consistently found out of place when Todd opens the building in the morning.

Since the light switch for the second floor is in that corner, Todd says she makes a point of always putting the chair aside when she closes the store at night - a precaution to insure she has a clear path to the switch. One morning, however, she tripped over the chair, which during the night appeared to have been pulled into the middle of the floor, as if someone moved it to sit down for a good read.
"I knew I moved that chair the night before because I always walk out that way," Todd says.

House Across the Water

I've always had a steadfast rule against including things from Indiana on this blog, not because I don't love Indiana (I most certainly do!) but because once you open the floodgates to including stuff near Kentucky, entropy creeps in.

Then again, entropy is inevitable, as with all things in the Universe.

At least this house is directly viewable from Kentucky, at Carrie Gaulbert Cox Park on the Louisville side of the river.

I've heard rumors that the playwright Neil Simon once owned it and used it as an occasional retreat, but have been unable to confirm this. Anyone? It's a beautiful old Victorian house nonetheless.

Private Areas

Saw this sign in Ri Ra the other day. I was afraid to inquire to the server for fear that she'd slap me.

Beard-Eating Assault Mined for Comedy Gold

The news media is buzzing like flies today, over the sentencing of the criminals who allegedly assaulted a Lawrenceburg man. According to reports, the man faced gunpoint and knifepoint as the assailants cut his beard off and forced him to eat it.

Apparently, reporter Cathal Kelly of the Toronto Star thinks it's something to make mirth of, with puns like "his hunger for justice". And oddly, though Kelly used this WLEX story as its source, the quotes were altered to reverse WLEX's editorial cleanup of the man's grammar.

WLWT couldn't help punning either, although they were slightly more subtle: "A central Kentucky man said he's waiting for justice to be served after two men shaved his beard, then made him eat it."

(And of course, the kind of people that enjoy sites like Fark won't be disappointed by their coverage.)

The idea of beard-eating is intrinsically humorous, of course, there's no denying it - there's an old Johnny Ryan comic strip that comes to mind - but correct me if I'm way out of line here, assault and violence isn't funny, even if the victim is wearing a Confederate Flag hat. I'm sick to death of media/internet snarkiness that reflexively, as a rule, now feels mandated and obligated to use people's misfortune for bread-and-circuses entertainment.

A few years back, I actually saw a "news" story on local TV about an elderly woman who tripped and fell and injured herself, and waited a long time before anyone found her. These capped-teeth talking heads actually peppered the story with puns like "went on a trip this fall" and actually dared to invoke the monumentally unfunny cliche "Help, I've fallen and can't get up".

I'm all for making fun of criminals, of course - I mercilessly heckle sociopaths from this microscopic podium in the ocean of internet noise. But I oppose "news" stories that make fun of the victim, an act which places the reporters themselves in the sociopath seat, and encourages the audience to slough their civility and come along for the rude ride.

Trimble County Soldier's Monument

Trimble County again: this monument to war heroes stands outside their courthouse.





I've never understood why the Korean War and the Vietnam War sometimes get downgraded to be called a mere "conflict" (and this particular monument avoids putting a label on the Vietnam War altogether). Is it some kind of politically-correct thing?

These were wars; call them such.

Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.

Rafinesque's Crypt at Transy

Last month, I briefly addressed the legendary Curse of Constantine Rafinesque, hurled by Transylvania University's notorious eccentric renaissance man.


At the time, I had been unable to catch the right people with the keys to his indoor crypt during office hours, but now, I'm happy to present some photos I took of Rafinesque's (alleged) grave in Transy's Old Morrison building.




In addition to Rafinesque, St. Saveur Francois Bonfils is also interred here. He was a French language/literature professor at Transy who had previously been an officer in Napoleon's army. He succumbed to the Cholera epidemic in 1849 and was buried in Christ Church Graveyard, then was subsequently dug up and moved to Transy's administration building in 1939 for reasons not entirely clear to me.