A Devil at Noon

There's a play currently showing at Actors Theatre of Louisville entitled A Devil At Noon, ostensibly thinly based on the life of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. As as longtime student of PKD's work, I was intrigued - until I read the review at Theatre Louisville.


It sounds positively dreadful, and I guess it shouldn't surprise me at all since I tend to loathe just about everything that comes from the Humana Festival of New American Plays. And it's a shame, too, because someone needs to bring a real play - you know, with an actual plot and an actual set? - about the real Philip K. Dick. Kentuckians gotta know.

Even without assessing his writing, he's a fascinating character all by himself: in 1974 he began experiencing hallucinatory visions, in which he allegedly re-experienced past lives in Biblical times, and began receiving telepathic information from a cosmic entity known as VALIS. He struggled to deal with these unsettling experiences until his death in 1982.

Was he crazy? Perhaps, perhaps not; but you can't argue with success - many of PKD's works have been turned into blockbuster Hollywood films. There's Blade Runner with Harrison Ford and Sean Young (see image above), Next with Nicholas Cage, Minority Report with Tom Cruise (see image below), Screamers with Peter Weller, A Scanner Darkly with Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr., and Total Recall with Arnold Schwartzenegger, among others.

Signs of the Anchorage Wilderness

I spend a lot of time roaming the woods and trails in Anchorage. Here's some puzzling evidence encountered in the way of signage.

Above:this almost completely rusted-away "No Trespassing" sign is along what is now a public nature trail in E.P. Sawyer Park. It must date back to the time of the Central Kentucky Insane Asylum, which originally occupied these grounds.

Below: This "nature trail" sign is oddly isolated out in the middle of a swamp area.


Just when I thought I was truly out in the middle of nowhere, I happened upon this deluxe and informative sign, telling me all about the importance of keeping Goose Creek clean:


And then there's this old plastic sign with what seems to be the international symbol for "no hikers allowed", but it was laying flat in the ground in a remote part of the woods. Which way had it been meant to indicate to keep out? Impossible to tell for sure. I kept walking, of course.


It sure does seem like there's a lot of plastic signs littering the landscape even as they warn me of the importance to protect the environment. Here's another, with the surreal title "Wetlands: Nature's Kidneys".

Rare Yellow Cardinals

A pair of extremely rare yellow Cardinals showed up at a Kentucky family's backyard bird feeder a few weeks ago, and it's rocking the world of ornithology.

According to the Herald-Leader, retired Kentucky Nature Preserves researcher Brainard Palmer-Ball and Auburn University professor Geoff Hill have examined the photographs and confirmed that these Cardinals are indeed the result of a genetic mutation, rather than being the yellow South American Cardinal, which is an altogether different species from our Northern Cardinal.

If you see a yellow bird outside, don't hesitate: take pictures! Don't stop to gawk and ask yourself whether it's a goldfinch or not, snap pics and ask questions later.

These specimens were sighted near the Boyle County/Marion County border, not far from Gravel Switch.

Outhouse Shed

I'm in with the out house. Or I would have been, except this structure spotted on the Anchorage Trail is a fake facility. I inquired to someone about it and they told me it's actually a shed for groundskeeper's supplies.

Murderabilia

In 1997, a 14-year-old Paducah boy named Michael Carneal, endlessly tormented by school bullies and increasingly hearing voices in his head of a group of entities calling themselves The Danes, finally snapped.

On December 1 of that year, he brought a .38 handgun to school and opened fire upon the school's Christian prayer group, killing three and wounding five more. He then placed his pistol on the ground and said, "Kill me, please". He had been reading the Stephen King novel Rage which, coincidentally, was also in the possession of Dustin L. Pierce, a senior at Jackson County High School in McKee, who held his classroom hostage at gunpoint in a nine-hour police standoff in 1989.

Despite the fact that he was only a child, he was sentenced to life in prison in LaGrange.

Now, probably out of boredom being in a high security institution surrounded by far scarier people than himself, Carneal has turned to art as an outlet. People are actually purchasing his artwork, which inevitably draws the ire of people who don't want prisoners to be able to do anything, have anything, achieve anything.

It all started years ago when killer clown John Wayne Gacy started getting rich in prison selling his crude paintings, and someone decided that maybe it wasnt such a good idea for murderers to profit from their crimes. When you phrase it that way, it does sound logical, but on the other hand, there isn't much "profit" involved when you're in prison for life and all you can really buy with your windfall is stale, overpriced Reese's Cups at the prison commissary. I mean, the guy's in jail for life, it's not like he's living the life of Riley in the VIP room of a Monte Carlo casino.

It's also part of a growing trend to dehumanize prisoners, and to take away any shred of a reason to live for these people. Sooner or later, the same people who say "prisoners shouldn't be able to sell their art" will be saying "you know, prisoners shouldn't be allowed to watch TV or read books either. They committed horrible crimes, so they don't deserve to do anything enjoyable ever again." This mindset that prisons are supposed to be hellish only guarantees that these men and women will only become hardened sociopaths more than ever. No wonder recidivism rates are through the roof.

An organization called "Kentuckians Voice for Crime Victims" (do they have a website? I couldn't find one) has publicly decried the sales of Carneal's artwork and writings, even though Carneal is not actually directly receiving any cash from these transactions. The Courier-Journal devotes a disproportionate amount of a recent article to the opinions of some anti-prisoner-trade activist named Andy Kahan from Texas. According to the article, "Kahan estimates that about half of the criminals get some form of payment, but he argues it's just as wrong for third-party dealers to profit."

By this logic, no one would be allowed to write true-crime novels or even cover the news for profit.

Having said that, the websites offering Carneal's work - such as Ghouls Like Us, Serial Killers Ink, and Murder Auction - don't really seem like serious patrons of the arts. Rather, they seem like a bunch of unhealthy serial-killer fetishists who might need to be checked for Danes themselves.

(As a cigar enthusiast, though, I have to admit that my curiosity perked up just a tad when I learned that Ghouls Like Us is selling a cigar butt from another infamous Kentuckian, Charles Manson, and hyping it by saying "now you can say you've shared a cigar with Manson!")

Amish Funeral Today

Thursday night, an Amish horse-drawn carriage overturned into a flash-flooded stream and four children drowned in Dublin, KY.

The funeral is today, and it is expected that over 1000 Amish will be in attendance. Cassie Hammonds, proprietor of Shamrock's Restaurant in nearby Mayfield, is organizing a donation campaign to help the family defray the costs of the funeral and of hosting their extended family.

Donations of food or money can be sent to Shamrock's at:

6237 state Route 339 S.
Mayfield, KY
42066

Checks should be made out to Emanuel Wagler, who is the father of
three of the children and uncle of the other one.

Male Cheerleader Almost Ruins U of L Game

Today's UofL game versus Pittsburgh seemed like a done deal as the final seconds approached. The Cards' Kyle Kuric scored a three-point shot putting them 62-57. But as for what happened next, I'll let uoflsports.com explain:

That's when things got a little bizarre.

The clock didn't stop after the basket, which put the Cardinals up 62-57, and the horn sounded. Some Louisville cheerleaders on the baseline raced onto the floor, with one male cheerleader grabbing the ball and tossing it in the air.

Officials called Louisville for a delay of game technical foul and put .5 seconds back on the clock. Pitt's Ashton Gibbs knocked down two free throws and the Panthers had one last chance to tie, but Gibbs couldn't get off a desperation heave in time.

"All good things have to come to an end, and the male cheerleader (at Louisville) comes to an end," joked Louisville coach Rick Pitino. "Hopefully he'll learn the rules."

You can see it on YouTube here, but it happens so fast that some viewers are missing it. It's towards the very end of the clip - watch the goofball dressed all in white come walking onto the court and grab the ball, then flip it recklessly high in the air, not even caring where it might land.

The technical foul called because of cheer-dude's unexpected intervention meant that Pitt had a chance for two free-throws and control of the ball, giving them a narrow but real chance to turn it around.

The Facebook Car

Someone just loved that Facebook so much, they had their ride all tricked out in Facebook-adoring graphics. I can't imagine liking a website - any website - so much that I'd actually pay money to have it detailed to resemble it.

But hey, it's a free world, or so I like to pretend.

I found this gem on another website that I don't particularly care for - People of Walmart, a place where people surreptitiously take pictures of other people shopping, then post them to the web and make fun of their weight, their attire, their sexual preference, their social status, etc. (That's not to say I didn't chuckle hard at some of the stuff on there, but funny or not, I'd still love to see sites like this get shut down forever.)

But the case of the Facebookmobile doesn't end there: I also found another picture of it on Craziest Gadgets.

The People of Wal-Mart site, whose content is mostly user-submitted, lists this photo as having been taken in Kentucky. Has anyone else seen this thing out there on the road?

Corn Grave?

When I took these photos of a tipped-over gravestone in Henry County, I initially thought that what we're seeing here is a row of ears of corn, with a small corn plant sprouting in the foreground.

It still looks like that to me, but someone else suggested that this may actually be depicting a weeping willow tree, albeit an oddly-rendered one.

Opinions?

Statistics

I've been studying the blog stats that Blogspot so handily provides, and the data is rather interesting.

For starters, here's just a random sampling of some of the odd search-engine queries that brought people to this blog:

concrete pig

derby pie blah blah blah

miss tater day

ghost janitor kentucky

mothman kentucky

satan cave

blue people

passenger trains in the 1920's

branch davidians in kentucky

crypt bardstown

kfc secret location

kentucky nudist

festival of sacrifice lexington

unusual swimming pools

dog kidnaps baby

unusual mosque kentucky

hallowed by usage and consecrated by time

white castle wedding

tough guy in campbell county

I suppose by listing them here, I'm reinforcing their search-engine stick-icity by feeding them back into Google's crawlers for another go-round, aren't I?


According to the stats, 80% of my visitors are from the USA, which doesn't really surprise me given the focus of the blog. (By contrast, another blog of mine, Revelation Awaits an Appointed Time, gets almost as many European visitors as American, and also has a large readership in Middle Eastern countries.)

The vast majority of UnK readers are running IE and Windows, which also is no shocker - Firefox is a close second though.

Less than 1% visited UnK using iPhones, however, which I found a bit unexpected.


And in case you care, the ten most-clicked-on UnK articles of all time (well, since last summer anyway, when Blogger started keeping stats):

Blue People of Kentucky
Shirley Ardell Mason
Mothman Sighting in Russell
Carrie Nation
Stringbean's Hidden Treasure
Tom Cruise Climbs Burj Khalifa
The Erica Fraysure Case
Bobby Mackey's Music World
Reclining Figure on Grave
Miss Elizabeth

Now see, before I saw the stats I would have conjectured that surely Tombstone Junction, or one of my Bill Sparkman or Edward W. Edwards posts, would make the top ten most viewed.

But "Reclining Figure on Grave"? Really? Huh.

I suppose I should listen to what the market demands, and make my next novel "Stringbean and the Blue People Vs. Mothman".

Trees of Life

I don't give a fig for much modern TV programming now that LOST is off the air, but I do adore that History Channel show Life After People. They use a mix of CGI and real footage to demonstrate just how quickly all traces of our civilization would be absorbed back into nature and disappear, if all humans suddenly just up and vanished. (Hope springs eternal.)

I always enjoyed the weeds that start to take back parking lots when the blacktop starts to crack and decay, like behind the abandoned Showcase Cinemas at Bashford Manor. If left untouched for another 50-100 years, the vast expanse of concrete would once again be a wildlife area - the back-and-forth temperature extremes of scorching summers and ice-encased winters will gradually weaken anything, be it concrete, steel, what have you. And the gentle forces of vegetation pressing upwards against the pavement shouldn't be underestimated - like slow water torture, each Spring brings pressure from below. Sooner or later it all begins to add up until shoots of plants with a lust for life succeed in breaking on through to the other side.



Now here's an even better example of nature's indomitable drive to survive. I spotted this pair of strong-willed trees in Anchorage refusing to let a thick slab of poured concrete stop their advance. And upon closer inspection, I could see their roots extending like tentacles some feet away, going over, under, around, whatever it needed to in order to get the job done.


If I had but ten people in my employ with half the determination, life force, and joie de vivre of these trees, imagine what could be accomplished overnight.

The Johnson Family

And speaking of William Burroughs (which we were in the previous post), if you've read him (and I'm going to assume you have because that's just the kind of solipsist I am) then this grave in Louisville's Eastern Cemetery probably would make you do a double-take, too. (And maybe also if you're a Days of our Lives fan!)

Paul K's first band in Lexington, The Johnsons, were so named as an homage to Burroughs.