Clown Convention

I just found out that this very week, Louisville is hosting "Run For The Noses", the 2009 Convention for Clowns of America International.

Those of you who follow my artistic escapades know that I have a real love/hate obsession with Clowns. Mostly hate. In 2005 I had a one-man exhibition called Clowns in Love in New York City (with a special guest appearance by Kentucky's very own Grillo the Clown).

I've always felt that the guy in the film Killer Klowns From Outer Space was on to something when he theorized that our Clowns of today represent a distant vestigial memory of the frightening ancient alien civilizations that seeded our solar system in prehistory.

Nevertheless, your humble author is always willing to take one for the team, au service de la révolution, and I looked into the possibility of donning some clown white facepaint, making a balloon Cthulhu, and infiltrating the Clown Convention for this blog as an investigative reporter. Unfortunately, with a $185 registration fee, that would have been a pricey scheme.

Considering that all Clowns on Earth know each other and recognize each other immediately, I'd be outed in no time. And I don't know the secret Clown handshake, nor the Clown "password for the house". If captured by Clowns and grilled about my Clown credentials, I'd collapse under questioning faster than Peter Graves in Stalag 17.

But, if you're a braver soul than I and have $185 to blow, check it out and let me know what you learn. Some of the fascinating experiences you may expect:

Lectures from Bunky & Blinky, Priscilla Mooseburger, Salty the Clown, Buff Phoon, Peachey Keene and Judy "JuJuBee" Johnson.

Classes in "Face Painting for Fun and Profit", "Working with Shaped Balloons", "Losing Your Inhibitions through Improvisation", "Magic So Easy A Cave Clown Can Do It", and "Clowns in Church".

I keep thinking I'll run into some Clowns in town to party down, but so far I haven't spotted a one. I guess they're all sticking close to the convention's hotel. I'd give anything to be a fly on the wall at the bar late at night as these Clowns get schnockered and start talking Clown gossip.

"Prepare for Death"

An inscription from a gravestone in Jeffersontown Cemetery:

Weep not for me, oh kindred dear
I am not dead but sleeping here
My grave is silent as you see
Prepare for Death and follow me...

Kentucky Doctor Cloning Humans?

Who is Dr.Panayiotis Zavos?

Well, he's a Lexington doctor who runs something called the Zavos Organization, dedicated to cloning; President and CEO of Zavos Diagnostic Laboratories, Inc. which markets infertility products and technologies; Founder, Director and Chief Andrologist of the Andrology Institute of America; Founder and Director of Reprocell Technologies and The Home Fertility Network. And don't even get me started on the The BioTranz Chilled Semen Shipper.

As if all of this weren't dazzling/confusing enough, Dr. Zavos also operates The International Institute for Gender Selection, which hawks something called "Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD)", which, their site says, "is a medical procedure which allows embryos to be tested for gender-related genetic conditions, prior to being placed in the womb, giving the best opportunity to select the healthiest embryos and simultaneously choose the gender of your baby". And then there's the impenetrably named EZYIUI, and my personal favorite, Home Semen Analysis.

All of these websites, organizations, institutes, companies, corporations, and services emanate from 181 Southland Drive in Lexington, which turns out to be the offices of Dr. Zavos. Even The Andrology Institute of Pakistan is run out of this office!


Dr. Zavos (I keep starting to type "Dr. Zaius") put Kentucky in the news a few years back when he claimed he'd produced the world's first human cloned embryo intended for reproduction. But later, when pressed for proof, admitted that the procedure hadn't worked. Next he reported having produced hybrid half-cow-half-human cloned embryos. (As if humans aren't bovine enough already!)

Now Dr. Zavos is back, claiming to have finally successfully cloned human embryos from the DNA of a dead little girl. But instead of going through the traditional scientific channels, the good Doctor decided to take his case to the Discovery Channel instead, who have videotaped a special about his alleged Frankensteinian breakthroughs. Needless to say, this rather oddball move has elicited more jeers than cheers from interested parties.

Now, I won't go so far as others have and accuse this whole thing of being outright quackery. Zavos is apparently one imaginative and ambitious freethinker with a flair for razzle-dazzle and PR, and I can't fault him for his self-determinism. I won't even necessarily come out against human cloning, in principle. But as Will Smith once said, "This definitely rates about a 9.0 on my weird-shit-o-meter."


Meanwhile, the world will just have to sit and wait and see if the scientific establishment accepts these latest findings from The Island of Dr. Zavos. Peer-reviewed qualitative analysis of his work could take years, assuming anyone even bothers to try. But while we wait, we can visit more of his baffling websites like BioTranz Express, The Zavos Home Conception Pak™, sementests.com, The Middle East In Vitro Fertilization Clinic, Conceive At Home, Repromed International, Zbay, The Fertility Zone, Fertility Zoom, and, of course, Fert Mart.

Jesse James' Hallucination

The Talbott Tavern (right next door to the Jailer's Inn) in Bardstown is the oldest "stagecoach stop" tavern and hotel in the United States, built in 1779.

Although Jesse James’ ghost is claimed by some to walk these halls, I see no reason to believe that he should haunt a tavern just because he used to drink here. Ghostly activity predates his death, with numerous child ghosts said to be creeping around, plus the spirit of a waitress who committed suicide here by hanging herself.

By some accounts, Jesse James may have had a paranormal experience himself at the tavern: one night while sitting around drinking, he claimed that he saw the murals painted on the walls of an upstairs room coming to life, and shot the walls full of holes in his panic.

Then again, it may have just been the fact that he was three sheets to the wind. And maybe hallucinating on a bad batch of bourbon. Other accounts say he was merely shooting at a butterfly, either real or imagined.



The bullethole-riddled mural has always been a point of historical pride for the Tavern, but sadly was destroyed in a fire. It has been speculated that the fire was of supernatural origin as well.

The room was still in a charred shambles when I dropped in to take photos for the book, but they graciously allowed me to go in the locked room and snap a few shots of what was left.

The bullet holes don't all seem to follow the same trajectory, which I suppose could be explained if James ran all around the room when he did the shooting. I suppose.

Jailer's Inn

The Jailer's Inn, located at 111 W. Stephen Foster Avenue in Bardstown, is a bed and breakfast occupying the former Nelson County Jail building. Originally built in 1819, the building is still pretty much unchanged today, except that most of its rooms have been renovated into luxurious suites.

However, some cells have been left intact for historical display purposes, and one of the rooms available for rent still has a decidedly spartan cell-like quality to it (albeit done up with an Elvis/50s motif!)


The Jailer's Inn, like the Talbott Tavern next door (see page 194 in your copy of Weird Kentucky), is often reported as being haunted. The Travel Channel even named the Jailer's Inn on a list of the ten most haunted places in America, although I wouldn't go that far.

I haven't experienced anything creepy at Jailer's Inn myself, but certainly, it would make sense that it would be a potentially haunted place; after all, old jails would be a place of accumulated human misery and even death, just like old hospitals and asylums.

Of course, this isn't necessarily the kind of PR that every bed and breakfast wants, and so there's no mention of any hauntings on their promotional brochure. But they do take part in so-called "ghost hunter" events such as Patti Starr's "Ghost Hunting Get-a-way Weekend", which charges 500 bucks for a double-occupancy room, dinner and breakfast, a ghost-hunting seminar with Patti, and tours of Jailer's Inn and Talbott Tavern. If this sort of thing is your cup of tea, you can find more info here.

Tree Bursts From Crypt

Another find from the German Reformed Presbyterian Church Cemetery in Jeffersontown. That cemetery has some lovely Revolutionary War above-ground graves, such as the ones pictured in the bottom image below. One, however, has been completely destroyed by a tree that somehow managed to grow inside the crypt and eventually burst it apart.

"O Death, O Grave"

This uprooted gravestone laying on the ground at the German Reformed Presbyterian Church Cemetery has the inscription "O Death, O Grave". This inscription was completely buried under the soil for who knows how many years, but is now revealed to be viewed again.



It's apparently a quote from the poem Su ruhest du, o meine Ruh by Salomo Franck, circa 1711:

To me the darksome tomb
Is but a narrow room,
Where I may rest in peace from sorrow free;

Thy death shall give me power
To cry in that dark hour,
O Death, O Grave, where is your victory?

The grave can nought destroy,
Only the flesh can die,
And e'en the body triumphs o'er decay:

Clothed by Thy wondrous might
In robes of dazzling light,
This flesh shall burst the grave at that last Day.

German Reformed Presbyterian Church Cemetery

It had been awhile since I'd been by one of my favorite cemeteries, the German Reformed Presbyterian Church Cemetery (which apparently also somehow doubles as the Jeffersontown Lutheran Cemetery). This past weekend I dropped in and was surprised to find an enormous amount of damage to the graves.

This place has always been in some state of disrepair, but this is more extreme than the last time I was here.




The cemetery had previously undergone restoration in 1967, but I do believe it's time for another.

Kentucky: Saddest State?

A new scientific survey just released in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine breaks down by state the statistics on FMD (Frequent Mental Distress). This term applies to people who are generally sad, stressed, or depressed for 14 or more days of the month. And guess who came in first place as the saddest state by a long length?

Yep, you guessed it - our humble commonwealth.

(West Virginia is the second most depressed state, by the way, and Southern Indiana and Northern Arkansas are also excessively sad, in effect forming what TIME Magazine calls "The Gloom Belt".)

So what can we do to help make our fair state a happier place to be?

For starters, let's repeal the nutty new liquor tax. And then let's get rid of pollution and Oxycontin. Then let's eat more burgers and shakes and ice cream. And some beer cheese too.

Attend the Pikeville Hillbilly Days this weekend. And the 400 Mile Yard Sale. Visit the Red River Gorge. Eat more donuts. Play more miniature golf. Drink more moonshine or bourbon, preferably while doing all of the above. Or just go drinkin' at Selena's/Willow Lake Tavern.

And most importantly, support local theatre!

Berserk naked man shoots girlfriend, cop, neighbor, self

From Officer.com, who in turn got it from WLKY:

A domestic situation involving a nude man escalated into a shooting situation in south Louisville Wednesday morning.

The shooting happened in the 5200 block of Ronwood Drive. Among the wounded is LMPD Officer Andrea Rice.

According to Metro Police Chief Robert White, Rice was called to scene on a domestic disturbance call. When she arrived, she saw a nude man in driveway at the residence.

"He was approaching the officer and she was telling him to stay back, and as he approached her, she started to go around her car to put some distance between them, and he followed her around the car," said witness Larry Gaus. The suspect has been identified as Joseph Starcher, 24.

According to a police spokesperson, Starcher tried to wrestle Rice's gun away from her. Both the officer and Starcher were shot during the struggle.

Rice was shot twice in thigh. Starcher was wounded, as well.

According to Police Chief Robert White, Starcher got Rice's gun and shot his girlfriend and a neighbor.

When backup arrived, Starcher was shocked with a Taser. "They Tased him and contained him, and all four were transported to the hospital," White said.

And from WAVE-TV Channel 3:

"It was like a horror movie," said Larry Gaus, who was on his way to work when everything unfolded. "As I'm driving down the road, I seen a police car and a naked man come out from around the corner."

According to LMPD, Officer Andrea Rice, a 15-year veteran of the force, was sent to 5205 Ronwood Drive on a domestic call. LMPD Chief Robert White describes what happened next.

"And she noticed a female outside that appeared she had been assaulted. And moments later, the suspect came running out of the house toward the officer," said White.

Gaus said the man "just took off straight toward her (Rice). She was giving orders to stay back."

White says that Rice tried to use her taser on the naked man, but that didn't work. That is when she pulled out her firearm. "She felt threatened, pulled out her gun, fired it which apparently didn't work either.

White said the naked man finally caught up with Rice and they began to struggle over her weapon. "He eventually retrieved the gun. He fired several shots striking her twice and two other individuals were also struck."

"Patrick Amsterdam"

Jeffrey Scott Holland (your humble author)'s short play Patrick Amsterdam makes its world premiere at the Finnigan’s Festival at The Rudyard Kipling in the glorious Old Louisville district!

Patrick Amsterdam concerns an increasingly washed-up lounge singer and his downward spiral. George Robert Bailey stars as Patrick, Todd Ziegler plays his hippie sidekick and Sarah East plays the card girl.

The dates are: April 16, 17, 18, 23, 24 & 25, at 7:30pm.

Meanwhile, you can help support JSH's Catclaw Theatre Company by making a Paypal donation to catclawtheatre@gmail.com or clicking here. Help us bring weird theatre to the masses!

Kentucky soldier's remains found in Korea after 59 years

In 1949, 17-year-old Beattyville resident Lloyd Stidham joined the Army, lying about his age and telling them he was 19 in order to qualify.

On November 27, 1950, he was reported missing in action in Korea, two days after being captured by the Chinese. He was never seen or heard from again.

But half a century later, in 2000, a joint team of Americans and North Koreans led an investigation to a place overlooking the Kuryong River in P'yongan-Pukto Province where U.S. soldiers were long believed to be buried. The area was excavated, and sure enough, human remains were found.

American scientists from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used dental work, circumstantial evidence, and DNA analysis to identify as many of the soldiers as possible. The work took several years, but earlier this month, the Department of Defense finally announced that the remains of Lloyd Stidham and three other soldiers had been conclusively identified.

On April 13 Lloyd Stidham will be interred at Camp Nelson National Cemetery in Nicholasville.