Fireball in the Sky

Last night I was sitting on my front porch gazing at the sky just in time to see a huge fireball blazing down into the distance and disappearing. I was pleased to have seen such an especially large and close meteor, but thought nothing more about it until this morning.

Then this came to my attention. The skies in northern Illinois lit up last night when a meteor apparently created a strange and enormous ball of fire that flashed for but a second.

See a time-lapse gif of the event here. The lines in the sky are apparently unrelated jet trails.

NBC says the fireball was reported seen from faraway points such as Milwaukee and St. Louis around 10pm last night. I saw no explosive fireball, but I did see the mother of all meteors at right about that time, so I have to wonder if there was more than one, and if what I saw wasn't the same one seen in Illinois. It has also been suggested the phenomena could be space junk re-entering the Earth's atmosphere rather than a meteor.

See video of the fireball over Wisconsin here. This is very similar to what I saw here in Louisville, but I saw no explosion-like flash.

Anyone else see this thing?

Li'l Abner Restaurant?

From the JSH mailbag:

Can you do a blog asking people where Lil Abners was located in Louisville?

Thanks.

This is probably a job for the Filson Club, or for a mission to the library to consult old city directories, but let's see if anyone out there pipes up on this. Who remembers the Li'l Abner's Restaurant in Louisville?

"Head Transplant a Success"

I saw a Louisville Courier-Journal headline reading "Head Transplant A Success" on Mojo's local news RSS feed. Excited, I clicked through to find it was a deceptive bit of humor on someone's part - the story's actually about a marble statue in Clarksville, TN whose damaged head got a replacement. Hmph.

I noticed a commenter on the story, who was also duped and disappointed, had expressed hope that the story was going to be about "science fiction come alive." But in fact, there's nothing sci-fi about head transplants - we have the technology right now to perform them, and we have for many years. The only reason scientists haven't done it (at least publicly) is because of ethical issues.

In 1908, Charles Guthrie succeeded in creating the world's first man-made two-headed dog. He grafted a dog's head onto the side of another dog's neck, with the arteries grafted together in such a way that the blood of the host dog flowed through the second head and then back into the original dog's neck. From there, it then proceeded to the brain and back into circulatory system. A photograph of it can be seen in Guthrie's book Blood Vessel Surgery and Its Applications.


In the 1940s, a short documentary called Experiments in the Revival of Organisms told of Sergey Bryukhonenko's research in keeping decapitated heads alive. Although many suspect today that the film was a staged re-enactment of Bryukhonenko's work rather than actual footage, the scientific proof of his work is well documented, and resulted in a Lenin Prize.

In the 1950s Soviet researcher Vladimir Demikhov transplanted twenty puppy heads. Additionally, the respiratory and partial digestive systems were brought along with the heads as well, with the esophagus expelling waste off the side of the dog. Because this exposed cavity left the dogs susceptible to infection, they didn't live long. The most successful one lasted 29 days.


In 1963, Dr. Robert J. White in Cleveland, Ohio successfully did a head transplant between monkeys. The animal was able to smell, taste, hear, and see. The nerves were left entirely intact, and connecting the brain to a blood supply kept it chemically alive. He repeated these experiments with even greater success in the 1970s and then again in 2001.

It's long been rumored that Walt Disney's severed head is kept in a cryogenically frozen container in some secret location, awaiting the day that he can be brought back to life. Unfortunately, cryonics was a new pursuit in those days, and virtually all cryonics labs froze their heads and bodies improperly. Too much time elapsed between the death and the freezing, the freezing process itself was too slow and gradual when it should be as instantaneous as possible, and the temperature should be far colder than what 1970s-era cryonics labs maintained in their freezers.


With cutting-edge advances in stem cell research, nanotechnology, and other innovations, there's no doubt we could be doing human head transplants today if we really, really, really wanted to - but the idea is still too horrifically Frankensteinish for most to even contemplate.

A Singles Guide to Thunder Over Louisville

So, after the mass-exodus housecleaning of writers that took place at Louisville Mojo recently, I thought I was out. But like Al Pacino, they keep pulling me back in. The newsy content and general free-for-all blogging is gone, and now they're back to strictly being a social network, dating service, hookup haven, meat market, however you wanna phrase it. But they retained the JSH 'cause they recognize the skills. Or something like that. I dunno. Maybe. I guess.

But now the powers that be would prefer that I write with a more honed focus on nightlife and dating and romance, instead of my usual rants about the Easter Bunny and Gene Simmons and Big Love and the mysterious giant radioactive Space Ribbon at the edge of the Solar System. Alrighty then. Can do.

And so it is that I offer my humble suggestions for Louisville Mojo's readership regarding that "Thunder Over Louisville" thing. Read that here.

The Little Colonel

All but forgotten now except to historians, classic film buffs, and a few other people in the know, is the Victorian-age meme of the "Little Colonel".

There's a theatre company in Pewee Valley (just outside Louisville) called the Little Colonel Players; perhaps you've seen their logo with an odd little character in a Napoleonic hat. But from whence did this concept originate?

Annie Fellows Johnston wrote a series of novels dealing with the aristocracy in a small southern town. These were semi-biographical and based on actual local people and places. The stories were set in Lloydsborough Valley, which was actually a fictionalized version of Pewee Valley. Johnston, originally from Indiana, eventually made Pewee Valley her home, and she died there in 1931.


Among the books in the "Little Colonel" series: The Little Colonel in Arizona, The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor, The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation, The Little Colonel's Hero, The Little Colonel's House Party, The Little Colonel's Holiday, The Little Colonel at Boarding School, Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding, and The Little Colonel's Chum, Mary Ware. (From that last one, she spun off a popular series of "Mary Ware" books.) Other books in her decidedly dated oeuvre include Miss Santa Clause of the Pullman, The Rescue of the Princess Winsome, Georgina of the Rainbows, It was the Road to Jericho, Mildred's Inheritance, and Ole Mammy's Torment.

In 1935 a film adaptation was made, starring Shirley Temple and Lionel Barrymore. And after that, Johnston and her beloved characters seemed to vanish down the memory hole. Lists of popular Kentucky authors - even specifically lists of ones from the Victorian age - often omit Johnston and her "Little Colonel" books.


In the stories, the Little Colonel (a young girl), draws inspiration from "The Old Colonel" (a Southern Gentleman who had lost his arm in the Civil War):

"Along this street one summer morning, nearly thirty years ago, came stepping an old Confederate Colonel. Every one greeted him deferentially. He was always pointed out to new comers. Some people called attention to him because he had given his right arm to the lost cause, some because they thought he resembled Napoleon, and others because they had some amusing tale to tell of his eccentricities. He was always clad in white duck in the summer, and was wrapped in a picturesque military cape in the winter."

The Old Colonel was a thinly-veiled dramatization of one George Washington Weissinger, Jr., a well-known lawyer in Louisville and Middletown. He's buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, but visiting his grave is tricky. According to littlecolonel.com:

Cave Hill Cemetery (the most prestigious burial ground in the region) has records that the Old Colonel was buried on February 25, 1903, his wife two months later. A plot map shows the exact location of the graves. But there are no tombstones or grave markers. Why? We don't know. We also can find nothing about the death of Amelia Pearce Weissinger (born Amelia Neville Pearce), his wife, just before her interment beside him on April 30, 1903.

And David Domine, in his great book Haunts of Old Louisville, reports sightings of an elderly one-armed ghost in a Civil War uniform, fitting the Old Colonel's description perfectly.

The Kentucky Virus

This was just emailed to me and I got a chuckle:

You have just received the "Kentucky Virus"!

As we ain't got no programming experience, this here virus works on the honor system. Please delete all the files from your hard drive and manually forward this virus to ever'body in your address book.

Thanky fer your cooperation,

University of Kentucky
Computer Engineering Dept.

I am admittedly inconsistent in my reactions to the "hillbilly" stereotype - some I oppose, others I endorse. As a hillbilly myself, such idiosyncracies are my birthright, I reckon.

Asleep Twelve Years

The November 2, 1906 issue of the New York Times features a story about an Adair County man who entered a "Rip Van Winkle nap", sleeping for 12 years and still continuing to slumber at the time of the article's appearance. Herchall Grider, 63, was apparently not in a coma but somewhere between a minimally conscious state and a persistent vegetative state, since he was able to be unconsciously fed by his family without choking.


The only other appearance of this story I could find was in the Breckenridge News, Cloverport, KY, Wednesday, November 7, 1906 - oddly, trailing after the New York reporting of it by almost a week. Both stories are similarly worded enough to conclude that one was simply a rewrite of the other - or perhaps both are reworded relayings of a third report elsewhere.

Death Penalty Sought For Nunn

We've been following the strange case of Steve Nunn ever since the murder of his former fiancee, Amanda Ross. A manhunt for Nunn ensued after her body was found, and police tracked him down in a Hart County cemetery where his mother and father (former Gov. Louie B. Nunn) are buried. Reportedly, Nunn fired a pistol into the air when officers arrived, and was discovered to be bleeding profusely - he had slit his own wrists in an attempted suicide.

Fayette County Commonwealth's Attorney Ray Larson says his office has "filed a notice of aggravating circumstance and notice of intent to seek the death penalty in the Nunn case."

The Periodic Table of Comic Books

So why on Earth does the University of Kentucky host something called "The Periodic Table of Comic Books", which seeks to collect and log all instances in which comic books make mention of the elements? Well, hey, why not?


As one might surmise, the collection is weighted heavily towards DC's Metal Men, but the other entries range as far afield as 1941's Neon the Unknown to 2001's Star Trek: Divided We Fall.

Small Plane Crashes in Louisville Fairgrounds

A small single-engine plane crashed tonight at the Kentucky Exposition Center, on Ring Road near Preston Highway and I-65. From the clearly visible FAA Aircraft Registration number on the plane, we can trace the plane to a Allen Harvey Friedlander. The man in the plane, who had be cut out of the cockpit, is expected to survive. No word yet on what went wrong.

Richmond Cemetery Vandalized

The growing trend of cemetery vandalism rears its ugly head once again - this time in one of my very favorite graveyards.

From WLKY:

RICHMOND, Ky. -- The groundskeeper at a central Kentucky cemetery says more than 100 gravestones have been toppled and broken, and some are irreplaceable.

Mike Rice, director of grounds for the Richmond Cemetery, tells the Lexington Herald Leader the overturned stones were discovered Saturday morning.

Rice says the stones date from as recently as last year to back to the 1800s.

Rice was gathering names from the stones Monday in the hope of contacting descendants that might be in the area. He said he couldn’t give an estimate of the damage.

It just goes to show, despite the unusually strict rules for visiting the cemetery, it doesn't mean a thing if you don't have proper security to enforce them.

I'm not going to be able to make it to Madison County this week, but if anyone out there gets a chance to swing by Richmond Cemetery and take some photos, I'd really like to see just how bad the damage is, and which of the historic stones were destroyed. E-mail me.

Happy Easter!

Happy Egg Day from all of us over here at Creeps Headquarters! I've got an article about the Pagan origins of the Easter Bunny up today on my Louisville Mojo column, and Krampus the Cat covets my Easter Basket over on his blog. I'd like to thank the Easter Bunny for watching over us all and blessing us with chocolate effigies of himself which we ceremonially bite the heads off of. I'm also thankful that I no longer do the Project Egg thing every Easter, and thankful that Louisiana's Moist Doorknob Comics (the world's most primitive comic book company) have reportedly finally printed the 4-page RV&OI Easter Comic I did for them several years ago.