An Archaeologic Assay of Human Artifacts Deposited Alongside Roads, Vol. 1

On Lakeland Road in Anchorage, there's this deep gulch running alongside the E.P. Sawyer Park. The park, as my regular readers are probably tired of hearing about, used to be the grounds of the Central State Insane Asylum and is so haunted, they say you have to scrape the ectoplasm off your shoes when you get back to your car. (I exaggerate only slightly.)

Lakeland Road, incidentally, used to be a railroad track that shuttled directly to the asylum. If you look closely at some points you can still see evidence of the tracks before they paved it over and turned it into a road. And human beings, filthy creatures that they are, have been tossing crap out their car windows along that road ever since.

Today while in the park searching for the exact spot where the asylum's water tower had stood (more about that tomorrow), I happened up the embankment where the park's fenceline meets the aforementioned roadside gulch. It has acted as a catch-net for much of the debris that has been accruing there for decades, and while my left brain was appalled that no one has cleaned that area up for so long, my right brain was fascinated by inspecting what humanity had sloughed off.

Without even doing any digging or disturbing the site at all, I could visually identify corroding beer and soda cans from the 1970s with pull-tabs rather the modern stay-tabs. (Stay-tabs were introduced in 1975 and had become the industry standard in the United States by that decade's end.) Most of the outer layers of garbage were recognizably between the 1980s and the present. And if you think that's not very old, let me remind you that 1991 was two decades ago.

I spotted evidence of much older strata of trash peeking out here and there, however - large murky green and brown bottles, and a fragment of very old floor linoleum (seen in images #16 and #17). A little digging with a shovel would likely yield some more serious finds.



I found a liquor bottle still partially filled with what I presume is vodka or gin because it's clear and the lid is tightly sealed (see image #5). Then again, I also found a pop bottle full of a liquid bearing that unmistakable color of urine (see image #3). Such are the hazards of my profession.

What am I seeing in image #14? Is it a child's sweater? A hat? Definitely some sort of abandoned clothing. It appears to have a face on it. I didn't even really notice it until after I got home and looked at the pictures closely.

While the junk seen here isn't as immediately compelling as, say, the old dumpsite in Elliott County I chanced upon a few years ago, I betcha there's all kinds of groovy goodies lurking under the surface. Avid fan of urban archaelogy that I am, you can be sure this gulch hasn't seen the last of me.

An American Chestnut in Adair

The American Chestnut, or Castanea dentata, once ruled the Appalachians with a range extending from Maine to Mississippi. They were extremely important to wildlife, providing much of the fall mast for species such as White-tailed Deer, Black Bears, Wild Turkey and, before it went extinct, the Passenger Pigeon. And now the American Chestnut is close to extinction itself.

Sometime in the late 19th century, the chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) was accidentally introduced into our country by imported chestnut trees or cheap imported Chinese lumber. The Chinese and Japanese species of Chestnut are resistant to the blight, but America's had no natural resistance to it. The disease was first reported on trees in the Bronx Zoo in 1904, and by 1940 almost all adult American Chestnut trees in America had been wiped out.

There are still many small young trees, shoots and saplings out there, but they rarely get a chance to mature. Interestingly, the root systems of the former Chestnut trees are still there under the soil and they're still trying to produce new shoots, but sooner or later the blight gets the new trees before they can get very big. A few actually manage to get several feet tall before succumbing, but that's nothing compared to the 150-foot height of a healthy and mature specimen.

It has been estimated that before the blight, the total number of American Chestnut trees in eastern North America was over three billion. And today, the number of them over 60 centimeters in diameter within the tree's former range is estimated to be fewer than one hundred.


And so it was an event of considerable importance when in 1999, an 80-year-old, 50-foot American Chestnut was discovered in Adair County, Kentucky.

How did it survive when so many others did not? No one's really sure. But it, along with other survivors that have turned up in Ohio, Tennesseee, Georgia and Alabama, is providing researchers with hope that all is not lost for the American Chestnut. The American Chestnut Foundation is working to turn back the clock on this endangered tree, and I encourage you to get involved with their Kentucky chapter.

Mine 18

McCreary County's Mine 18 was operated by the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company from 1937 to 1962, in the now-defunct town of Blue Heron. The community originally stood on the banks of the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River.

For many years, Blue Heron remained a "ghost town" as its few remaining buildings quickly fell into disrepair and collapsed. But in the 1980s, a strange project to rebuild Blue Heron as closely as possible was enacted, and now visitors can travel to what amounts to an enormous full-scale museum replica of a Kentucky coal town as it looked during its heyday. Most of the buildings are only empty shells meant to be viewed from the exterior, and are referred to on the National Park Service website as "ghost buildings".

Unfortunately, you can't go exploring deep into the mines, which to me would be a lot more interesting than seeing a fake coal tipple. Someone should open some sort of underground resort in a Kentucky mine; if not this one, then perhaps the abandoned mines in Boonesboro.


You can see photos of Blue Heron the way it was back in the day by clicking here, and also note the photo gallery of the nearby town of No Business, KY with plenty of nice abandoned buildings.

BBC Exec Based in Midway

There's been quite a flap going on in the British media about a migration that the BBC is undergoing - I haven't sorted out all the details, but the long and short of it is this: the BBC headquarters is being uprooted from its home in London to a place 200 miles away called Salford. The controversial project is going to cost a fortune, and many lifelong BBC employees are furious at being forced to move to another city.

The man in charge of this mass migration to Salford is Guy Bradshaw, whose consulting company Equals Consulting is behind the recommendation to move the BBC, as well as responsible for its implementation.

Now here's the interesting part: Mr. Bradshaw lives in Kentucky.

Historic old Midway, to be exact. According to an article in the Daily Mail, Guy and his wife (who is American) and daughter used to live in Kent before selling their house last year and moving to Kentucky.

For some reason, the British newspapers are up in arms at the revelation that Mr. Bradshaw's home so far away from London, and are trying to spin this into somehow rendering the entire move to Salford suspect. While the idea of packing up the BBC lock-stock-and-barrel and lugging it 200 miles away may indeed be a really stupid idea, I don't see the relevance of Mr. Bradshaw's living arrangements. If anything, his willingness to commute back and forth from Woodford County, Kentucky to Europe shows that he's not asking the BBC staffers to do something he isn't willing to do as well. They're complaining about being moved 200 miles from their families? Well, Bradshaw works 4000 miles from his!

I don't claim to have studied this matter in depth or to have but a smattering of the facts, but at a glance it seems to me that with looming budgetary disaster on the horizon for the BBC, something drastic has to be done. Is moving to Salford the answer? I don't know. But things are so bad that there's even rumblings of BBC3 and BBC4 being abolished, and in December BBC Chairman Sir Michael Lyons refused to deny those rumors. Now that's scary to me. If this man in Kentucky can promise that the move to Salford will keep 3 and 4 alive, I'm behind him six hundred percent.

(On the other hand, I hope Equals Consulting is better at real-world logistical planning than at internet self-promotion: their website is simply horrid, written in an inhumanly dense style that quite literally is nothing more than a mile-long string of random empty SEO keywords and phrases!)

Edison's Medicine

Today is Thomas Edison's 164th birthday. I just saw him the other day and he doesn't look a day over 125.

As happens every year, the mainstream media spends the day giving a quickie overview of Edison's alleged accomplishments. This year I think it's time I played Devil's Advocate and present a differing view of history.

To be sure, Edison was a great man in his own twisted way and did achieve many things in his lifetime. But he owes many of his achievements to the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla invented the alternating current system of electricity that has become such a benchmark standard in America, people forget there could be any other kind.

But in 1882, it was not so. All our nation's electricity came from Edison's direct current system, and when Tesla popped up with the safer and superior alternating current, Edison - eager to protect his own interests - used every smear tactic at his disposal to generate negative PR for it. Edison paid local children to catch stray dogs and bring them to him (many people's pets were no doubt seized by these overeager kids). In showy circus-like press conferences and demonstrations, he would electrocute these poor dogs before everyone's eyes to "prove" the dangers of alternating current.

(In so doing, Edison stole credit for yet another invention: the electric chair. For his anti-Tesla dog-killing shows, he enlisted two of his employees - Harold P. Brown and Arthur Kennelly - to come up with the apparatus that would electrocute the puppies. Because Brown and Kennelly worked for Edison, and because Edison promoted the device as his own, the development of the electric chair still continues to be falsely credited to Edison in some publications to this day.)

Not satisfied with the pet executions, Edison upped the ante. On January 4, 1903, he arranged a public spectacle in which Topsy, an elephant from the Forepaugh Circus at Coney Island's Luna Park, was electrocuted by Edison's lackies to demonstrate that Tesla's AC was so dangerous, it could kill an elephant. What the crowd of gawkers didn't know was that Edison had already arranged that Topsy be fed carrots laced with potassium cyanide, to ensure that she wouldn't live.

He made a film of the event, and showed it around the nation as part of his scare campaign against Tesla's AC.

Edison was not a terribly bright man when it came to science, and he could not even begin to wrap his head around how Tesla's mysterious alternating current worked. Says Wikipedia: "Edison was a brute-force experimenter, but was no mathematician. AC cannot be properly understood or exploited without a substantial understanding of mathematics and mathematical physics, which Tesla possessed."

Tesla had originally been working for Edison, but gradually came to realize that Edison was stealing his ideas and patenting them. The final straw was when Edison promised Tesla $50,000 if he could work the bugs out of Edison's inefficient dynamo. After a year of hard work, Tesla succeeded in improving the dynamo. When Tesla humbly showed up at Edison's office to inquire when he would receive his fifty grand, Edison reportedly shrugged and said: "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor".


Tesla and many other inventors had already invented the light bulb, or light bulb-like creations, long before Edison claimed credit for it and unveiled his own version in Kentucky at the Southern Exposition of 1883. If we regard the definition of a light bulb as "a vacuum tube that lights up", then consider the Geissler Tube, the Crookes Tube, and the works of Hiram Maxim.

It's generally accepted now that Joseph Wilson Swan is the actual inventor of Edison's bulb. Wikipedia again: "In America, Edison had been working on copies of the original light bulb patented by Swan, trying to make them more efficient. Though Swan had beaten him to this goal, Edison obtained patents in America for a fairly direct copy of the Swan light, and started an advertising campaign which claimed that he was the real inventor. Swan, who was less interested in making money from the invention, agreed that Edison could sell the lights in America while he retained the rights in Britain."

But really, it all goes back to Sir Humphrey Davy, who invented the first incandescent light in 1802, by passing direct electrical current through a thin strip of platinum. In 1809, Davy also created the first arc lamp by making a electrical connection between two carbon charcoal rods connected to a 2000-cell battery. But by the time American citizens flocked to Kentucky in 1883 to witness the unveiling of Edison's electric lights, history was ready to forget or ignore all who had come before.


Interestingly, years before the Expo, Edison had actually lived in Louisville circa 1866-1867. It's said he lived in a shotgun duplex on East Washington Street in what is now Butchertown. Today the Thomas Edison House operates in Butchertown as a museum and tribute to the man. However, it should be noted that there's actually no hard evidence that this house is the exact one that Mr. Edison lived in, even though the historical marker sign out front definitively states it as being so.

The Spontaneous Revivals of Asbury

Asbury College, located just south of Lexington in Wilmore, KY, was founded in 1890 as Kentucky Holiness College. Its founder, the Methodist evangelist John Wesley Hughes, said that God had directly instructed him to open a college where students and faculty were "always endeavoring to tear down the works of the Devil and to build up the Kingdom of God". (Years later though, in 1905, he was ousted from his own board of directors for unknown reasons.)

Asbury is famous for the "Spontaneous Revival of 1950" and the "Spontaneous Revival of 1970". According to Asbury's website, "In February 1950 a student testimony led to confessions, victories, and more testimonies. This went on uninterrupted for 118 hours and became the second leading news story nationwide; it is estimated that 50,000 people found a new experience in Christ as a result of this revival and witness teams that went out from it." And of the 1970 incident: "In February 1970 student confession and testimonies led to 144 hours of unbroken revival; some 2,000 witness teams went out from Wilmore to churches and at least 130 college campuses around the nation."

But actually, Asbury has had a long history of these "spontaneous" revivals, usually taking place in the month of February for some reason, and dating all the way back to 1905. From Asbury's website again:

In February 1905, during a blizzard, a prayer meeting in the men's dormitory spilled out to the rest of campus and the town of Wilmore.

In February 1908, revival broke out while someone prayed in chapel; the revival lasted two weeks and was signified by prevailing prayer and intercession.

In February 1921 the last service of a planned revival lasted until 6 am, and services were extended for three days.

Apparently the zeal around the school has fallen a bit lackluster in these space-age secular times. There have been only two "spontaneous revivals" at Asbury since 1970 - one in 1992 and one in 2006 that is described rather sketchily as "four days of continuous prayer and praise". I note this not to mock anyone, but to hopefully instill them to greater heights of religious fervor this February, and to urge them towards disseminating their beliefs on a grander scale as was done by their esteemed alumni in 1950 and 1970.

(On the other hand, in an anonymous Forerunner article credited to "Editorial Staff", the idea is proposed that the great Spontaneous Revival of 1950 never actually ended, and that we are still in the midst of its reverberations even today. An interesting and beautiful idea, but marred somewhat by its association with The Forerunner, known for hateful and tinfoil-hatted articles like "Islam and Mormonism: Kissin' Cousins". They also claim to know the true identity of the Beast of Revelation, but you have to buy their DVD to find it out.)

Also located in Wilmore is the Asbury Theological Seminary, which was originally part of Asbury College but has been a separate institution since 1931. This is an interdenominational graduate school of theology, whose graduates now serve in more than 80 denominations in over 57 countries around the world.

Both the College and the Seminary are named for Bishop Francis Asbury of the Methodist Episcopal Church (as is Asbury Park, NJ, made famous by Bruce Springsteen).

Louisville's War on Nudity

Do I have my finger on the pulse of the timespace continuum or what? Just days after waggishly dissecting Kentucky's ludicrous anti-nudism statutes, the Louisville Metro Police have made a formal announcement of their intention to crack down on strip clubs, by invoking the city's nudity ordinance.

According to WAVE-TV:

For years, it has been the subject of a court battle. But starting Feb. 8, Metro officials say its inspectors will begin monitoring Louisville strip clubs to make sure nude dancing is a thing of the past.

The city ordinance will stop all nude dancing, eventually cut out alcohol sales and force employees to pay licensing fees. Touching and direct tipping of dancers is out, no lap dances and there's a 6 foot distance that must be between dancers and patrons.

Okay, so the powers-that-be don't like strip clubs. That's fine. I understand these twinks, bears, chickenhawks, and nellies are grossed out by naked women, and obviously, we have to like what they like. And if we have a problem with that, we can always leave, right? I mean, it is their city, after all, not ours, right?

So pray tell, what about nudity in theatrical productions? Riddle me that, Batman. Nudity in the theatre has been a long-honored tradition, hallowed by usage and consecrated by time, right here in Louisville. There was peek-a-boo nudity and see-through costume nudity in my play Toulouse-inations which was staged at the Kentucky Center for the Arts, and it is my intent to have full nudity in my upcoming play Son of Grimaldi. (I also wanted some near-nudity in my play Patrick Amsterdam, but the lovely and talented Sarah East ultimately chickened out on wearing a red thong microbikini as called for by the script.)

I guess my Jefferson County Confidential nude art exhibition a few years ago, which was also a clothing-optional event for guests as well as the art itself, would also be frowned upon in the new regime. The majority of my nude photo work is shown in art galleries in Europe, where people are less squeamish and less superstitious in general. (I'm always seeking models - anyone interested, contact me at jshpaint@gmail.com for more information. Both males and females are welcome, and your age, weight, appearance and body type are absolutely not an issue.)

So, Louisville, maybe this is the night I called it a day. Maybe it's time I gotta travel on, like the old Bill Monroe song says. Between the corrupt cops, the idiotic arena, the smoking ban, and now this, I'm running out of reasons to defend Louisville from its detractors and naysayers. I really am.

I hear Interzone's nice this time of year.

Air Devils Inn

It's not often you encounter a saloon with such old-school cool as Air Devils Inn. Even now in the 21st century, they are a strictly cash-only business. I worship them for that luddite stance every bit as much as I appreciate that they keep the joint dark as a coal mine. I'm a great fan of dark bars.

Their neon sign is awesome-O, and by night even more so. (Some say it's the oldest neon sign in Jefferson County, though I'm not quite ready to bet the farm on that factoid.) Their name derives from its proximity to Bowman Field, and harkens back to the truly good old days when pilots where pioneers; when aviation’s most distinguished hell-raisers, dizzy from their aerial antics, would march directly to the pub to hoist a few beers and sober up.

They were one of the first and most ferocious resisters to Louisville's ridiculous smoking ban, and one of the last to wave the tattered flag of freedom of choice to the very end when everyone else had considered the battle lost.


Strange as may seem, there are many - inside city Government and outside of it - who would dearly love to see Air Devils Inn cease to operate. Why? I honestly am not sure. Chalk it up as proof that true evil does indeed exist in this world.

Friend, I advise you to go and make your pilgrimmage to Air Devils Inn now while you still can, before it's just another entry in the hallowed hall of great Kentucky landmarks that got torn down for the sake of someone else's sinister and short-sighted agenda.

J.T. Dockery's Spud Crazy

Jackson County's very own J.T. Dockery will unveil his new Spud Crazy graphic novel (based on a story by Nick Tosches) tonight at Lexington's Institute 193!

From Institute 193's blog:

J.T. Dockery is one of those rare artists that seems to exist both within the work he creates and alongside the rest of us in the “real world.” Women, booze, cigarettes, and shady characters spill onto the page and seep back into real life–drawn, stacked and stashed into portfolios or passed on the street. No one is safe.

Spud Crazy, originally published as a script in The Nick Tosches Reader, has been re-imagined by Dockery as an excerpted graphic novel. Wielding his penchant for fragmented plots, bizarre themes and mash-ups, Dockery has composed, directed and illustrated Tosches’ original script into a visual film complete with soundtrack and frame-by-frame action. The resulting package is some new hybridized publication: part comic book, part musical score, part academic essay, part artist-edition and all SPUD.

The exhibition runs from 6pm to 9pm and will feature a live performance by the Spud Imperials.

Harlan County Haunts

You may have seen Harlan County Haunts and More Harlan County Haunts by local writer Darla Jackson in stores. And if you haven't, ask. Jackson, a lifelong Native of Harlan County, has compiled two fine collections, each containing over a hundred individual reports of ghosts, monsters, angels and other paranormal and mysterious phenomena.

Her books can be purchased at Jewelcraft, Harlan A.R.H. in Harlan, KY, Kilgore's in Evarts, KY, Brookhaven in London, KY and Cumberland Falls State Park Gift Shop in Whitley County, KY. And, of course, at the usual places like Amazon, and also Jackson's Lulu store.


Jackson is currently working on Mountain Murders, a collection of cold case files from Harlan County.

According to the Kentucky Arts Council:

As a dancer, Darla is an experienced Appalachian clog dancer and has visited schools as a performer, dance instructor and coach for teachers eager to learn Appalachian culture. Growing up in the mountains of Harlan County, she was exposed to different styles of Appalachian dance and music. Clogging is her passion. Darla is a Cherokee Indian and is enrolled in a state recognized Native American tribe.

Fortune Telling!

Whilst wading through the manure that is Kentucky's Revised Statutes yesterday in assembling my post on Kentucky's Nudist Society Act, I also happened across good ol' KRS 231.110.

It deals with "Places of Entertainment", and what is forbidden in them. And in typical KRS fashion, it's frightfully vague and disturbingly arbitrary.


Did you know you can't have "drunken" persons in a place of entertainment? I guess that makes every nightclub in Kentucky against the law.

Did you know you cannot have any unmarried man or woman occupy a secreted place together out of view of the public? What year is this, anyway? Sounds more like Saudi Arabia than America to me.

Also says here that persons with a "lascivious reputation" are not allowed to congregate in places of entertainment.

Wait, that can't be right. Can it? Let me just look at that again... hmmmm. Yep, that's what it says.

So, uh, what is the governing body responsible for determining one's "reputation"? Or is it just left to the individual determination of fine morally upstanding law enforcement officers? You know, like Chris Dison.

I know, I know - they always say "oh, those laws aren't really enforced, even though they're still on the books." Yeah. Not enforced much. Except maybe when they need to be, selectively, by serious detectives seeking justice. You know, like Crystal Marlowe.

But most peculiar of all to me is that the statute spends more time being concerned about fortune telling than anything else. Maybe it was a bigger deal in 1978 (when this statute was passed) than it is today, I dunno. Says here an establishment must go through the rigamarole of obtaining authorization to tell fortunes from the county clerk. (Why does an expert in Tarot need to pass muster with some bureaucrat? Is any county clerk knowledgeable about the necromantic arts? Does he/she possess some sort of innate ability to instantly sense the fakes from the "genuine" fortune tellers?)

It further goes on to decree that even after an establishment jumps through all those hoops (and that doesn't even take into consideration each city's own peculiar laws and regulations), it must post in a conspicuous place a schedule showing a detailed breakdown of fees.

It's enough to make a fortune teller not wanna tell fortunes. Or at least go underground. Or at least repaint the sign out front to read "Life Coaching" instead.


I wonder if these statutes ever caused any trouble for Madame Zelda at Squirrely's Magic Tea Room? No wonder she's never there when I drop in.

Oh, how I wish it was 1942 again, when a man could discreetly drive to Madam Brent's trailer and slip through the beaded curtain to have one's fate assessed.

What would Edgar Cayce do?

Kentucky's Nudist Society Act

Here's a real blast from the past. A Time magazine article dated July 15, 1966 - when Hector was just a pup - about how Kentucky's nudist society laws were overturned:

When police arrived, Kentucky Farmers Clarence and Benjamin Roe were holding family religious services in their unfenced backyard. Unfortunately, the assembled Roes of all ages and sexes were not wearing clothes. The Greenup Circuit Court fined Clarence and Ben jamin $1,000 apiece for violating Kentucky's Nudist Society Act, which required all nudist colonies to pay an annual license fee of $1,000, register all members, and segregate the premises with a solid masonry wall 20 ft. high. Unreasonable and unconstitutional, ruled Kentucky's highest court as it voided the Roes' convictions and stripped the nudist law from the books. Calling the wall "prohibitive" and the fee excessive, the court scoffed at the law's definition of a nudist as anyone found naked before "persons of the opposite sex, not his husband or wife, at their solicitation or with their consent, for religious or health purposes." Construed literally, ruled the court, the law would penalize even "a female patient who undergoes an examination by a male physician."

Problem is, two years later, they went back and rewrote the law to allow an exemption for medical professionals, and the flawed law has remained on the books in Kentucky ever since.

How does the state of Kentucky define "nudist"? I bet you've always wanted to know that, haven't you? Provider of Rare Services that I am, here's your answer.


Don't you just love the male-centric language of it? And how it fails to define what "any part of his private person" means? And how it leaves no allowances for nude modeling in the arts? This law reads like it was written half a century ago. Oh, wait, it was.

So, to this very day, you still have to have a license to operate a "nudist society" under these insanely vague definitions? That's right. And wait, it gets better: it specifically states that it makes no difference whether nudity is part of your religion or not (and it is part of several religious belief systems), you still have to get a license to take off your clothes in the private company of other like-minded individuals.

And exactly how does one apply for a license to take your damn pants off in the woods? You must petition the local county judge, who can turn you down based on your "character".

It's not at the top of my list of civil rights issues to crusade for, granted; but it is primitive, it is backward, and it is irksome on many levels.