PETA Wants Big Brown Castrated

Those wacky kids at PETA are at it again.

They're calling for Kentucky Derby winner Big Brown to be castrated, against the wishes of the horse's owners, Michael Iavarone and Richard Schiavo, who are preparing to make him a high priced stud sire at Three Chimneys Farm. Their thinking, as far as I can tell, is that any offspring of Big Brown may be more likely to have the same kind of accidental injury as his parent. (If that logic seems fuzzy, remember that PETA is the same organization who handed out leaflets to little children that said "Your Mommy Kills Animals".)

There's been no word as far as I know that Iavarone and Schiavo are taking PETA's protest seriously. Myself, as a card-carrying member of the Kentucky-centric Old Order of Transylvanian Gentlemen, I can't support anyone who calls for the end of racetrack betting, nor anyone who disparages the holy name of Colonel Harlan Sanders.

The USA Today story is here.

EKU's Mystery Arsonist

A series of unexplained fires on Eastern Kentucky University's campus - and during Fire Prevention Week, no less - have officials baffled and perturbed.

Four of the five fires have been concluded to be acts of arson. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader:

"Officials are still looking for suspects in three small fires that took place last week in the Dupree Hall dorm and one in the Powell Student Center. The fires all seem to be related and caused by arson, but officials aren't sure whether one person or a group is responsible..."

The department is offering a reward of up to $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of a person responsible for the arsons. Anyone with information about the arsons should call the EKU Police Department at (859) 622-2821.

Please help Catclaw Theatre!

My theatre company, Catclaw, is in dire need of funds to continue our weird and mysterious works, and to take it to another level. Catclaw benefits the community by bringing new quality and variety to the theatre scene in Kentucky and surrounding areas. Furthermore, for our traveling productions, we intend to promote Kentucky actors and give them new opportunities to make their talents known to a national (and even international) audience.

We have a goal of setting up our own theatre space in Louisville by this time next year. Help us reach that goal!


No donation is too small, and all donors will receive acknowledgement in our playbills and newsletters, plus receive special discounts and thank-you gifts. For supporters giving over $500, your donation will include exclusive VIP invitations to upcoming special events, as well as other benefits we haven't even thought of yet. Contact us for details on how superdonors will get free tickets for life, and/or free advertising in our playbills for life!

You can also support us by purchasing items from our eBay auctions, and if there's anything else we can do for you, just let us know. Seriously. We'll come over and cook you dinner and paint your fence and shovel the snow from your driveway for a donation. You tell us what you need.

Catclaw Theatre Company is not a 501(c)(3) entity at this time and gifts to us are not tax-deductible at present.

Our Paypal account address is sdeatrick@gmail.com. To donate, click the Paypal button below:

Madison County Meteor

Once when I was a kid living on the farm in Waco, KY, my father and I saw a huge red glowing ball streak down through the sky and disappear on the forested horizon. It made an audible crash, and a red glow momentarily rose the spot.

I've always wondered about that fireball from the sky, and a few years ago I decided to go poking around in the general vicinity that it appeared to have landed. I came upon this round pond that seemed uncannily like an impact crater. Unfortunately, the next time I came to the site to investigate further, construction work for homes had begun and obliterated the evidence.

Bubbleland

There's a small isolated piece of Kentucky that isn't actually connected to the rest of the state ("exclaves", geographers call such things) known as "Kentucky Bend", or more colorfully, "Bubbleland". The exclave was created due to the shift in course of the Mississippi after the New Madrid Earthquakes in 1811 and 1812.

Located in the southwestern corner of the state, Bubbleland is a curiosity in many ways. Although the area is 17.5 square miles, only seventeen people live there according to the 2000 census. And despite being declared part of Kentucky after a long and protracted squabble with Tennessee over the land (who actually owned it as recently as 1848), the official post office mailing address for the area is nearby Tiptonville, Tennessee. (Since rockabilly legend Carl Perkins is from Tiptonville, this could in a sense make Perkins an unofficial Kentuckian!)

Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, wrote about the feud between the Darnell and Watson families in Bubbleland, one that lasted six decades!

Toulouse-inations

No Unusual Kentucky updates in a week??

Well, I've not had much time as of late. I've been in superserious crunch time with my play Toulouse-inations, which makes its world debut tomorrow night at 8pm at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Louisville. The show is pretty damn weird in itself, in more ways than one, so go and check it out even if you think theatre's not your bag.

After its run in Louisville, the show will go on to play in other cities and will set its sights on an Off-Off-Broadway production in NYC in 2009. By sheer persistence, stubbornness, and plugging away, this play will eke out a reputation for itself, for better or for worse, by hook or by crook, a bis ou a blanc.

Someday you'll kick yourself for not having jumped on this chance to see the show in its very first raw incarnation with its original cast, so save your future self the anguish of hindsight, and purchase tickets NOW!

Consult the Kentucky Center's schedule here to peruse and purchase. The show opens August 7 and runs for FOUR DAYS ONLY.

Questions? Call the Kentucky Center at 502.562.0100 or Catclaw Theatre Company at 502.649.3378.

Rose's Restaurant

One of the best places to eat in Slade, KY is Rose's Restaurant, which is located at 1289 Natural Bridge Road. As a wilderness roadhouse, the grub is great, but what we find unusual here is that the ceiling is covered in dollar bills, each of them autographed and inscribed from various customers. Why? We didn't ask.

The Airports of Madison County

Okay, so we here at Unusual Kentucky are admittedly given to paranoid and conspiratorial conjecture at the drop of a hat. But the Madison County Airport really does give us the Creeps. It's tucked back in the woods far, far, far from civilization and there are almost no signs pointing how to get there from the main road. There is a real feeling of uneasiness out here, and everyone here seems very paranoid and wary of outsiders. (It's been this way for years, incidentally - long before the Sept.11th incident made all airports a little more tense) Though airnav.com lists the military as accounting for only 3 percent of their traffic, we've seen an awful lot of military planes in and out of here at times. The airport, it should be noted, is not far from Blue Grass Army Depot, who of course have extensive airport and helipad facilities of their own.
On Menelaus Road, on the way to the Madison Airport, there is yet another airport, apparently called "The Berea/Richmond Airport" according to one map. Never seen planes come or go here but the planes parked in the weed-filled field change from time to time so evidently they do get some traffic. It's a tiny field next to a barn and farmhouse, with a small half-hangar towards the back.
And while you're out in this neck of the woods, also check out the Hanging Bridge.

The "Kentucky Anomaly"

This is apparently one of those things that tend to get buried and lost in the shuffle of mountains of government-generated paperwork and bureaucracy - check this out.

"A very prominent magnetic anomaly measured by MAGSAT over the eastern mid-continent of the United States was inferred to have a source region beneath Kentucky and Tennessee. Prominent aeromagnetic and gravity anomalies are also associated with the inferred source region."

Okay, so a huge magnetic anomaly under Kentucky is cool, and is right in line with everything I've been saying about the "Kentucky Vortex", the "Dark and Bloody Ground", and the old William S. Burroughs bit about old evils lurking under the soil. But gravity anomalies specifically under Kentucky? Damn! This is hardcore!

And of course, the first things that come to my mind are the stories about the ancient civilizations of people that were supposedly here before the Native Americans, and then I start thinking about why the Blue Grass Army Depot is said to be the Area 51 of Kentucky. (And then I start thinking about the guy who claims there was a UFO that crashed in Burnside, KY... but only for a moment.)

Could this "Kentucky Anomaly" be a sort of Unified Field Theory for everything that's weird about this area? I'm intrigued. They fed this anomalous data into a NASA computer and asked it to come up with a theoretical model that might explain the anomaly. As the NASA website tells it:

"A crustal model constructed to fit these anomalies interpreted the complex as a large mafic plutonic intrusion of Precambrian age. The complex was named the Kentucky body."

How X-Files is that? It's called "The Kentucky Body" and they don't know exactly what it is but they do know it's causing huge magnetic and gravity anomalies?

Did they really say "gravity anomalies"??? Yes, yes they did. Whoa.

Now I know the Pre-Cambrian era well - that's back in the old, old, times before everything. Actually, to call it an "era" is a misnomer - it actually comprises the entire first seven-eighths of the Earth's history, about which we know practically zip.

It's not just all about this "Kentucky Body" though: a subsequent report notes that "the source region for the satellite anomaly is considerably more extensive than the Kentucky body sensu stricto."

Aside from a mention in some grad student's online paper, I can't find any further analysis of the Kentucky Body and the Kentucky Anomaly by NASA (or anyone else) after this initial flurry of papers in the 1980s. Why? Did the subject become classified?

Red River Museum

Located in Clay City, KY, the Red River Museum is a veritable treasure trove of odd antiquated items related to the Powell County area.

Two floors of amazing junk and antiques, plus outbuildings and a yard full of more stuff. Railroad memorabilia, rustic antiques, taxidermified animals (including a disturbing pair of prematurely born baby deer) , old photos and paper ephemera from the Gorge's history. The building itself is the former Clay City National Bank building, built in 1875.

Best of all, it's free.

Haunted (Waffle) House

I'm tellin' ya, Kentucky is one spooky place, all across the board, and I maintain that we are all, at any given moment, swimming in a sea of unseen ghosts and otherworldly critters and we just don't know it.

Case in point: just an hour ago, I was having lunch at the Waffle House in Jeffersontown, KY (1620 Kentucky Mills Drive) and the jukebox was silent for most of the meal. Then, one song came on by itself without anyone having put any quarters in it. Then it went back to silence. I thought it rather odd, since every other jukebox I've seen that has an automatic-play feature runs continuously, not just playing one random song and then stopping.

I mentioned it to the waitress, who informed me in no uncertain terms that the Waffle House is haunted and that strange things like that happen so regularly that they're all used to it. Another waitress standing nearby nodded in affirmation, and mentioned that towels have flown by themselves, and so have these plastic containers they use in the kitchen.

The first waitress speculated that the spirits may have followed her to work from her own home, because she once lived in a very haunted house in Louisville with the exact same kind of poltergeist activity. She told of large art-glass bottles falling by themselves from atop a fishtank, not breaking when hitting the floor, and spinning to point all in one direction. She also told of rumors that a child was killed in her home, and that she discovered a creepy room in her basement, where someone had once lived, but was boarded up and hidden behind paneling. She's since moved from this house, but reports the ghostly phenomena still follows her, both to her new home and to her job at Waffle House.

She seemed extremely sincere and somewhat frazzled about having to endure the haunted weirdness. There was no sense of spinning a grand yarn to shock or impress; she was very blase and matter-of-fact about the ghosts in her life, which seem to have taken root in her workplace as well.

Needless to say, I will be making repeat visits to this Waffle House and having further chats with said waitress.

GWAR car?

You know, in the Weird Kentucky book I referred to this as a GWAR car (you know, the insane blood-splattering metal band?).... but now I wonder if it doesn't actually say "GNAR"?