Blue Moon of Kentucky

Last night was said to be, according to those who say such things, a "blue moon". Whatever that means. There are at least four different competing memes for just what constitutes this "blue moon" they speak of, and none of them are particularly satisfying to me. Apparently much of the misconceptions about it go back to a 1946 article in Sky & Telescope that was utterly, completely wrong - which just goes to show you can't always trust the "experts".


I've already mused on this blog about the various weirdnesses involving blue moons, blue people, aliens, and Elvis, but this latest spate of media attention to the "blue moon" concept has my coffee-oiled gears turning again regarding Kentucky's peculiar obsession with blueness. Of course, what comes to mind first are those ubiquitous Kentucky Wildcats of the University of Kentucky, with their slogans like "Go Big Blue!" and "I Bleed Blue". And much of our state's blue fetish is actually about misplaced blueness - blue moons aren't really blue, and neither is bluegrass.

Blue people seem to be on the rise, culturally, what with Blue Man Group and Avatar. But for over a billion people on Earth, it's nothing new: Krishna has been predominantly portrayed as blue-skinned in the Hindu religion.


But it's the idea of blue light that interests me most, as far as our discussions about Kentucky go. Reported nocturnal sightings of eerie blue lights - sometimes called "ghost lights" - in the Kentucky mountains have been shrugged off mostly as "swamp gas" (what would skeptics do without this crutch?) but on the other hand, it is possible that in earlier times, the many burning springs and natural gas vents dotting our state's landscape burned with a blue flame.

Kentucky's curiously-named "Moonshine" also burns with a blue flame.

Many of the UFOs seen around here are blue in color, such as in this report of blue lights in the sky above Fort Campbell (although the testimony doesn't make a whole lot of sense). Coincidentally, Fort Campbell was once home to an elite corps of secret Special Forces known as Blue Light.

Then there's two different "Lady in Blue" haunting legends - one is said to haunt the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, and a similar one dwells in the Keen Johnson Ballroom at Eastern Kentucky University (Consult your copy of Weird Kentucky for more info on both). And maybe the "Gray Lady" of Liberty Hall is actually a very pale blue. Perhaps blue just happens to be the basic color of mystical energy, or "life force", or whatever you want to call it if you believe in that sort of thing.


Interestingly, although blue has an extremely short wavelength, the receptors in the human eye are specially geared to detect blue to a greater degree.

Cemetery Deer

What is it with deer? They're stalking me. Everywhere I go nowadays, I encounter deer, even in the city. I never used to see them so often, not even when I lived in the wilderness of Waco, KY - with the sole exception of the now-infamous "Devil Deer" incident.

But now I see them everywhere (to quote Hank Thompson) and they're popping up in urban settings with greater frequency as mankind continues to encroach on what dwindling wild space is left to them. One even barged into the Middletown Fresh Market a few months ago.

And last fall (holy moley - I just checked and it was exactly a year ago today and I didn't even realize it when I started writing this. Now that's weird!) I was driving Westbound on I-64 at night through Franklin County, and ran over an enormous deer. I didn't run into it, I ran over it. Now, the impact was great, to be sure, but aside from a really skull-joggling staccato double-WHAM!! as each set of tires bounced over the unfortunate buck, it was relatively untraumatic. I have pretty darn good reflexes, or so I like to flatter myself, and managed to keep the car straight and continue driving with relative calm.

It wasn't until I got home that it really started sinking on me how incredible the whole thing was. It's like in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson look at the bulletholes in the wall behind them and can't figure out why they aren't dead. I kept picturing - and still picture to this day - the frozen-in-time snapshot my mind took of the moment just before impact. The deer's considerable rack should have been run over by my driver-side tires, and it's a minor miracle that my tires weren't punctured by them.

But then it's a major miracle that I'm even alive at all. When I tell the story to people, many have been incredulous - "you ran over a deer in a Volvo station wagon and didn't wreck? Is that even possible?" I admit it doesn't sound possible at all, and yet it happened. And all I lost was a muffler.

I recently saw a news story where a Brownsville man driving one of those monster-sized heavy-duty pickup trucks collided with a deer in Grayson County. If any vehicle could squash a deer, you would expect it would be one of those, right? Nope. The impact sent him flipping over repeatedly, totalling his vehicle.

And just this past weekend, someone died in a deer collision in Harold, KY (Floyd County).

The statistics for deer/vehicle impact fatalities are so grim that a number of organizations exist to monitor the problem, such as Deer Crash.



Anyway, I said all that to say all this: I was in Louisville's Calvary Cemetery the other day, and came face to face with Bambi. We stared each other down for a couple minutes before the little doe decided she didn't want her picture taken.

Frankfort Cemetery Desecrates Its Own Graves

Many families with loved ones buried at Frankfort Cemetery were recently horrified to find that trinkets, mementos, sentimental items, crosses, religious icons, and plastic flowers have all been removed and tossed in a giant junk heap.

Superintendent Coleman Kincaid is the man responsible for this travesty, and he makes no apologies about what he's done.

"There are so many ways that objects near and around graves make it hard for us to do the maintenance that this cemetery requires. We have 20,000 graves here." Kincaid said to the State-Journal. "The rules have always been here. It’s just in the past they were loosely observed and I am the one now charged with enforcing them."

However, there are glaring problems with Kincaid's "rules are rules" excuse. For one, real flowers are permitted while plastic ones are not, so it doesn't make sense to say that it's just about the maintenance men having difficulty mowing and weed-eating. It's just as hard to mow around a real flower than a plastic one.

Let's just be honest here, Mr. Kincaid, and say what this is really about: aesthetics. Even in death, it seems, snooty and nosey people try to tell tackier people what they can't do in their own yard.

Some people think decorated graves are tacky, while others (like me) say that people who paid a fortune for an exorbitantly price-gouged funeral, headstone and cemetery plot should be able to leave trinkets at that grave without some Mrs. Drysdale-voiced society lady complaining about how gauche it is.

I don't know whether Cemetery Board Member Dorothy Wilson talks like Mrs. Drysdale, but it would be appropriate. From the State-Journal:

Cemetery Board Member Dorothy Wilson supports Kincaid and thinks the recent cleaning enhances the property’s beauty and serenity.

“I think Coleman and the men who work here have done a nice job and definitely think it looks better,” Wilson said.

She too has received complaints, and many who called were very angry, she said.

“We (the board) began discussing the condition of the cemetery two or three years ago and the fact that there was a policy and it is on every contract, but had not been enforced,” said Wilson, the board member.

“When Coleman came on as superintendent last summer, we explained to him that the cemetery needed to be cleaned up.”

Although it may be true that stipulations about trinkets on graves are indeed buried deep in the fine print of the cemetery's contract (and who reads such contracts closely when they're wracked with grief for a loved one?), Wilson has, by her own admission, acknowledged that the policy had not been enforced. This means that a prospective customer, looking around and seeing graves festooned with bric-a-brac, naturally and logically would assume such things were permitted - because, in fact, they were.

The Frankfort Cemetery Board - consisting of seven people selected every five years - needs to overcome their obsession with aesthetically "cleaning up" other people's graves. The State-Journal notes that many people are furious with the Board, and say those who sit on the board are insensitive to their grief.

But that's not the only problem on their hands.

In someone's zeal to "clean up" the place, actual grave markers have been removed from the baby section of the cemetery. From the State-Journal again:

Pat Woods, of Frankfort, is among those upset by the policy.

“They even removed things that were sitting on tombstones and just threw them in a pile,” Woods said. “What respect have they shown for us or our loved ones?”

Woods is especially distraught that markers are gone in a section many refer to as the baby cemetery. “When my brother and sister died in the 40s, my parents could not afford tombstones,” Woods said. “I recently purchased new markers and replaced the old ones. They are gone.” A wooden cross that marked one child’s grave is no longer there, she added.

Kentucky State Capitol

The best place to get a good photo of the Kentucky State Capitol is not actually at the building, but from a considerable distance from it in the mountains that surround it. There's a lookout point along U.S. 60, where I took these, and Frankfort Cemetery also provides an excellent view.


Kentucky hasn't had good luck with capitol buildings. Between 1792 and 1830, Kentucky had two buildings serve as the capitol, and both of them burned down. Then from 1830 to 1810, we had a third one that was discontinued a few years after Governor William Goebel was assassinated in front of it. In 1910 the current capitol building was completed, with a dome patterned after Napoleon's tomb in Paris.