Kentucky: Laziest State?

Another ignominious first for Kentucky: a new CDC study has determined that of the most sedentary and inactive counties in the nation, 4 out of 5 of them are in Kentucky.

Ironically, I just read about this upon returning home from a three hour hike in the woods. Heh.

It kinda irks me that a WKYT-TV story about the CDC report quotes Dr. Scott Black at the University of Kentucky as saying, "If you look at the areas that are particularly inactive, there's not a lot of opportunity for physical activity. There aren't gyms available, fitness centers."

I'm sure Dr. Black meant well, but we didn't have any gyms or fitness centers in the area I grew up in (Waco/College Hill/Bybee/Irvine) and we certainly didn't sit around doing nothing. We went out and did things. Still do. I find the suggestion that "there's not a lot of opportunity for physical activity" without the relatively modern concept of cheesy fitness centers to be absurd and even somewhat offensive.

Of course, growing up we didn't have the internet, video games, and handheld gizmos sucking our attention span anyway. We also didn't ingest high fructose corn syrup, Nutrasweet, Splenda, Acesulfame-K, or genetically modified foods. And kids back then weren't as doped to the gills on needlessly-prescribed zombie meds by evil creeps like Pfizer and Merck.

And interestingly, our grandparents smoked like chimneys and drank like ducks and yet their generation is outliving ours. Ask yourself, what environmental factors are different now?

We've already been declared #1 in the nation for depression, and Manchester has been determined to be double the national average in obesity. This year I urge my fellow Kentuckians to stand up, get up, get out, and prove these gloomy statistics wrong. My modest proposal is not that we need to build more "fitness centers" in rural areas, but that we first need to pull the plug on electronic distractions from what is important and what is real, and then start eating real food instead of Monsanto's monstrosities.

The four counties named by the CDC as most inactive in America are: Carter, Magoffin, McCreary, and Pike.

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.

The Cumberland Moonbow

There are only a handful of places in the world where one can see a genuine moonbow - Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, is one such place where moonbow fans flock to view the phenomenon. And Cumberland Falls, near Williamsburg, KY is another.

What is a moonbow? It's a rainbow produced by moonlight rather than sunlight. They're relatively faint compared to rainbows, and they're always in the opposite part of the sky from the moon. The human eye doesn't often clearly see vibrant colors in moonbows, but they're very evident when long-exposure photographs are taken.

I used to think a rainbowy ring of light around the moon was a moonbow. Technically speaking, it is not. That would be a corona, a light-diffraction phenomenon produced by clouds or mist. Moonbows tend to be 22-degree-angle halos, formed during very rare circumstances, most often near waterfalls but not necessarily.

(Photo above by flickr user Bryce Fields.)