Statewide Tobacco Ban?

The anti-smoking forces are looming over Kentucky's civil rights like the Death Star over Alderaan once again. The Courier-Journal is reporting that a bill proposing a statewide tobacco ban is now before the Kentucky legislature.

I oppose any attempts to curtail tobacco usage, even though I don't even smoke, myself (aside from an occasional fine cigar after a good meal or a puff of my pipe whilst striking a Sherlock Holmes-esque pose at my fireplace mantle), mainly because I tend to oppose any attempts to curtail people doing whatever they want to do within the law. I repeat, within the law. And there's the rub, you see: tobacco is legal. You'd think we were talking about Heroin or something, the way the rabid anti-smoking militants carry on.

And speaking of drugs, I find it odd that powerful and influential people are on a tirade against tobacco instead of doing something about Oxycontin and Crack and Meth, all of which are major problems for Kentucky's well-being. If these do-gooders would use a tenth of the resources and funding and effort they spend railing against tobacco to instead help put a stop to the Oxycontin pipeline, Kentucky would be a much safer place. But for some reason, they prefer to make second-hand smoke their pet bugaboo. Why is that, I ask aloud? Qui bono?

I believe diet sodas like Diet Coke to be far more harmful than all the tobacco in the Commonwealth, containing as they do dangerous artificial sweeteners like Nutrasweet, Splenda, and Acesulfame-K, as well the equally dangerous High Fructose Corn Syrup. Hell, everything we eat nowadays has corn in it, and not just any corn but genetically modified Monsanto corn. As Ivan Stang once opined, "Cocaine's pretty damn unhealthy, alright, but at least it isn't half our kids' diet."

Nevertheless, you don't see me mounting some goofy campaign to ban these substances, because I do believe it's your right to eat and drink cancerous crap if that's what you really want. Or to play golf amongst nerve gas, even.

Similarly, partially hydrogenated oils are one of the deadliest substances in our food supply, and yet they still are consumed on a daily basis by you and I. Whining about second-hand smoke when you eat and drink poison - literal poison every day of your life - is a little like living inside a septic tank and consuming raw sewage, yet complaining that someone else passed gas.

How about the pollution in Kentucky's air, water and soil caused by Rubbertown, DuPont, and places like Valley of the Drums and Maxey Flats? And these sites are only famous because people found out about them, as opposed to the sites that are still buried out there that you don't know about. Second-hand smoke, compared to what unfathomable chemicals that factories are semi-legally allowed to belch into our air from their smokestacks, is not on the top of my list of things to stress about.

How can you decisively point the finger of blame for any given person's lung cancer when we're swimmming in a sea of mostly-invisible car exhaust at all times, and blobs of ozone float around us constantly? And even though people make jokes like "I believe such-and-such lived too close to the power lines as a kid", it's no joke that people are living too close to the electromagnetic fields of power lines and power stations, and no one is doing anything about it.

And I bet most of these "OMG, your second hand smoke is killing me" people use cellphones. Guess what? You're dead already. Game over.

(Even the ones who don't use cellphones can't escape the radiation from cell towers, which are increasingly being hidden so you won't even know when you're leaning up against one.)

Aluminum is a very toxic metal, yet we cook our food in pans made of it, then wrap the leftovers in foil made of it. We use aluminum-based deodorants, day in and day out. In 1993, the World Health Organization announced their findings that autopsies of Alzheimer's disease victims showed abnormally high concentrations of aluminum in their brains, yet since then absolutely nothing has been done to reduce the public's aluminum intake.

A recent exhaustive analysis of 173 brands of bottled water was recently conducted, and only three of them got an "A". One brand that I often drink was given an "F".

As if arsenic and cryptosporidium in tap water aren't bad enough, did you know that the world's water supply is increasingly contaminated by antidepressants, antibiotics, and other prescription drugs that most municipal water treatment plants cannot remove with their conventional filtration systems? Sewage treatment plants can't eliminate it either, nor can they eliminate MRSA or Clostridium difficile, a truly terrifying superbug which Kentucky is sixth in the nation for reported cases.

Do some Google-cizing around the web and you'll find that practically everything under the sun is being touted as "bad for you" by some nutritional expert or other - peanuts, fish, corn, wheat, protein, caffeine, alcohol, dairy products, red meat, even soy. And we're surrounded by toxic BPA-laden plastics that leach estrogen-mimicking chemicals and more. And don't even get me started on Monosodium Glutamate. The sheer information overload of studying all the data from all these experts will either make you move to a desert island or throw your hands up and say, "The hell with it, it's hopeless trying to be healthy. I'm going to the store to buy a pack of hot dogs and a carton of Luckies."

(So what is the solution? There isn't one. I say, just live your life and let the Lord take you when he decides.)

Did you know that toxic coal ash sludge is now being used as an ingredient in the asphalt on Kentucky roads? It's kind of a complicated and unwieldy subject, and frankly, it's pretty boring - even to me - to read about, and it lacks the clear-cut charm of other causes. You know, causes that people can set up donation-raking organizations for, to whip citizens into a hysterical frenzy over to further their own ambitions. But that doesn't make the coal ash any less toxic a substance being introduced into Kentucky's environment.

How about getting tough on crime before we tackle smoking? There are places in Louisville that are essentially places of total lawlessness and danger, even as the LMPD prefers to spend its time combating perfectly legal strip clubs, and citizens like me who get pulled over and fined for nothing more than forgetting to buckle my seat belt. And let's not forget the LMPD's problematic history of framing innocent people for crimes they didn't commit. Maybe the new Louisville mayoral administration should clean house and start the LMPD all over again, from the bottom up and the top down.

But second-hand smoke? Come on. You're arguing about burnt toast in a burning house.

Finally - and I don't think you need me to remind you of this - I hear tell that it's a statistical certainty that we're all going to die in the end anyway.

Enjoy every sandwich!

Salty and Mattie

One of my favorite acts on those 1950s full-color "Stars of the Grand Ole Opry" films that have been making their way around America via truckstop tapes for years now: Salty and Mattie, who stuck out like a sore thumb with their magnificent harmonica-driven rock and roll blues antics like "Harmonica Boogie" and the baffling Popeye-goes-Halloween number "The Ghost Song". For years I wondered who the heck these two oddballs were and how they got to share a stage with superstars like Faron Young, Ernest Tubb, June Carter, Webb Pierce, Carl Smith and Jim Reeves.

The how still isn't clear, but I now know the who: Floyd "Salty" Holmes was from Glasgow, KY and was a founding member of the Kentucky Ramblers, who subsequently changed their name to the Prairie Ramblers and became best known as Patsy Montana's backing band. He also appeared in some early Western films, thanks to his friend Gene Autry pulling some strings for him.

Salty drifted into obscurity after he and Mattie were divorced in 1956, and he passed away on January 1, 1970.


Salty's wife Mattie (sometimes called Mattie Holmes, other times Mattie O'Neil) is actually Opal Jean Amburgey from Neon, KY.

Amburgey got her start recording and performing on Lexington's WKLP-AM with The Sunshine Sisters and then went on to brief fame as Jean Chapel, recording many rockers for Sun and RCA such as "I Won't Be Rockin' Tonight", "Don't Let Go", and "Welcome to the Club".

RCA tried to bill her as "the female Elvis" but by the early 1960s the buxom blonde rockabilly belter was largely forgotten. She went on to an even more successful songwriting career, however, writing songs for country stars such as Marty Robbins and Tammy Wynette. Her daughter Lana is also a singer-songwriter, having placed songs with Nancy Sinatra, Eddy Arnold, and Lester Flatt.

Jean/Mattie/Opal died in 1995. I've been unable to find out where she and Salty are each buried. Does anyone know?

Bonus Saltiness: "Stuck With Love", "John Henry", "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain", and "Cannonball Special" with Joe Maphis.

Man Shaves Woman's Arms, Pours Kool-Aid On Them

And then there's this suave dreamboat who's on WLKY's crime report for assault, stalking, and more. Police say he assaulted a woman because he thought she had a phone number written on her arms.

27-year-old Tommy Gunn (that's his name, I'm not making this up) forcibly shaved the woman's arms and poured Kool-aid over them, apparently because he thought this is the traditional, time-tested "Hints from Heloise" way to make a secret invisible phone number written on a woman's arm magically appear. He then, according to WLKY, "struck her and dunked her head in water."

Keep in mind that we haven't heard Mr. Gunn's side of the story, of course, and I'm sure he has a perfectly good explanation for his psycho behavior. Like... er.... um.... well, I can't imagine what that might be, but I'm sure it would be a fascinating insight into the human condition.

Christian Country Cowboy Church

Whizzing down 146 in Oldham County this morning, a sign caught my eye that I'd never noticed before. Its words still echoed in my head as I drove on - "Cowboy Church". Did it really say that? Cowboy Church? Awesome.

I turned around immediately and went back.

The sign is at the top of a gravel road that branches out in several different directions, including a local American Legion hall and various buildings related to the Oldham County Fairgrounds. I didn't see any building that had a "Cowboy Church" sign on it, but I'm hoping it's this barn with horse murals painted on it.




When I got home, I Googled it. I found out that the CCCC is, like apparently everyone in the Universe except me, on Facebook. I also discovered that there's a huge nationwide network of these Cowboy Churches, which originated in Texas. According to Wikipedia:

"Cowboy churches are local Christian churches within the cowboy culture that are distinctively Western heritage in character. A typical cowboy church may meet in a rural setting in a barn, metal building, arena, sale barn, or old western building, have its own rodeo arena, and a country gospel band. Baptisms are generally done in a cattle tank. The sermons are usually short and simple. Some cowboy churches have covered arenas where rodeo events such as bull riding, team roping, ranch sorting, team penning and equestrian events are held on weeknights."

As a fan of anything rustic and retro in American culture, and especially anything that glorifies a frontier spirit in today's homogenous nutrasweet styrofoam culture, I wholeheartedly approve and endorse the Cowboy Church concept. Let me go put on my big purple Hawkshaw Hawkins outfit and I'll see you in church this Sunday.

Tom T. Hall

Tom T. Hall has become one of country music's most prominent elder statesmen, a fact that makes me feel rather smokehouse-aged myself since I vividly remember him from my childhood as being that guy who did gently goofy post-Roger Miller songs like "I Love", "Little Bitty", "How Do You Talk To A Little Baby Goat?", "I Like Beer" and "Sneaky Snake".

If you ask me, the fact that Mr. Hall is another good Kentucky boy (from Olive Hill) should be made more of a big deal by tourist-attraction types whose job it is to make big deals of such things. But no one asked me. So I'm ringing the supper bell to sing Tom's praises myself today.

Tom's first band, the Kentucky Travelers, released a few records on the Starday label, and according to Wikipedia, they "performed before movies for a traveling theater", a concept which piques my interest greatly. Did this "traveling theatre" tour nationally? Or just Kentucky?

But soon his songwriting skills took him to Nashville, where he had hit songs with "Harper Valley PTA" by Jeannie C. Riley, "DJ For A Day" by Jimmy C. Newman, "Hello Vietnam" for Johnny Wright (made even more famous years later as the opening theme from Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.)

And by the late 1960s/early 1970s, he was a recording star in his own right, with songs like "I Washed My Face in the Morning Dew" (not to be confused with that other "Morning Dew" song) and "The Year That Clayton Delaney Died". Clayton Delaney, by the way, was a real person from easten Kentucky; a ramblin' rounder kinda guy who the young Tom idolized, just like the song says.

One of his songs, "A Week In A Country Jail", was based on a true story: Tom was pulled over by a cop in Paintsville, KY for speeding, and then arrested for expired tags on his car and for not having his drivers license on him. What was supposed to have been an overnight stay in the local jail turned into a week when the county's only Judge left town to attend a funeral. This Mayberry-gone-wrong story became a hit in 1969. Ironically, Paintsville is now the home of the U.S. 23 Country Music Highway Museum, which pays tribute to Tom's success.


Tom T. Hall is 74 now, but is still going strong with public appearances and live performances. You can write him at: Tom T. Hall, P.O. Box 1246, Franklin, TN, 37065.

Abandoned Buildings of Henry County

There's a million of 'em, and you're gonna love 'em.

Tod Browning

Tod Browning, the director behind such classic films as the original Bela Lugosi Dracula, was another good Kentucky boy who left the bluegrass for the bright lights of Hollywood, to bring civilization to the barbarians.

At the age of 16, Browning fled his home in Louisville, KY to join a traveling circus. For the next several years he toured the country with various carnivals and sideshows on the sawdust circuit as a performer, dancer, contortionist, blackface comedian, somnambulist and barker. He developed his own sideshow routine in which he was buried alive, Houdini-style, in a coffin. Billed as "The Living Corpse" and sometimes even "The Living Hypnotic Corpse", this gig was quite successful at raking in the rubes.

He also performed as a clown with the Ringling Brothers Circus for a time (do photos exist? I would love to see Tod Browning in clown makeup.)

Not only did Browning cheat death every night in his coffin act, but in 1915 he miraculously survived a head-on collision with a freight train in his automobile, though he was badly injured and required two years of rehabilitation. Browning's biographer David J. Skal theorizes that Browning may have been castrated in the wreck.


Browning's carny experiences helped shaped some of his greatest films, such as The Unholy Three (Lon Chaney plays a ventriloquist on the lam with a carny strongman, a dwarf and an ape!), The Unknown (Lon Chaney again, as an armless circus knife-thrower who throws knives with his feet and is enamored with Joan Crawford), and Freaks, whose cast was largely made up of actual circus freakshow performers, including Schlitze the Aztec, the Hilton conjoined twins, the bearded Lady Olga, and the "Human Caterpillar" Prince Randian (pictured above).

The Show tells the story of a Hungarian carnival troupe with a Grand Guignol ultra-violent decapitation show, a mermaid, a spider-woman (pictured below), and a poisonous gila monster.



And then there's The Devil Doll, a kinda-horror/sorta-science fiction film about a mad scientist who develops a formula to shrink people. The film is also notable for scenes with Lionel Barrymore in little-old-lady drag, hamming it up Mrs. Doubtfire style.

The most intriguing nugget in the Browning oeuvre, however, is London After Midnight, which has been lost since 1967, when the only known print went up in the accursed MGM vault fire. The film, about a vampiric Jack The Ripper-esque fiend being pursued by Scotland Yard, inspired a real-life copycat killer in 1926 when a man arrested for murdering a woman in London's Hyde Park claimed the movie drove him to it.


Browning also wrote scripts for other people's pictures, such as The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, a bizarre 1916 film about a Sherlock Holmes-like detective who is so addicted to cocaine that he keeps it by the barrel in his home and travels with an ammunition bandolier on his chest, filled not with bullets but with hypodermic syringes for mainlining cocaine and opium. They just don't make movies like this anymore.

Unfortunately, unlike fellow Kentuckian director D.W. Griffith (with whom he sometimes co-worked, such as on the film Intolerance and the aforementioned Leaping Fish), Browning's remains were not brought back home for burial; he was interred at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Tod's uncle was also a celebrity - baseball legend Pete Browning, the original "Louisville Slugger", is buried in Cave Hill in Louisville.

1-1-11

Today is January 1, 2011 (that is, if you believe the calendar), otherwise known as 1-1-11. A number of numerologically-minded people have noted the singular (heh) nature of the date and asked me what I make of it.

I'm not the superstititous type - or rather, I operate on an entirely different set of superstitions than the average person. I don't put a lot of stock in playing mystic-number games, which earns me great enmity from some of my conspiracy-theory pals who find great significance in extracting numbers like 13, 666, and 9-11 from all texts by any means necessary, even if it involves Chinese algebra to make the data cough up the desired results.

But this time, I do have a soft spot for the symbolism of the positive-ness of a day that's rendered in all ones, because my new year's resolution for 2011 is to delete negative influences from my life.

I don't mean that in a saccharine pie-in-the-sky "power of positive thinking" nicey-nicey airheaded kind of way, to be sure. I'll still come across as the same curmudgeonly crank as always, as far as the folks in our studio audience can see. What I really mean by it is that I have always made an extra undeserved effort to befriend and communicate with obnoxious and negative people, even as they're picking my pocket and placing stones in my passway. As of today, the meter has run out.

Strictly for the purposes of this blog post, I even consulted (against my better judgment) a numerology website and was surprised to find that it gloomily predicts "the year as a whole may be fraught with intolerance and regress". Damn, even the New Agers are harshing my mellow already.

What does this have to do with Kentucky? Well, not a darned thing, to tell the truth. But hey, here's a picture of Isaac Shelby:

Next Year

Friends, neighbors, Kentuckians, if I don't see you until we get to the other side: Happy New Year!

Of course, it's not really new year's eve. Or to put it another way, it's only new year's eve because we say it is. To be even more precise, it's only new year's eve because someone else set an arbitrary pattern in motion long before we were born that says this is new year's eve, and we find ourselves currently living in a society that chooses to accept this belief.

Concepts such as "January 1", "six o'clock", and "the year 2011" aren't real. In fact, there is, scientifically speaking, no such thing as a precise "year" anyway, because of orbital eccentricity. Such terms are simply relative constructs that are the result of considerations made and agreed upon by humans. You could proclaim yourself to be the creator of your own one true Pulcovian calendar based on a 17 month cycle with years starting in what we call "summer", and you'd be just as right as anyone else, as far as the lilies of the field are concerned.

And as I've noted elsewhere, some contemporary researchers like Clifford Carnicom claim that drift-rate analysis of our time standard shows unexplained dilation and variation, and that undocumented revisions to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) may be occurring.

What hope has man of accurately marking time when even atomic clocks are subject to Special Relativity?

And how much longer will marking time even matter, anyway, as the world brain of the internet is well on its way to infecting outer space? NASA and DARPA are currently working on an interplanetary internet that will somehow function despite the spacetime distance issues.

But who the heck are they building this interplanetary internet for, when there's supposedly no other humans on other planets? Do they know something we don't? Answer: of course they do.


Our own most accurate (but not perfect) method of marking time for ourselves - the rising and setting of our sun - is meaningless on other planets anyway. Or is the plan to impose our Earthly Julian Calendar of 365.25 days on the whole universe?

And then there's this to consider.

Happy Pulcovian Summer Solstice.

Skeeterday

The late great Kentucky country-pop chanteuse Skeeter Davis was born on this date in 1931. We here at UnK commemorate one of our state's oddest contributions to pop culture with a few youtube links:

"The End of the World" - on some 60s TV show introduced by fellow Kentuckian Stringbean.

"Walking the Floor Over You" - Skeeter lays down the Ernest Tubb classic rendered in double-tracked harmony with a snappy Go-Go backing, kinda like Johnny Rivers goes Nashville.

"Singin' in the Summer Sun" is a wacky little Dixieland-tinged pop number. Perhaps she thought she was trying for the same ricky-tick vibe as Nat King Cole's "Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer".

"Above and Beyond" - Before there was the duo of Porter and Dolly, it was Porter and Skeeter! Here they boinkity-boink their way through the great Buck Owens tune.

Kentucky Chupacabra?

Now this is news! Mark Cothren, a farmer from Lebanon Junction, KY, has made a shocking announcement: he's killed a Chupacabra in his yard.

What's a Chupacabra? It's a mythical beast that was first posited in 1995 in Puerto Rico, shortly after which alleged sightings swept Mexico, Central America, and South America. Gradually, as happens with all cryptid myths like Mothman, people started reporting it everywhere, even Russia.

Wikipedia describes the commonly shared view of the Chupacabra's appearance (one variant of which is seen in the image above via an artist's model conception):

The most common description of chupacabras is a reptile-like being, appearing to have leathery or scaly greenish-gray skin and sharp spines or quills running down its back. This form stands approximately 3 to 4 feet (1 to 1.2 m) high, and stands and hops in a similar fashion to a kangaroo. In at least one sighting, the creature was reported to hop 20 feet (6 m). This variety is said to have a dog or panther-like nose and face, a forked tongue, and large fangs. It is said to hiss and screech when alarmed, as well as leave behind a sulfuric stench. When it screeches, some reports assert that the chupacabras' eyes glow an unusual red which gives the witnesses nausea.

With that description in mind, let's have a look-see at what Mr. Cothren caught:


Uh... dude. That's it? Really?

What you call "Chupacabra", I call "Chihuahua."

This sighting is part of a new trend in the Chupacabra myth, one in which the traditional description given above is completely ignored, and more and more people are starting to say that Chupacabras can also look like a wild dog. Why? I guess because are catching wild dogs, and wanting to say they caught a Chupacabra, and therefore are retconning an entirely new description onto the concept.

In November 2007, an alleged Chupacabra head was DNA tested and deterimed to be that of a coyote. In January 2008, a "dog-like" animal was seen killing chickens on a farm in the Phillipines and was declared to be, obviously, a Chupacabra and not a dog. In July 2010, a coyote-dog hybrid with mange was called a Chupacabra in Texas.
And now, we have this poor dead critter to add to the list, and it would be hilarious in its absurdity except I don't find dead critters funny.

Cothren was quoted by WAVE3, by way of POPFi: "I was like, ‘every animal has hair, especially this time of year!’ What puzzled me is how something like that could survive through a winter with no hair."

Well, it didn't survive the winter, sir - you shot and killed it.

William Branham

The great Kentucky psychic faith-healer William Branham died on this day, Christmas Eve, in 1965.

Branham was born in Burkesville, KY in 1909 to a Catholic family. As a young man, he began racking up an impressive career as a boxer, with fifteen wins on his record. He coulda been a contender, but something happened that caused him to abruptly change his life's trajectory in favor of the Baptist church. He hung up his boxing gloves, donned a suit, and began preaching the gospel in tent revivals.

Preaching was definitely Branham's calling - he was very charismatic, so much so that he quickly acquired his own church with swelling ranks of devotees. As his congregation grew, so did his messianic nature. On June 11, 1933, while baptizing people in the Ohio River between Louisville and Jeffersonville, he claimed that a bright light descended upon him and a disembodied angelic voice told him, "As John the Baptist was sent to forerun the first coming of Jesus Christ, so your message will forerun His second coming."

As the 20th century progressed, many other thinkers and gifted individuals (including fellow Kentuckian Edgar Cayce) began feeling their way from traditional theology toward what would later be known as "New Age" philosophies. Branham's beliefs went from Baptist to Pentecostal, then gradually became more and more apocalyptic and further out past the fringes of mainstream Christianity.


Branham claimed to be the literal reincarnation of the Biblical prophet Elijah, and that his past lives extended throughout history. Says Branham, he was with Moses at the Burning Bush and saw the parting of the Red Sea. I've always wondered if he ever listened to the folk song "I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago". (I like the Elvis version best!)

Branham was also a major proponent of the controversial "serpent seed" doctrine, which held that the snake in the Garden of Eden was actually a reptilian humanoid who mated with Eve to produce Cain. The idea did not originate with Branham, however; it was once a relatively accepted idea in early Jewish Midrashic texts and in the obscure Rabbinical treatise Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer (פרקי דרבי אליעזר).

Branham's grave is located in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Many of his followers are still active today.


Consult your copy of Weird Kentucky for more Branham revelations!

(Top image: Branham preaching. Middle image: the prophet Elijah, riding his flaming chariot across the sky. Bottom image: poster for a 1956 event with Branham. )