Indian Head Rock

For many years, a rock protruding from the middle of the Ohio River along Greenup County was a popular spot for swimmers and waders to venture out to and have their picture taken. The rock also became well-known for a petroglyph of an oddly simplistic face.

Not everyone agrees on the significance and origin of the face. According to Wikipedia:

It has been theorized that the face was carved by an Native American artist as a petroglyph, a boatman as a river gauge, or was carved by John Book from Portsmouth, Ohio who later fought in the Battle of Shiloh. Other theories include that a band of robbers used it to mark their nearby stash and that a quarry man carved the face with a metal device.

Seeking to preserve the rock from eventual destruction from erosion or defacement, Ohio historian Steve Shaffer took it upon himself to remove the rock from the river and haul it over to Ohio, where it was placed on display.

And then all hell broke loose.

The Greenup County Attorney declared that Shaffer's removal of the rock could be a violation of Kentucky’s Antiquity Act (a Class D felony) and the Army Corps of Engineers also opined that the rock was Kentucky property and its removal violated the Federal Rivers and Harborment Act of 1899. After three years of legal wrangling - which included having the Mayor of Portsmouth, OH dragged before the Grand Jury - the rock is finally being returned to Kentucky. Says the Courier-Journal:

Under an agreed order dismissing a suit filed in federal court, the city of Portsmouth, Ohio, will relinquish control of the rock and permit it to be returned to Kentucky.

The so-called Indian Head Rock will be taken to a Greenup County garage until a permanent home can be found and money can be identified to put it on display for public viewing, Greenup County Judge-Executive Robert Carpenter said in a release from the Kentucky Heritage Council.

Haunted Meat Locker

An event I regrettably missed out on...

The Belva Mine Disaster

This story, as told over and over, and cut and pasted almost verbatim on numerous online sources, goes like this:

In December 1945, an explosion at the Belva mine in Fourmile, KY killed many miners and left a handful of survivors trapped. These survivors were eventually rescued, and subsequently stated in interviews that at one point during their ordeal, a "door" somehow opened up in a rock wall and a man dressed as a "lumberjack" or "telephone lineman" stepped out to reassure everyone that they would be rescued. The mystery man then went back into this well-lit room, closed the opening behind him, and was gone.

The source for these interviews is universally given as having "appeared in the December 1981 - January 1982 issues of newspapers in Pineville, Kentucky". Some online sources mistakenly place the setting of the Belva mine in Pennsylvania, but they're obviously confusing it with a similar story of strange men illuminated by a bluish light that manifested to trapped miners in Shipton, PA and told them not to worry.


The CDC actually has an old report online here (in pdf format) - but it doesn't address the magical lumberjack.

The recent hubbub about the rescued Chilean miners being forbidden to talk about the first 17 days underground has raised a lot of conjecture about what exactly is being concealed in that incident.

Some invoke the Richard Shaver "Deros", others the "Hollow Earth" hypothesis, and still others point to the list of alleged underground bases that has been circling the net since the 1990s.

(That list, by the way, names Pineville, KY as the site of a so-called "underground base", apparently for no other reason than because of this very "mystery lumberjack" story we're addressing now. It also incorrectly lists a cave in Tazewell County, VA as being in Kentucky.)


It also doesn't help the story's provenance that a newspaper account at the time, published in the Middlesboro Daily News, makes no mention of anything odd or supernatural happening. I have yet to track down these alleged 1981-1982 papers that blow the lid off the lumberjack legend.

The whole thing sounds like malarkey to me, but I've learned by now that sometimes that stories that sound the absolute stupidest often tend to be the ones that are true. Some have used the Belva lumberjack as a springboard for envisioning a whole concept about good samaritans traveling through time and space to help people in need. Though I don't doubt that such entities could exist, I'm pretty sure this isn't such a case. But with all such matters, like the supposed time-traveler at a Chaplin movie premiere or the long-enduring mythology of the Men in Black, I remain an open circuit and not a closed switch.

Orientation

Doing an "FAQ" of sorts for Unusual Kentucky is something I've been mulling over for quite some time now, and I reckon it's fully mulled. Here's a few handy-dandy tips on how best to utilize this blog to its optimum potential, and some background exposition to help put all this in context.

First, and perhaps foremost, you should know that although I am a writer and journalist, I do not consider blogging to be journalism per se. When blogging, I pretty much type whatever pops into my cabeza in personal-editorial mode. Virtually everything you will read here consists of just what you would expect from the world of UFOs, paranormal, ghosts, conspiracy theory, etc. - vague rumor, hearsay, anecdotal evidence, folklore, legend, and myth. It just comes with the territory. There's already more than enough of that online, so I try to avoid unsourced falsehoods and Junk Data whenever possible, but hey, this is the internet, so caveat emptor, Jack. If you use my blog - or anything else from the internet, for that matter - as a primary source for your doctoral thesis, well, that's your misfortune.

Updating this silly blog takes up less than 1 percent of what I do in life, and the reader is cautioned to keep that in mind. I rarely spend more than a few minutes on a post, and am as often as not typing under the influence of coffee, bourbon, European snuff, or sleep deprivation. This blog is supposed to be a thought-provoking and fun clearinghouse for weird Kentucky memes, usually reported off the top of my head with very little effort (I charge money for that) - if you take it seriously at all, you're taking it way too seriously.


Which brings us to the second point: comment moderation. With the blog's growing popularity, I now get hundreds of spam comments which I must tediously wade through to pick out the real ones. And among those real ones, I tend to leave out the ones that are insulting and wanting to pick a fight. If you have a beef with something I say here, e-mail me directly. I rarely bother to get into prolonged debates with anyone about anything, but I never do with anonymous internet jerks.

I also tend to ignore comments that are non-sequiturs, that are questions or conversation that would be better off addressed to me via e-mail, or that exist only to post a link.


Now, some tips on some features of Blogger itself you may not be aware of. I get a lot of questions asking things like "Where is your post on such-and-such? I can't find it." Even without doing a Google search for your query, you can cross-search this blog in two ways - by the labels (the keyword links at the bottom of each post) which might assist you in your quest, or by the search box in the upper left corner of every Blogger site.


This blog is not optimized for viewing on RSS, or via any other method or device than actually directly viewing the blog at the source and on a regular computer's web browser.

And finally, I get a lot of confused queries from folks who mistakenly believe that I am from NYC or Los Angeles and am writing about Kentucky from a distance and out of ridicule (One nut even sent me a hate letter once that started out "You big city people come to Kentucky just to laugh at us".) To set the record straight, I am a farmboy from Waco, KY on the Madison/Estill County border, and though I maintain painting/photography studios and branch offices in several cities, my home base is still Kentucky and always will be. My entire purpose in this blog is to highlight what a wondrous and exciting place Kentucky really is, and that it is a key part of those things in Heaven and Earth undreamt of in your imagination, Horatio.

And finally finally: I welcome your input and contributions. Send me pics! Send me reports! Not enough stuff here from Calloway County? Rectify that and help me out! Tell me what's good in your neck of the woods.

Alrighty then, agents of Interzone, consider yourselves briefed. Now get out there and file those reports. Go go go. Oo-rah. Semper Fi.

Hamburg Place Horse Cemetery

Once upon a time, the site where the sprawling Lexington strip mall known alternately as Hamburg Pavilion and Hamburg Place now occupies was one of Kentucky's most beautiful horse farms.


The decision to cleave the farm in two to allow I-75 to be constructed was hotly contested and controversial at the time, but the public was assured this was only a minor marring of the farm's beauty. Then when it was decided to bulldoze half of it to build lots of shopping centers on the edge of a city that already couldn't support its own failing shopping malls, further controversy and arguing ensued. But in the end, commerce won out, as it always does.



If that sounds cynical, it is. But let me also say that I do love shopping at Hamburg, and always make a beeline for it when I'm in Lex-town. I especially never miss a chance to visit Half Price Books and the butterburgers at Culver's.

And next time you're here, watch for this cemetery on Sir Barton Way that conjures up memories the glory days of the Fayette County horse industry. That is, if you can forget that you're standing in the back parking lot of a Lowe's and a Wal-Mart.



Of all the horses interred here, Nancy Hanks gets the most deluxe marker, with a lovely statue. Named after Abraham Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks never ran in a Derby but did break a world's record for trotting a mile in 2 minutes and 4 seconds, which was a major feat in 1892.

It's John Madden himself, founder of the farm, that gets the fanciest treatment, though. Contrary to popular belief, this is not Madden's grave, it's just a tribute. He's actually buried in Cavalry Cemetery.

Land of Tomorrow

It's often been repeated in years past - by me, even - that there's an old legend about Kentucky's name coming from a Native American word for "dark and bloody ground". The legend, of course, isn't true - but hey, it's always been a useful meme, because Native Americans did use that specific phrase to describe this area.

We still don't really know for certain where the word "Kentucky" comes from. George Rogers Clark said it came from a Native American word meaning "river of blood". That's pretty awesome, but really, there's no reason not to make the more logical assumption that it comes from the Mohawk word Kentah-Ke, meaning "meadow".

But that doesn't mean we have to abandon the "dark and bloody ground" concept, not by any stretch. The term really was applied by Native Americans to describe the territory that would become Transylvania, and then eventually our modern-day Commonwealth of Kentucky. In Steven A. Channing's Kentucky: A Bicentennial History:

When representatives of the Transylvania Land Company
signed the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in 1775, Chief Dragging Canoe of the Cherokee said they had secured "a dark and bloody ground."

Why dark and bloody, exactly? Well, it's complicated. Northern and southern tribes, such as the Cherokee and Shawnee, had been fighting over the land for as long as either side could remember. But the curious thing is, they weren't fighting for it for the purpose of living there. They wanted the land strictly for its qualities as a superb hunting ground, but one that spooked all concerned (perhaps it was, even then, teeming with Devil Deer.) There was something about this land, even in ancient times, that early man seemed fearful of.

And it seems to go back to early, early man, ones that even predate our own Native Americans.

In his 1806 book Travels In America, Thomas Ashe writes of his experiences with a vast network of huge open-room caverns originally discovered in 1783 beneath the city of Lexington, containing exotic artifacts, a stone altar for sacrifices, human skulls and bones piled high, and mummified remains.

These mummies were very strange looking, of unusually tall stature, and had red hair. The local native Americans claimed that these were the remnants of an ancient race predating their own; one that died out long ago and about which they knew very little.

Respected historian George W. Ranck, writing in 1872, also discussed this "lost city" buried beneath Lexington, and Don Edwards, writing a century later in the Lexington Herald-Leader, noted that when construction workers were preparing to build one of the downtown hotels, they took many more core drillings of the ground than usual - just to be sure they weren't building atop one of the legendary giant caverns.

Lexington isn't the only place that strange Kentucky mummies have been found. Check your copy of Weird Kentucky for information on the mummies discovered in Mammoth Cave - mummies that continue to confound our current ethnological paradigm.


And in 1792, General John Payne made a strange discovery while building his house in the tiny town of Augusta, KY, 63 miles North of Lexington. Payne's firsthand account is related in Historical Sketches of Kentucky by Lewis Collins:

"The bottom on which Augusta is situated is a large burying ground of the ancients...They have been found in great numbers, and of all sizes, everywhere between the mouths of Bracken and Locust Creeks, a distance of about a mile and a half. From the cellar under my dwelling, 60 by 70 feet, over a hundred and ten skeletons were taken. I measured them by skulls, and there might have been more, whose skulls had crumbled into dust...The skeletons were of all sizes, from seven feet to infant.

David Kilgour (who was a tall and very large man) passed our village at the time I was excavating my cellar, and we took him down and applied a thigh bone to his. The man, if well-proportioned, must have been 10 to 12 inches taller than Kilgour, and the lower jaw bone would slip on over his, skin and all. Who were they? How came their bones here?

When I was in the army, I inquired of old Crane, a Wyandot and of Anglerson, a Delaware, both intelligent old chiefs, and they could give me no information in reference to these remains of antiquity. Some of the largest trees of the forest were growing over the remains when the land was cleared in 1792."

A few years later, on December 21, 1806, the town of Augusta, KY was visited by Harman Blennerhassett, lawyer, occultist, and member of the Illuminati. Was he aware of the ancient underground civilization in the region?

Blennerhassett was born on October 8, 1764 in Ireland and moved to the USA with his wife, where they settled on Blennerhassett Island on the Ohio River. Blennerhassett was a friend and colleague of Adam Weishaupt, and a member of his Order of the Illuminati, reaching the level of Illuminatus Magus. He was also a friend of Vice President Aaron Burr, with whom he, some allege, engaged in a conspiracy to, among other things, remove President Thomas Jefferson from power. The plot was discovered, and Blennerhassett's secret camp at Marietta was destroyed on December 19, 1806.

Blennerhassett fled with about 50 of his fellow initiates, leaving his wife, his sons and the rest of his guerrilla troops behind. But here's what has always puzzled me: instead of making a direct exit, Blennerhassett risked making a mysterious side trip to Augusta, KY, arriving on the day of the solstice. Given his penchant for mystical folderol, it seems clear to me that there must have been some occult significance to his visit to Augusta. But what? We may never know.

That Blennerhassett was interested in Kentucky's forgotten ancient civilization is a distinct possibility, however. And did the Marquis de Lafayette have similar thoughts in mind when he toured America with an eye for ancient burial mounds and significance found in calendar dates?

(By the way, I originally wrote an essay on these subjects on my old, now defunct, original version of the UnK site, and much of that material was cut and pasted with some unwelcome alterations and reprinted on other sites with credit given not to me but someone else. So here on this Halloween, I hereby declare the Curse of Grillo's Grandfather and will also mention that I have some excellent attorneys.)

And then there's The Kentucky Anomaly, which is something I ran across accidentally while combing through a mind-numbing quantity of old NASA technical reports. NASA subsequently pulled the report from the URL at which it had previously occupied, and replaced it with something else. But the original report had spoken of "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."

Gravity anomalies. Caused by something beneath Kentucky. Seriously. Now that's news! Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out much else about this so-called "Kentucky Anomaly". What does it all mean? Dunno. I'm working on it. But if, as NASA says, this thing goes back to Pre-Cambrian times, consider that this could be the smoking gun as to why this territory has had a palpably weird vibe for as long as humans have dwelt on its soil.


On the other hand, the Ohio River along Kentucky's upper border also seems to be a source-point for spookiness, from the burial mounds of the Ashland area where Charles Manson grew up, to the aforementioned Augusta, to the anomalous Welsh-speaking people that implausibly turned up in the area that would later become Louisville (Again, consult your copy of Weird Kentucky.)

The mysterious and awe-inspiring Great Serpent Mound is just on the other side of the river in Ohio, but definitely related to all this other ancient activity in the Kentucky/Ohio Valley region. The tribes involved have been alternately theorized to be the Hopewell, the Fort Ancient, the Adena, and a prehistoric precursor of the Allegheny tribe known as the Tallagewi. Still others contend that it all goes back even further, to lost cultures about whom we know absolutely nothing.

Of the Great Serpent Mound, Wikipedia has this to say:

The mound is located on a plateau with a unique cryptoexplosion structure that contains faulted and folded bedrock, usually produced either by a meteorite or a volcanic explosion.

Determining exactly what formed the Serpent Mound Cryptoexplosion Structure is a problem that geologists continue to debate. Two main solutions have been offered. Some geologists think the structure is a meteorite or asteroid crater. Others suggest that the structure was caused by forces from inside the earth, probably an explosive eruption of gases derived from a deep magma source in the basement rocks.

A similar anomaly exists at Jeptha Knob in Clayvillage, KY (Shelby County). Jeptha Knob was originally thought to be a cryptovolcanic structure but now is considered to be the site where a massive asteroid struck the Earth 425 million years ago.

One could go quite mad studying all the puzzling evidence - and some have.

This Halloween, my fellow Kentuckians, count yourself lucky to be living in one of our country's most interesting states - but also consider that "may you live in an interesting state" could be an equally effective variant of the Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times."

There's yet another proposed meaning for the word Kentucky - some say it comes from a Wyandot word meaning "Land of Tomorrow". Though not as plausible as some of the ones we addressed at the outset, I just like the sound of it, and the implication it carries - that as interesting as Kentucky is now, it's going to get even more interesting in the future...

Nude Statues in Gratz Park

The fountain (which hasn't been running the last few times I've gone by it) in Lexington's Gratz Park features these two semi-nude figures frolicking eternally in bronze.


Given the modern-day prudism regarding the human body in public art - consider John Ashcroft's covering the bare-breasted Spirit of Justice statue, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli censoring his own state's seal, and Republican delegate Robert Hurt's mission to censor all nude art in Washington D.C. - it's surprising that some squeamish sorts haven't already crocheted some clothes for these skyclad splashers.




The fountain and statuary were donated to the city of Lexington by the great novelist James Lane Allen, a graduate of Transylvania University. Allen was part of the growing "Local Color" movement in literature in the late 19th century. Rather than writing in a generalized setting and style that everyone could easiy relate to, the "Local Color" or "Regionalist" writers sought to use their stories to document the dialect, the people, and notable places in a specific locale. (Another Kentucky example: Annie Fellows Johnston's Little Colonel series of books.)

Campaign Ad Depicts Rock Stars as Criminals

A political advertisement for one James A. Daley, Campbell County Attorney, has backfired in the worst way.

The ad accuses his opponent Steve Franzen of "making a living defending criminals". Hey, no shit, Sherlock! - he used to be a public defender. In America everyone has a right to legal representation, even though I know you prosecutors wish we could dispense with that quaint formality. The ad further illustrates its confused point by showing a bunch of black-leather-clad tattooed tough guy "criminal types".

Problem is, those men are all members of current rock bands - Disturbed, Stone Sour, and Avenged Sevenfold, all of whom are popular Warner Bros. recording artists. And they're not pleased with being portrayed as criminals, especially not for some two-bit politician's personal gain.

According to Cincinnati.com:

Franzen, a private practice attorney who works in criminal defense, said beyond being disgusted at the message on the flier, depicting these band members, who are in no way connected to him, as criminals is a violation of several laws including copyright, slander and placing someone in false light.

"We're talking about the county attorney here," Franzen said. "At the very least he ought to be able and willing to run a campaign within the bounds of the law."

Justin Verst, the chair of "Keep James A. Daley County Attorney," who paid for the flier, said it was produced by the group's paid consultants, November Strategies. Verst said the fliers did go out with his group's permission.

Post-Tornado Rainbow

Yesterday I thought it was just a typical windy Autumn morning while I was sitting in the Middletown Starbucks. What I didn't know was that most of Kentucky was on a tornado watch, that a tornado had been spotted just over the river in Indiana, and another one had overturned a semi-truck on the Watterson.

Meanwhile, in Scott County, a forming funnel cloud was caught on video, and in Hopkinsville, one tore the roof off a storage building. That may or may not be the same one witnessed by National Weather Service spotters near Pembroke, and then in Dunmor in Muhlenberg County. An enormous tree in Berea toppled in the storm, narrowly missing an entire apartment complex. In Middlesboro, the mall was damaged and the power was knocked out.

To my surprise, one of the baristas came to the center of the room and announced, "uh, everybody, your attention please, we've just been informed that funnel clouds have been seen in Anchorage, so I'm going to have to ask you all to move away from the glass windows and to the rear of the building, for your safety."

And so we all migrated to the back, everyone suddenly intently tapping at their laptops and handhelds, and within seconds, we were all sharing info with each other that we'd gleaned. One guy instantly had a real-time animation from the NWS on his laptop full-screen, and was showing us how it was estimated to be moving at 80MPH and thus would be past us very quickly. It wasn't that long ago that we'd all be huddled around a radio, listening for the latest wire-service news update from the DJ, but now, every citizen with wi-fi internet access is instantly better informed than even that radio DJ of yesteryear.

Though the tornadic front did indeed swiftly pass, the rainstorm on its coattails continued for hours more. But when it was over and blue sky began to peek out from the cloud cover, I caught an odd rainbow that only existed over a portion of very specific clouds - when those clouds shifted, so did the rainbow, and when that cloud system rolled away, the rainbow was gone. Though my eye saw an evenly ordered full spectrum in it, my camera surprisingly did not - at least, not as clearly.

Fort Knox is Burning

Over the weekend, a massive fire-fighting effort has been underway to douse the flames that have been sweeping hundreds of acres at Fort Knox. No one's certain how it started, but some are saying that the fires probably started after tracer rounds were fired during military exercises. This is ammo enhanced with pyrotechnic materials that allow the paths of the projectiles to be clearly seen as they sail through the air.

According to the Courier-Journal, at least 87 drops of water have been performed by Blackhawk helicopters. There's conflicting reports online at the moment, some saying that the fires have all been contained, while others indicate that some are still burning. Fire departments that have provided assistance include Bullitt County, Flaherty, Lebanon Junction, Nichols, PRP, Rineyville, and Zoneton.

Another fire, at the Fort Duffield Civil War Park in West Point, KY, is believed to have been also sparked by the Fort Knox conflagration. According to WHAS:

The WHAS11 crew walked up a hill inside the park to get a closer look at the now-controlled flames and saw firsthand the damage the fire caused. The blaze was so hot, it did something no one working the fire said they had ever seen before; melted a portion of one man’s helmet.

The considerable smoke lingering over the southern part of Jefferson County has been very bad to breathe, with air quality ratings in Valley Station reaching undesirable levels.

The Kentucky Forestry Division reports that 42 fires in 31 counties occurred last week. 15 of those were in Rockcastle County, where
Judge-Executive Buzz Carloftis issued a total ban on all open fires, including trash fires, camp bonfires, and controlled burnoffs on public and private land.

In addition to being a major training base for the U.S. Army, Fort Knox also supposedly houses the nation's gold bullion supply. I say "supposedly" because there's been a growing concern in some circles that the gold is actually missing. There have been reports of "gold" ingots discovered to be composed primarily of tungsten, a metal whose weight is close enough to gold for the brick to pass the flotation test.

There have been repeated calls for an independent audit of Fort Knox's gold since the Reagan administration, but the Federal Reserve has stonewalled these efforts each time. And as market analyst Gary North wisely notes, the Fed may have good reason to be in damage-control mode, as a chain reaction of worldwide financial upheaval could ensue:

"If all the gold is not there, there will be enormous pressure from voters on governments around the world to audit the gold reserves of their central banks. If the gold held in trust by the New York Fed is not there, foreign voters will conclude that their governments' gold may not be there either."

Things may be getting even hotter for Fort Knox if the gold-audit proponents get their way, and that's a fire that shows no signs of being put out.

The Fraternity Cult of Aqua Buddha

Larry David had a good rant on Curb Your Enthusiasm about people who say "Having Said That" in a context which allows them to state one thing and then use "Having Said That" to proceed to make a sharp turn and contradict themselves. "I hate all dogs. Having said that, I really love Rin Tin Tin."

Bear with me, here, then:

As I've often stated on these blogs, I have zero interest in terrestrial politics. I long ago gave up the rigged shell-game of believing that terms like "left", "right" "liberal", "conservative", "republican" and "democrat" have held any real meaning in my lifetime. Both political parties are controlled by the same hive-mind packs of superstitious and short-sighted men, and neither party even comes close to addressing the issues that I consider the most important ones facing humanity today. In the immortal words of William S. Burroughs, "Fuck 'em all, squares on both sides."

Also, whenever I post here about some "weird politics" story, it invariably touches off knee-jerk reactions from people who assume that if I make fun of something really stupid that Gov. Beshear does, then it logically must follow that I am a Republican. I most assuredly am not - I don't use Brand X or Brand Y.

So that's why I tend to avoid political posts altogether, especially during election years.

But having said that........

The recent revelations about Rand Paul's college days, printed in GQ Magazine, are just too wacky not to examine. The article claims that Paul belonged to a fraternity well known for its anti-Christian and anti-religious sentiment. As part of this frat's rituals, the article alleges, Paul took part in tying up a woman and forcing her to kneel in obeisance to a comical mock-god of theirs they called the Aqua Buddha.

That's pretty crazy stuff, if true. And when Jack Conway used this information for an attack ad of his own, Paul decried it as despicable, and reportedly called Conway a "liar." But since the source of the Aqua Buddha cult story comes from GQ, not Conway himself, I think Mr. Paul is a tad confused there. Nonetheless, Paul has since several all ties of civility with Conway after the ad aired, refusing to even shake hands with him in debates. Says Paul: "I will not shake hands with someone who attacks my religion and attacks my Christian beliefs."

Again, while I understand Paul's outrage, this response doesn't make logical sense. In no way has Conway attacked Christianity itself by calling attention to the GQ story. And that's my real beef with Paul in the end: he may have some good think-outside-the-box ideas, but he's a very poor communicator. And I distrust people who cannot communicate. In fact, I turn and run from them whenever possible.

(I suppose I should say something critical about Jack Conway here just to keep it from looking like this is strictly an attack on Rand Paul, but honestly, I don't know anything about the guy. He bores me. Like I said, I don't follow politics and couldn't care less. I will say that, in order to campaign against someone, if you have to reach all the way back to your opponent's school years to dig up dirt on them, then your campaign is obviously in deep, deep trouble.)

According to FOX News:

Conway's team made it crystal clear Thursday that their candidate would be at the forum, regardless. In an e-mailed statement to reporters, campaign spokesman John Collins said, "Attorney General Jack Conway will be at the debate - regardless of whether Rand Paul has the guts to answer basic questions about his own actions. Jack understands and will always stand up for the people of Kentucky. Rand should stop his huffing and puffing and start answering people's questions."

Yeah, yeah, whatever - I don't care about any of that. I just wanna know more about this Aqua Buddha cult! How did it work? Does it still exist? Do they have an official religious text? Membership dues? Why is it "Aqua"?

The fraternity in question, known as The NoZe Brotherhood was not a legitimate one. It was banned by Baylor University for its sacreligious and racist views espoused in their newsletter The Rope, but continued to operate anyway as a sort of pathetic poor man's secret society. According to a female student quoted in the GQ piece:

"He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They'd been smoking pot." After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. "They told me their god was 'Aqua Buddha' and that I needed to bow down and worship him," the woman recalls. "They blindfolded me and made me bow down to 'Aqua Buddha' in the creek."

Is any of this relevant to the current campaign, though? Absolutely not. Rolling Stone magazine disagrees (but of course, they would):

The sneering, intellectually superior tone of Paul's society-brother newsletter is the one thing that to me seems still relevant to Paul's campaign. If you follow Paul enough and go to enough of his events, you won't be able to miss how much smarter he thinks he is than everyone else; he puts even Al Gore to shame in this department. If you ask him to explain some of his old comments, or something from his father's old libertarian newsletters, as I did, he's liable to roll his eyes at you. He apparently finds the whole answering questions and explaining himself thing very tiresome, and seems put out that he even has to bother with it en route to the Senate. If you read these NoZe articles, you might get an idea of where some of this comes from.

Maybe so, but that still doesn't make it relevant. If doing stupid things in college is enough to dash a professional/political future, then heck, we're all doomed. The NoZe frat may have been idiotic, but they're not half as cause for alarm to me as, say, the Skull and Bones Society, of which both President Bushes and John Kerry were members, and which has been accused of grave-robbing and borderline necrophilia.

If a man can be elected President of the United States after being a member of a group whose initiation ritual requires laying naked in a coffin and reciting one's deepest and darkest sexual fantasies to his fellow frat boys in a room filled with illegally-acquired human bones, I think we have more important things to worry about than Randy's goofy college past.

Jupiter Over Jefferson County

One from my blog Revelation Awaits An Appointed Time:


The planet Jupiter has recently been closer to the Earth than at any time since 1951 or 1963, depending on conflicting media sources.

How close is it?

It's so close that last night, standing in E.P. Sawyer Park in Anchorage, KY, I actually managed to see (I think) one of its 63 known moons through high-powered binoculars.

It's so close that I even managed to take photos with my ordinary and mundane digital camera (an Olympus SP-350, 8.0 megapixel) that, while, not likely to appear in Sky & Telescope anytime soon, are good enough to show Jupiter's characteristic pinkness.