Defend the Indefensible: Kentucky

so not gonna happen

well, I'm getting my bearings.

OK is seriously just horrible

i grew up in cincinnati, across the river from kentucky. more significant, my dad was born & raised in louisville and we regularly visited my grandparents there. so i have GREAT memories of kentucky. it's similar to cincinnati in terms of being a river port but always seemed less industrial and hence prettier, more southern and laid-back. skipping stones in cherokee park, sitting around my grandparents house while the adults drank whiskey and argued - fun!

northern ky is a different bag, essentially the suburbs of cincinnati. when i was a kid, newport was the gambling/strip club "sin city" across the river. as the pictures upthread demonstrate, parks in the rest of kentucky are beautiful: caves, gorges and lakes. the horse farms around lexington look great when you're driving south. appalachia is a region to itself, really. there was a lot of anti-hillbilly prejudice in cincinnati due to the large influx of refugees from the mountains. even though people from louisville had (gentle) southern accents and we didn't, i always thought cinci was more redneck/racist.

Maybe I should do Ohio.

: )

Completely stealing this from JFK or somebody but -

LOUISVILLE - Northern efficiency, Southern charm.
WASHINGTON DC - Southern efficiency, Northern charm.

"northern charm"

I've live in Louisville and used to live in Lexington. I've lived and visited many states in the US, and have come to the conclusion that there's nowhere I'd rather live than Kentucky at this point.

Louisville has an awesome network of parks in the city designed by Olmstead.

http://www.olmstedparks.org/our-parks/

The Old Louisville neighborhood is the largest preserved collection of Victorian homes in the US and is located on the site of the Southern Exposition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Louisville

there's nowhere I'd rather live than Kentucky at this point.

Even if I don't feel that way about Kentucky it makes me so happy to hear somebody say this about their home state

It's just a great state, politics aside. Louisville and Lexington are all-time.

And per BBQ, nah, it may be unique but it's just not that notable, though I think the eastern part of the state has more going on in that front. Plenty of other food to make up for it, though.

The urban / rural political divide is worth noting. McConnell and his kind of conservative bs is what people think of first. But Kentucky also has Yarmouth representing the Louisville congressional district and Lexington has a openly gay mayor Jim Gray.

People thinking of visiting Louisville could not do any better than staying at the 21c museum / hotel.

http://www.21cmuseumhotels.com/louisville/

There are plans for a new 21c in Lexington as well, but they just announced plans last month.

Do you ever, you know, get tired of Papa John's?

We stayed at the 21C a month ago. Neat hotel, worth the cost (at least for one night) because it's so close to all sorts of stuff. The bar/restaurant is great, too, and completely changed how I mix an Old Fashioned.

The politics ... I mean, Oregon is a very divided state, though you'd never guess it from Portland or Eugene or Olympia or whatever. But on a national scale, they lean democratic. Kentucky, there may be local outpost of liberalism, but the on state-wide and national levels, the state seems to default hard right: Mitch, Rand, federal judges ...

Is Papa John's a Kentucky joint?

Papa John's, UPS and all those YUM brands.

Here's where the Louisville Cardinals play:

http://www.louisville.com/files/u2818/yum%20center.jpg

You can't expect the same town that's home to Churchill Downs, the Louisville Slugger and Muhammed Ali to be 100% perfect, right?

Best time in Kentucky:
Louisville - Sitting on a back porch in the early summer in that soft, night air, drinking bourbon and singing along with some folks playing guitar. It was such a small moment but I remember it so well because it felt nearly magical.

Worst time in Kentucky:
Paducah - Going with a traveling companion to buy acid from a total tweaker, small-town KY wannabe drug kingpin and his terrifying minions and sitting in his living room while he smoked meth and talked about all of his guns, wondering seriously whether my companion would intervene on my behalf if things went horribly wrong for me.

Most hilarious time in Kentucky:
Trying to order a burrito with no meat, just beans from the Paducah Taco John's drive through. "You want no meat, just beef?" "No meant just BEANS! B-E-A-N-S!" "You don't want meat on your burrito?" "Just beans." "Just beef?"

I'm way too much of a Yankee to want to live in the south again, but overall, KY was very pretty and I would totally go camping there.

Oh, man, I went to a late-night Walmart close to Louisville when I was there, to buy cold medicine. They had closed down all the lanes but two, so not only were the lines long, I got to watch all the weirdos waiting in them. Some woman waiting 20 minutes to buy a belt - at 10:30 on a Saturday night! The dude behind me, buying a discount NCAA basketball, was wobbly drunk. The guy un front of me had a shopping cart with three packs of bacon in it. Every single person there was buying - and waiting in a long line to buy!- something totally batshit for a Saturday night. But of course, this goes on everywhere.

http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/

> Do you ever, you know, get tired of Papa John's?

Never eat the stuff really. If I want a slice, I'll grab some Papalino's >> Impellezeri's >> or Spinelli's. For some reason Louisville natives rep for Beano's 'Louisville style pizza', which to me is just hot garbage covered in cheese and should be tried for crimes against pizza in the Hague or something. I'm told it used to be good.

"bearno's"

Great thing about Kentucky is that its abbreviation is "KY."

Appalshop - http://appalshop.org/

and their radio station, WMMT

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, April 24, 2012 4:27 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seconded. And I love that it's just down the street from the Harry Caudill Library.

My only extended time in Kentucky gave me a pretty weird view of things, because I was in the mountains, doing interviews with people involved in (or affiliated with people involved in) this horrible thing. Grim towns there, always seemed too dark to me because the mountains crowd the sky so much, roads full of coal trucks, and everybody I talked to had some kind of horrible backstory: abuse, assault, drugs, poverty, etc etc. I spent an evening in the trailer of a 20-year-old girl who had to keep interrupting the interview when people would show up to buy pills and weed from her. I heard she landed in a mental hospital a year or two later.

Otoh, hanging out at Appalshop one day I met a woman who had a great story about how her dad used to own Dock Boggs' banjo. I checked it out and it was true, which eventually led to me making a visit to Mike Seeger in Virginia to see the banjo. So that was cool.

Also, put this in the "pro" column: http://www.newsomscountryham.com/

Jesus Christ about those murders, tipsy. Not going to shake that from my head too easily.

I pulled off in the hometown of the Everly Bros one night and took a piss behind a catalog store.

so there was pretty much no motive behind those murders? did they just need a van?

Pretty much. I have my own theory about how/why it happened based on the personalities and dynamics of the six Kentucky kids, but when it comes down to it it was just an awful, nearly random thing.

(ifwiw the article I wrote about it is the first thing linked in the footnotes to that wiki entry)

reviving this thread to ask tipsy if he'd be willing to share a bit more about his theory on the Lillelid murders.

i have no connection to the case, just curious.

what a sad story.