Oh, Kentucky

Followsup from last night's Kentucky-minute "Ah, Footbah" coverage: Dan Wright reports in The Kentucky Post that Beechwood built a 21-7 first-half lead on Covington Catholic but then yielded 17 unanswered points and lost ... Somerset 41 vs. Estill County 9 ... Estill County, wrote Tim Hyden in Somerset's Commonwealth Journal, "hoped for four yards and a cloud of dust, over and over and over again--to keep chugging downfield while the seconds wound away with Somerset’s high-powered sports car of an offense sitting in idle on the sideline. That was the plan anyway." Somerset 41, Estill County 9. ... The Southwestern Warriors of Somerset, come-from-behind winners over Danville last night, call their home field, "The Reservation."

Hooray!

They're Rosemary Clooneying it up in Maysville this weekend.

Bad jobs news from Henderson and Lexington.

The germination of FOSDP.

The germination of Paducah's punk-rock timeline.

Freakwater continues. About 10 or 11 years ago (I never can remember the year, which is really strange), I got in touch with the publicity people for Freakwater about doing a story on them for somebody. I was living in Cleveland Park at the time, and they were coming to play at a bar in Rosslyn or Ballston--somewhere around there. It was kind of an quick-in/quick-out thing for them, so what we decided was that I'd go to the concert and introduce myself and gather the atmosphere details my story would need--but that I'd do the interviews on the phone in the subsequent days. Sure enough, I went to the Saturday-night concert, and it was all terrific. The crowd (a lot of Kentuckians) was enthusiastic, and the two Louisville women (about our age) who front the band could not have been more gracious to me. Also, after the concert, I got to sit down for a bit with the drummer, who also played some with Wilco, and I got to talk with him a little about that band's Uncle Tupelo days. That was great, because, in the late 1980s, Uncle Tupelo used to stop off I-65 in Bowling Green when they were in between Louisville and Nashville dates, and sometimes I'd get to see them when I went to Picasso's to see the Government Cheese. Anyway, everything was going swimmingly. The next day after the concert, I returned to Virginia to visit the SPVs and had a customarily splendid afternoon with all of them. I got back to Cleveland Park around dusk, finally found the elusive Sunday-evening parking spot several blocks from my apartment and began thinking about next steps on the Freakwater story. But as I walked by the community garden behind the apartment building, my mind just blanked out for a second and was pierced with this oddly urgent sense that I needed to remember to check the answering machine when I got inside. So concerned that I'd forget, I just left the door ajar and immediately walked in to check upon arriving, and, alas, there was a message: from Mom, that Dad was dead. And I never got back to working on the Freakwater story.