Oh, Kentucky

In the background of this Tuesday snapshot of a perfectly beautiful 3-year-old child who is utterly consumed with joie de vivre while playing at Camp Zachary Taylor Memorial Park in southern Louisville (where F. Scott Fitzgerald trained during World War I), you might notice the boys playing basketball--some in University of Kentucky blue, some in University of Louisville red. It really is kind of like that in the state this week. The Associated Press reports, "Here, the game is likened to a civil war," but that doesn't quite get it. The Courier-Journal on Monday's Page 1 declared it literally is "CIVIL WAR!"


Illustrations of how crazy Kentucky gets about UK-U of L are not hard to find. Pieces of evidence, from absurd to subtle, are coming in from all over: Georgetown, Lexington, Columbia, Nicholasville, Grantland and 1983. My personal favorite little sidelight detail to the big game is the Louisville jeweler who is running radio ads for red- and blue-diamond watches and hosting a pre-game party Saturday. "We haven't had so much to be proud of since the mid '70s," goes the ad. (The mid '70s?)

All of that said, of course, the basketball game is not all that is going on around Kentucky this week. For example, Paducah's rocking the Dogwood Trail.

They're hiring patriots in Elizabethtown and honoring them in Columbia.

A couple of Kentuckians are the the headlining stars of the nation's top movie.

Great news for Aurora, but I thought it was the "Eggner Ferry Bridge."

Meanwhile, from the murals beat, ...
"Lured by the beauty of the Maine coast, freed from business cares as her company stabilized, she spent happy summer months in her last years painting watercolors around Camden, Me. Then the memory thief of Alzheimer's called to claim her. But while there was pulse in her veins on the last day of her life at her Lexington home, the gathered family, realizing what she would want to hear from the world she was leaving, began to sing at her bedside. Remembering happy times on Derby Day, they sang, 'My Old Kentucky Home.'"