Ohio River, Left Bank, MP 606

The snow is still falling here in Lower Clifton Heights*. There are about 2.5 inches of the fallen flakes on my deck. The snow will eventually come to an end in a few hours and when it does we're in for even more magic in the wintry firmament.

To borrow a few lines from Clement Clarke Moore, "The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow, gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below." That luster will be from the first Full Moon of 2021, cresting tomorrow afternoon at 2:16 p.m., but go out tonight and see the wonder!

It's the Wolf Moon, the most appropriate night of the year to Howl at the Moon!

When the sun sets tonight, it will end the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.

Here in Louisville, sunset will occur at 5:25 p.m. I have four friends vacationing in Key West (Ken, Josh, Bobby, Javier (and I wish I was with them)) and for them the day won't end until 5:43 p.m. My friends in Washington, D.C. can witness the sunset at 4:49 p.m. For a friend I am truly missing who lives in LA, sunset over the Pacific, a wondrous sight, occurs at 4:48 p.m.

Later this evening, at 11:19 p.m. EST, 8:19 PST, our Earth will cross a cardinal point on its annual journey drawing to a close these shortened days marking the Winter Solstice and with it ending autumn and beginning winter. With winter, new light and life slowly reveal themselves back into our world as the days lengthen leading to trees budding and gardens flowering.

The Hunter's Full Moon arrives tomorrow afternoon at 5:08 p.m. EDT so tonight's view will be great. The moon is currently about 250,000 miles away from the Earth, about as far as it gets. Its furthest measured distance away is 252,622 miles (so far).

The full moon tonight is accompanied by the chance for a frost across nearly all of Kentucky and much of southern Indiana, reminding me of James Whitcomb Riley's poem, "When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock." Go outside and enjoy the lunacy.

About ten hours from now, at 6:07 a.m. tomorrow morning, we will pass one of those cardinal points on our annual journey around our personal star, the Sun. The Summer Solstice marks the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. In Louisville the period between sunrise and sunset will be 14 hours, 49 minutes, and 48 seconds, the longest day of the year. We're scheduled for some thunderstorms in between those two markers. 

So here was the path having left from my mother's house. South Park Road, Louisville to KY1450W to KY1526W to I-65S to KY245N to KY61S to KY733S to US62E to N. 5th Street, Bardstown to KY1430E to US31E N to KY245S to US150E to BG Parkway E to KY555S (a note on this later) to KY433S (where I piddled around a bit in Mackville - they have a really cool old bank building) - to KY152E to KY442S (the narrow highway full of cattle farms) to KY1920S to the park.

Leaving the park on KY1920S to US150E (where I piddled around a bit in Perryville - I had come across a house for sale online a few weeks ago that I remembered and found it at 216 S. Bragg Street) to US68E to US127N to US127BYP N to US127N (these last two changes require no turns) to I-64W to US42E to US42W to US60W to the Noble Abode in Butchertown.

Senator McConnell, recent Kentucky history, and a prediction on President Trump and the coal voters. 

Earlier today my high school friend, a conservative voter but one who'll vote a Third Party when pressed, explained to another high school friend, like me a Liberal Democrat, that one problem with Kentucky is we have a number of uninformed, ignorant, and one issue voters - her words, not mine. I couldn't agree more although we may disagree on which voters are which. But is this news? Is it news that we're finally showing up as a Red State? Neither is news. It must be said that Kentucky is a Red State and has been for some time even though we've just gotten around to electing a Republican governor last year and turned out our Democratic House this year. The truth is we've been Red since the 1990s. (Being Red appears to be popular right now in more ways than one.) The growth in voter identity (as opposed to registration) between 1996 and 2016 has almost entirely been in the GOP column.

If you look at the presidential numbers starting with Bill Clinton in 1992 and whoever the Republican has been, the Democrats have gotten about the same number of votes for 24 years, around the 700K mark, while the GOP candidates have increased up to about 1M. So that isn't an anti-Hillary or anti-Obama vote but is rather a change in values, or is it? The Democrats' last bit of strength in our state, outside of Louisville, Lexington, and sometimes Frankfort, was in coal country in Prestonsburg and Pikeville in the east and Owensboro and Henderson in the west. Only Henderson remains nominally Democratic, but it is both a natural gas town and a coal town. President Obama and Hillary Clinton's EPA policies, policies started by President Nixon I'll note, finally took their toll. But the voters believe coal is alive. It isn't. It is dying or dead, especially the type mined in eastern Kentucky.

The GOP has flat out lied about coal for about 15 years. I believe one of the good things which may come out of Mr. Trump's presidency is the truth about coal. The new president has surrounded himself with oil and gas proponents, not coal guys. I believe at some point President Trump will double-cross his eastern and western Kentucky coal voters by telling them the truth. It will be a "Nixon-goes-to-China" thing. It will take a Republican to tell them for them to believe it. Which gets us back to Senator McConnell and why he has been re-elected with relative ease since 1984.

He had his own "Nixon-goes-to-China" moment with tobacco in the mid-1980s, back when he still could tell the truth on matters. Democrats in Kentucky allowed him to own the issue of the tobacco buy-out program both in the '80s and the follow up provisions in 2004, which came to an end with the final payments of a $100B program paid in late 2014. He politically converted all the flat tobacco-growing land from D to R - the 1st, 2nd, and 6th congressional districts, with the tobacco buy-out. He has been rewarded and, perhaps, rightly so, giving tobacco farmers a way out with real money. They're now producing more corn and soybeans and even shrimp and catfish. Kentucky State University added an aquaculture program to train farmers to farm something else. But he hasn't done it with coal, that last remnant of Democratic voters.

Why? Because other than eco-tourism, there is little you can do with empty and topless mountains. So, they've continued to lie and promise a light at the end of the tunnel. To be sure, many Kentucky Democrats have joined in the charade. But it is only a false light and President Trump's gas and oil men, the original GOP in the GOP (gas, oil, and petrol) will, I believe, put an end to it. They'll make sure no more money is wasted on a product in competition with their own. It is possible then, when the GOP lie about coal is revealed and admitted to, that some of those former Democratic-voting Kentuckians may become Democrats once again in the voting booths and then, perhaps, we'll have a more balanced state politically. But it will take 20 years to get back to a good place and we'll all be older and ready to leave the future to someone else at that point, if not sooner.

Nil Desperandum.

Mt friend Michael and I took a drive out to South Louisville this afternoon to enjoy the traditional Green River Style fish dinner at the Suburban Lodge on the corner of S. Third Street and W. Collins Court.  Our after dinner drive turned into an impromptu tour of the neighborhoods and streets - old, new, and gone - of the area.

We progressed out of the Suburban parking lot, itself a new location prompted by the extension of Central Avenue east of 2nd Street up and over the L&N yards over to Crittenden Drive, thereby connecting Freedom Hall with Churchill Downs.

Our first neighborhood was that of Wilder Park.  We were in fact on what was at one time called Wilder Parkway but now goes by the more mundane S. 2nd Street. We followed through the area passing the Wilder Park Park, renamed for Huston Quin, a one term judge on the Kentucky Court of Appeals and later, from 1921-1925, a Republican mayor of the old City of Louisville.

Cutting over to the east a few blocks we ended up on the western edition of Louisville Avenue, the only one which is left.  There was also at one time an eastern edition of Louisville Avenue with the L&N Railroad running down the middle.  One point of the drive was to point out to Michael, who was born just over 27 years years ago, where Highland Park was, since it isn't there anymore.

I had mentioned Highland Park while we were eating as the only real competition Suburban has for its style of fish is served up at the Highland Park Lodge which at one time was on the eastern Louisville Avenue in what was at one time Highland Park.  The Highland Park Lodge has since relocated to the former Okolona Post Office building on a street called Pinecroft Drive but what originally known as Lambert Road.  But, I digress.

Tracking down the two Louisville Avenues led us to the multiple Crittenden Drives in the area.  I have complained now and then over the last twenty-five years about the name-identification problems in this area to the various Public Works directors and offered solutions but to no avail.  As all of this area was new to Michael, he clearly saw the problems.

At the intersection of Crittenden Drive and the cross-street just north of the Watterson, the sign to the west identifying the cross-street said Park Boulevard while the sign to the east said Phillips Lane.   I told him neither sign was correct.  It should or could read Seneca Avenue or maybe Ashton Avenue to the east.  It should not read Phillips Lane.  It is hard to say what it should read to the west.  Park Boulevard is and has been for a century about two blocks west of Crittenden Drive, back when Crittenden Drive was known as Ashbottom Road.  S. Floyd Street turns into Park Boulevard where the old Highland Park city limits used to begin just north of the Dakota Street right-of-way.

All of the east-west streets, like Dakota and Seneca, were named for the Native American tribes which once owned and occupied the North American continent before the illegal immigration of white Europeans.  Oh, wait.  This isn't a political post.  It is a geography post.

At the intersection of this newly built and misnamed east-west street which the city has labelled as Park Boulevard and the other Park Boulevard, there is a sign indicating the continuation of this new road to the west and south along the L&N is called Crittenden Drive, this despite the fact there is another Crittenden Drive, the original one, the one formerly called Ashbottom Road, two blocks to the east.  There is, in fact, a U. S. Post Office, at 4440 Crittenden Drive on that original roadway.  Oh well.

We followed the new roadway, the new Crittenden Drive, alongside the railroad, to its intersection with a somewhat reconfigured but still recognizable Woodlawn Overpass.  This is the overpass we long remember as starting out on (that old) Crittenden Drive as Nevada Avenue and ending up on the South Louisville side as Woodlawn Avenue.  We've always had fun with names changing like that.  Anyway, we followed this new Crittenden Drive which eventually rejoined the old one out past the FedEx plant where once stood International Harvester (1945-1985) and before that, the Curtiss-Wright Airplane shops (1942-1945).  But that Crittenden Drive comes to a dead end somewhere around the old city limits line of the old City of Highland Park which was also, later, the old city limits line of the old City of Louisville.  It was at one time Eagan Avenue but in the 1980s was changed to MacLean Avenue.

We circled back up to the Woodlawn Overpass in what I described to Michael would be a double-loop, crossing over to Allmond Avenue and the Iroquois Station Post Office, which houses the Zip Codes 40209, 40214, and 40215.  Allmond circles around and ends at Strawberry Lane, the southern appellation of the western edition of Louisville Avenue.  About two blocks south of where MacLean Avenue once crossed over the tracks, a new bridge has been built, largely at the urging and with the funding direction of long time Alderman and Councilman Dan Johnson.  This is the Crittenden Drive Connector which leads to a new street entirely, "South Crittenden Drive," a street which wasn't there when I was in high school.

I'll be honest - I cannot tell what was where back in the day.  It looks to be about where the old Kroger Distribution Center was next to the old GES Department Store, in the curve south of the airport, where the original "new" Crittenden Drive broke off from Ashbottom Road and made its way around the old "bottom" of Standiford Field, back before the great Airport Expansion Project which began in the 1980s.

This new road hugs the railroad and the spur lines which feed the Ford Motor Company and extend eastward to General Electric, although they are rarely used east of the Ford plant.  The new "South" Crittenden Drive joins Grade Lane about two blocks south of where the older "new" Crittenden Drive once did prior to 1985.

In our short drive, we were on three different "new" Crittenden Drives, plus the Crittenden Drive Connector.  While Highland Park is gone and Park Boulevard seems a little misguided, and Seneca Avenue and Ashton Avenue are out of place, Crittenden Drive is alive and well in several different and unconnected places.

There's an old saying, "Everything in moderation, including moderation."  It's been attributed to many people including Ben Franklin and Oscar Wilde.  It comes to mind of late when thinking about the Duke Boys and their car, the General Lee.  I'm just not all that clear that taking the Duke Boys off the air accomplishes much.  Understand, this doesn't affect me.  I stopped watching TV in 1984, about six months before the Dukes of Hazzard series came to an end.  Then I think about places like Gettysburg and Perryville, both of which I've visited and both of which are celebrating battle anniversaries today.  People from Kentucky on both sides of a war fought and died acting mostly on orders well above their rank. In my post of June 28th I mentioned my unsettled and unsettling self-to-self discussion on the Old South, revisionist history, censorship, and the potential of book burning.  I'm still having that discussion.  Censorship is a big problem for me.  Book burning, deleting history from our history, is also a big problem for me.  How can we learn from the past if we have relegated it to the rubbish heap?

Every year since 1979 I've maintained a Kentucky Highway Map with the counties I visited through the course of the year.  In two of those years, 1979 (which prompted the idea) and 1987, I visited all 120 counties.  Both of those milestones can be attributed to participation in political campaigns.  I also maintain an Excel sheet of the visits so as to note how many times each county has made the list. And once again, two counties in particular escaped my driving, Lawrence and Elliott.  To date, the only two years I've made it to either were '79 and '87.

So attached is this year's map.  The westernmost point was in Fancy Farm of Graves County.  No surprise there although it is the first time I had made it down to the August event since 2011.  The easternmost point was crossing into Catlettsburg along I-64 in Boyd County just a few days ago.  I exited and spent a little time in Ashland and up to Greenup, where I had not been since Robin Webb's special election to the State Senate a few years ago.  The southernmost point was crossing through the Cumberland Gap in June on US25E.  Finally, the northernmost point was in northern Owen County during a summer drive.

I made it to a total of 47 of Kentucky's 120 counties.  So far the number for 2015 is 1.  For previous entries on this subject, see postings 258, 581, 671, 719, and 759.

Happy New Year.