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Weird Kentucky answers

1. Which murderous Kentucky belle inspired a Broadway musical that was later made into a movie starring Renee Zellweger? Beulah Annan. She married her first husband in Owensboro and her second in Chicago. But it was her affair with laundry worker Harry Kalstedt that launched her fame, after she shot him to death in April 1924 and then told multiple versions of her story, the most inventive of which was that she drank cocktails while watching him bleed to death while repeatedly playing a record by Sophie Tucker called Hula Lou.

2. Which “gonzo” writer and Louisville native retyped The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms to learns the authors’ styles? The late Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, might have studied the styles of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, but copy them he surely did not.

3. Which Kentucky beverage has an informal nickname of “Corpse Reviver”? Not bourbon, not sweet tea, not Ale-8-One. The “corpse reviver” beverage is moonshine.

4. In which Kentucky county did large hunks of red meat fall from the sky in March 1876? Bath County, where chunks of meat thought to be beef or perhaps venison fell from the sky in March 1876. The leading theory that the meat came from a flock of klutzy buzzards seems to be disproved because there were no reports of birds overhead during the meat storm, and the chunks were larger than a buzzard could carry.

5. Which former Kentuckian’s name is most invoked as “a ­generic expression of evil” because of his role in 1960s cult slayings? Charles Manson, the bogeyman of the 20th century and, lucky for America, a permanent prison inmate. He was born in Cincinnati in 1934, but he spent some of his childhood in Ashland.