http://www.kentucky.com/785/index.xml News, sports, and entertainment from Kentucky.com en-us Copyright 2008 Kentucky.com Tom Eblen 60 Sun, 12 Oct 2008 06:24:54 EDT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss McClatchy Interactive's Workbench webmaster@kentucky.com http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/552730.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/552730.html Sun, 12 Oct 2008 06:24 EDT
Kentuckians like to say they bleed blue, especially during basketball and football seasons.

We also bleed black. Some say it's because of coal, but I have a different theory: blacktop.

Kentuckians love asphalt, and we have spent nearly a century putting down as much of it as possible.

Like everyone else, I want to get where I'm going fast. I hate to sit in traffic. And, as a cyclist, I admit to being a pavement connoisseur. There is nothing like gliding down a lightly traveled country road on fresh, smooth asphalt. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/550741.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/550741.html Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:59 EDT
You hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially one as beautiful as the Flying Horse of Gansu.

But it sure is tempting.

The life-size flying horse, you may recall, is a reproduction of an 1,800-year-old Han Dynasty bronze sculpture.

The city of Xi'an and Shaanxi province in China gave the statue to Lexington eight years ago when the Kentucky Horse Park hosted the exhibit Imperial China: The Art of the Horse in Chinese History. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/548691.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/548691.html Wed, 08 Oct 2008 06:20 EDT
Kentuckians are among the nation's least healthy people. All of the surveys show it. Many of us smoke, most of us don't get enough exercise and almost all of us have a deep and abiding love for fried, salty and sugary food.

We also know Kentucky is a poor state, with little money available to build gyms, pools or trails for walking and biking.

All of that is why many people who attended Lexington's first Bike Summit a year ago were struck by a presentation from Gil Penalosa, the former parks director of Bogot., Colombia.

"He said, 'You have the best bike and pedestrian infrastructure in the world already in place. You just have cars running up and down it all the time,'" Urban County Councilman Jay McChord recalled. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/538002.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/538002.html Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:33 EDT
Lexington sculptor John Tuska had a sign on his studio wall: Non basta una vita . In Italian it means, One life is not enough .

"It isn't enough for all the things I want to do," he once told an interviewer. "Work generates work."

Fortunately for Tuska, who died in 1998 at age 67, there was someone to give his artistic vision another life.e_SClBIn the past dozen years, Seth Tuska, 50, has been collecting, organizing and cataloging his father's prolific work: more than 25,000 documents now housed at the University of Kentucky and more than 4,000 pieces of sculpture, drawing, ceramics and mixed media.

He has worked with a curator to create a 60-piece traveling exhibition that is being marketed to museums around the world. He has turned his childhood home into a museum of his father's work, which had its "grand reopening" on Friday. And he has started a studio, gallery and reproductions business that he hopes will give the museum financial security. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/536825.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/536825.html Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:51 EDT
There is no shortage of international prizes honoring flashy, provocative, beautiful or breathtaking architecture and design.

The new $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize, administered by the University of Kentucky's College of Design, is different.

The first Curry Stone Design Prize was awarded Thursday at the Idea Festival in Louisville to a South African architecture firm that, working without pay, designed and is building 10 houses for poor people in Cape Town. The houses are made of timbers of wood and steel and bags filled with sand. They cost less than $7,000 each and can be built by their owners.

Beautiful? Provocative? Not in the world of architecture. But for a world where it is estimated that 1 billion people . about 15 percent . live in shanties, projects such as this have the ability to reshape the way much of humanity lives. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/534440.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/534440.html Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:39 EDT
If you go to the Web site for Idea Kentucky, a big gathering Wednesday in Louisville, there's a link that takes you to the conference's ground rules.

Click on the link, and this is what you see:

Statements not allowed during discussions

. That's a crazy idea. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/530520.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/530520.html Sun, 21 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT
I'm sure it's because I've heard too much of the slop that has replaced intelligent discourse in our presidential campaign. But as I listened Thursday night to Urban County Council members and others discuss whether to go forward with a tax increment financing project tied to the CentrePointe development, one phrase kept running through my mind: Lipstick on a pig.

Granted, some good lipstick was offered up:

Developer Dudley Webb agreed to pay the estimated $50,000 cost of a state-required TIF feasibility study for his proposed 35-story CentrePointe tower, which would house a four-star hotel, luxury condos, offices, restaurants and shops.

Mayor Jim Newberry indicated, and Webb's attorney seemed to agree, that any decision about building a $10 million parking garage under Phoenix Park could wait a couple of years until we see if CentrePointe is built and the garage is needed. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/528667.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/528667.html Fri, 19 Sep 2008 06:39 EDT
Bill Fortune, my friend and cycling buddy, called one evening last fall with an announcement: "I'm going to ride across the country."

Fortune, a veteran law professor at the University of Kentucky, is phasing into retirement, so he finally had the time to pedal coast-to-coast. At 68, he's in better shape than most people 20 years younger. But he thought that if he was going to make the ride he had long dreamed about, he needed to do it now.

So, in mid-June, Fortune flew to Seattle and met up with two guides and 14 other cyclists, many of whom had retired after careers as a nurse, a banker, a helicopter pilot, a builder, a lumber executive and a physicist.

Their trip was chronicled on a Web site whose name probably summed up the thoughts of many of their friends and relatives: www.crazyguyonabike.com. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/526373.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/526373.html Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:54 EDT
I was encouraged by the column in Monday's Herald-Leader by Gov. Steve Beshear and Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo. It sought to calm the fears of environmentalists and others about plans for developing "adventure tourism" in Kentucky.

"Some people have misinterpreted our enthusiasm," the state's top two elected officials wrote. "They hypothesize that we intend unrestrained ATV use in even delicate environments and at the expense of other activities. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"In seeking to encourage exploration of Kentucky's beauty, we must not destroy it," they wrote, adding that they hope to find the resources for stricter enforcement of laws that protect sensitive natural areas.

And here was the most encouraging part: As state officials survey state lands to determine appropriate places for new ATV, horse, mountain bike and hiking trails, they will seek public participation. "Kentuckians will have their say," they wrote. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/523303.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/523303.html Sun, 14 Sep 2008 08:18 EDT
Last week, we marked the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This week, we should note an even more significant milestone.

Wednesday marks the 221st anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the document that is the foundation of America's bold experiment in self-government.

Ironically, when the Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787, it didn't include the most important part: The first 10 amendments, known as the Bill of Rights. That's because many Founding Fathers didn't think it was necessary to spell out citizens' rights and liberties.

James Madison, the future president, was among those who insisted that a Bill of Rights was essential. He waged a tireless four-year political battle that has been chronicled in the book James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights by Richard Labunski, a University of Kentucky professor. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/516079.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/516079.html Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:39 EDT
Mahurin grew up in ­Grayson County, the son of a poor farmer and a ­schoolteacher. After ­teaching school himself for a few years, he decided he wanted to go into the investment business. He didn't exactly have the usual pedigree.

Other young Hilliard Lyons employees were second- and third-generation brokers, not poor boys from Short Creek.

“The thing I figured out was that I just had to work harder than those guys did,” he said. “After a while, I had my contacts, and their grandpa's contacts had died. I started out thinking I couldn't compete with them, and after a while, they couldn't compete with me.”

That's the kind of savvy that has made Mahurin, 69, a legend during his 41 years at Hilliard Lyons, which now has 1,000 employees in 12 states. He is the firm's ­executive vice president, working from his longtime home in Bowling Green.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/478538.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/478538.html Sun, 03 Aug 2008 08:21 EDT
FANCY FARM . I was glad I had just filled up on barbecue, because the political speaking Saturday afternoon at the 128th annual Fancy Farm Picnic was anything but satisfying.

This year's focus was Democrat Bruce Lunsford's challenge of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who has held the seat for 24 years. It was no surprise that Lunsford and other Democrats would come out swinging . or that McConnell wouldn't even mention Lunsford's name, leaving that job to fellow Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning.


As always, the thousand or so people who crowded around the stage were mostly partisans who came to shout down speakers from the other party. And, of course, there were costumed characters walking through the crowd.


Young Republicans dressed as Arab sheikhs, .thanking. Lunsford for higher oil prices, through some stretch of the political imagination. Young Democrats dressed as characters with the names .Texas Oilman Mitch. and .Bush's Lapdog Mitch..
]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/478080.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/478080.html Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:18 EDT
FANCY FARM . There was a special Mass at 7 a.m. Friday at St. Jerome Catholic Church in this small Graves County town. Then the priest blessed 18,500 pounds of meat, and the people of the parish got cooking.

Of course, they had already been working for weeks. Before the men could put 10,000 pounds of pork and 8,500 pounds of mutton on the long rows of brick and block barbecue pits beside the school yard, the families had to get a lot of other work done.

They had to help pick, shuck and cut 150 gallons of sweet corn. They had to pick bushels of tomatoes and cucumbers from their gardens. They had to boil and peel 800 pounds of potatoes for the potato salad. There were the chickens to fry and the homemade pies to bake.

More than 10,000 people are expected to attend Saturday's 128th annual Fancy Farm Picnic, which always seems to come on the hottest weekend of the year. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/475330.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/475330.html Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:29 EDT
But many others — people the age of my daughters — see something different: They see the loss of an important piece of their culture. To them, it's almost as if somebody took a wrecking ball to the Lexington Opera House or the grandstand at Keeneland.

One of those people is Matt Jordan, 22, a University of Kentucky senior from Elizabethtown. I got to know him last year when he was a student in the journalism class I teach.

Jordan's passion is music, and last month he wrote a touching piece in the Kentucky Kernel, UK's student newspaper, about what The Dame meant to him and his generation.

“It was a cultural breeding ground for Lexington that can't be bought, copied or easily replicated,” he wrote. “This one venue drew together punk rockers, bluegrass purists, Latin dancers, indie hipsters and average Joes ... It was a gift while it lasted.”]]> http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/452623.html http://www.kentucky.com/785/story/452623.html Sat, 05 Jul 2008 07:33 EDT
Lexingtonians hold this truth to be self-evident: There's no better day to be downtown with family and friends than the Fourth of July.

From the starting gun of the Bluegrass 10,000 until the last flicker of fireworks over Rupp Arena, it's our own special celebration of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It must be something in the community DNA. After all, Lexington was founded in June 1775, a year before American independence was formally declared. But those patriotic pioneers named their new town for Lexington, Mass., because they had just gotten word of the battle there that began the revolution against Britain.

This Independence Day began with light rain falling on the 3,632 registered entrants in the 32nd annual Bluegrass 10,000 as they lined up along Main Street waiting for the race to start. It was wet, but at least it was cool. ]]>