greenvillesky

Journey to Burning Man

My friend Mick Jeffries from Kentucky and his brother Chris have set out on an arduous, cross-country journey in an Airstream loaded with cases of Ale-8 One soft drinks, a ukulele and an assortment of laptops and techno gear for a trip of a lifetime.  They are going to be a part of Burning Man 2009.  I will just let you click on that link because it would take this whole page to describe what Burning Man is,  exactly.  Burning Man takes place in Black Rock City, Nevada.  At any rate,  they have just begun the trip and found themselves in Missouri after driving most of the night from Owensboro, Ky.  I will be following them on the journey and I thought I'd pass it along to you.  Mick is Tweeting (see @mrtoastey feed at right) and Facebooking and blogging along the way and has already hit his first snag.  You can follow his blog,  Mingle Freely,  to keep up. This should be a great adventure.  I am jealous.

My day, so far

I thought this was going to be a relatively quite day after working a 14-hour shift yesterday. But then somebody has to go out and steal a car. This is a snap I took of the cops busting a suspect after a chase that ended in a movie theater parking lot. This guy allegedly jumped a fence behind the theater and ran into an apartment complex. The cops got the complex owner to open the apartment and they found him in a closet, under a blanket. Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be the cops in that situation. Who knows what he could have under that blanket. I remember in Lexington, Ky, in 1994, a police officer was serving a warrant and shot an unarmed suspect coming out of a closet. That started riots in Lexington and made the national news. It's not exaggerating too much to think something as small-fry as a stolen car bust can escalate into something much bigger. So, I am assuming that is why there were at least 20 cops involved in this incident. I wonder what else is going to come my way, today? Read the story at Reflector.com

Now you see it...

The old smokestack at the Imperial Tobacco Plant in Greenville came down in a pile of rubble after being demolished with dynamite Thursday. The base was rigged with dynamite and, after the explosion, it took about two seconds for the smokestack to be reduced to a pile of bricks. The plant burned in April, 2008 and officials decided the aged and cracked smokestack,that was still standing, must come down, for safety reasons. Here are a few photos I shot of the warehouse before it burned. At left, even law enforcement officials got into the spirit of the event and clowned around before the stack came down. See a video at reflector.com of the demolition.
Also see the my previous blog about the tobacco plant