EEEEUUUWWW...

Well, I knew it was happening, but it's distressing to see it all for sure, in black and white: the new college basketball arena set to open next season will be officially monikered KFC Yum! Center.

There's been endless droves of talk and nonsense about the big-ass basketball cathedral. Everyone already knew The Colonel had his greasy corpse-ified claw extended from beyond the grave, poised to take possession of the corporate naming rights to the monstrosity that was popularly (and imaginatively) called "The Downtown Arena." Weirdly, there was a rumor going around for the last couple of years that it was going to be called "The Bucket," which I guess is fun and appropriate: early artists' conceptions had the thing actually physically resembling a bucket of chicken(!) I was even kind of warming to that idea once I began imagining some outrageous Claes Oldenburg-designed showpiece on the riverfront, both magnificent and horrible in its overwrought corporate opulence--a cartoon made manifest that would dominate the city skyline like it has dominated the world's commercial fried chicken market. And they would play basketball inside.

Of course, my hometown lacks that kind of edgy vision (read: they know better than to piss off red necks who hate that sort of artsy bullshit). I was driving downtown for the first time in a while and was shocked to see how much they've built--and just how butt ugly the thing really is. And look at that picture: they're really going to put the logos of the Yum! axis of fast food evil ON THE FREAKING ROOF! So people in airplanes can see it! (Actually, one wonders why Yum! hasn't had this epiphany before, paying farmers in flyover country to grow their crops in the pattern of the Long John Silver's logo).

So there we have it: the name of the new boxy monstrosity now obstructing the waterfront will have an exclamation point in the middle of it's soulless, ungainly corporate-inspired name. I guess we should count ourselves lucky that the "Arena Authority Task Force" (or whatever that group of pompous local imagineers is calling themselves lately) limited themselves to whoring the naming rights out to just one conglomerate; I can imagine there being some crazy unwieldy compromise wherein the official name ends up being something like: Pepsi and Papa John's Presents The KFC Yum! Center at McDonaldland's Ameritrade PNC Bank Arena and Denny Crum Welcome Center.

Whatever--I'm still calling it "The Bucket."

Six Flags Over State Property Theft

It looks like things are, as expected, beginning to get ugly (or uglier, if you've been keeping up with the local mud-slinging/finger pointing going on between 6F and the KY State Fair Board) in the Six Flags/Kentucky Kingdom theme park battle. There's been a Delaware bankruptcy court filing under consideration for Six Flags, in which out of the company's 14 theme parks only KY Kingdom is being closed down.

Apparently, trucks had been brought in sometime last week--being positioned around the rides in anticipation of dismantling them and carting them off to some undisclosed 6F lair. 6F says they own the rides, but the State Fair Board says they are KY state property. I know I, as a local, may seem to have a horse in this race (so to speak), but I can tell you that these rides were there in that sad little parking lot long before 6F unfurled their corporate banners over the place, and as I understand it 6F was only renting the property--they never had ownership. In fact, the lease agreement is the whole bone of contention that 6F used to fly the coop in the first place--they didn't buy the property or anything on it, they just rented and maintained it for a while. Hmm, it'll be interesting to watch this mess untangle itself--or, perhaps, tangle itself further.