News You Can Bruise for 2004 February 27

California's pretty stingy with its brown highway signs, the ones designating an Official Government Attraction. Even zoos and wildlife preserves don't generally have brown signs. So it was a surprise when I went out to the Midwest and started seeing brown signs everywhere, some on ridiculous things not worthy of a brown sign, like the National Pontiac Corvette Museum and the Maker's Mark Distillery. (There's also the My Old Kentucky Home State Park featuring "Steven Foster: The Musical", none of which should even exist, much less have multiple brown signs. The state that MAMMOTH CAVE calls home put Steven Foster on their state quarter!)

The point of this entry is that there are three brown signs we saw that point to things that should exist, and that we would have visited had we had more time. The first is the Abraham Lincoln birthplace in Kentucky. It apparently has a Lincoln Memorial type marble building which protects from deterioration a log cabin in which Lincoln was not born.

The second thing is the Agriculture Hall of Fame near the Kansas/Missouri border. Untrue to its name, the Agriculture Hall of Fame is not the destination for which the state fair is merely the semifinal. It does not house the World's Largest Grape. It does have inductees, who are pretty much who you'd expect. It has a lot of old farming implements. It has tours. It has a large collection of barbed wire and Harry Truman's boyhood plow. Speaking of which...

The third thing is the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, where it turns out Truman is buried. A little weird. The online-but-not-really gift shop lets you buy "The Buck Stops Here" desk sign replicas.