Coyote Crossing

Rattling the can

I’ve finally sold my soul to the devil and set up a PayPal merchant account. There’s a discrete little “tip jar” button over there to the right which you can click to make a small payment (or a large one, if you want) into that account. Or you can

Edds and Onds

Boxes, boxes, boxes. My life is all about boxes. Lifting them is getting easier, so either I’m responding well to the workout involved in lifting everything I own four times, or The Raven packed all the heavy stuff first. Either way works for

New Office

Cheap cameraphone image of Coyote Crossing World HQ.

This is just a short post to note that after yet another move in the back of the Jeep — bringing the total such mileage involved to 880 since June 2008 — the Coyote Crossing Computer Machine

The Return of Carnival of The Arid: February 15

It’s 2011, and I’m moving back to the desert from Los Angeles, and I thought “what better way to mark that occasion than to revive the Carnival of The Arid?” So I’m reviving the Carnival of The Arid.

In 2009 we held the CoTA for about six months

Is SEO making you stupider? And other misleading titles

Last January I sat down in a bit of a mood and typed out what seemed at the time a disposable, one-off screed about the way some particularly thoughtless bloggers seem to compose their posts. It took me something like fifteen minutes. I checked for

A new look for Coyote Crossing

Happy New Year, everyone.

It’s been two and a half years since I put together the inaugural, bleached-boards design for this site’s incarnation as Coyote Crossing. Given that Creek Running North went through something like six redesigns in five

Priorities

I see the amphitheater at Epidaurus, the toppled columns, the winter sun; I see the steam rising from the pools at Breitenbush. All this, and a spider running along the edge of a leaf, and a wet hand print fading from the rock as I watched it. It

Kayak the Mojave!

When John C Fremont “discovered” the Mojave River, he named it the Inconstant River after its habit of trickling for a few miles in a rocky narrows in what’s now Victorville, and again in Afton Canyon, and elsewhere and between running merely as a

As befits the Dia De Los Muertos

I am thinking of, and missing, some who have passed.

My mother’s mother, especially poignantly for some reason this last month, and the love of her life.

The love of my life (four-foot division):

Jonathan “Basketball Jonathan” Montague, a

Petition to Save The Desert Tortoise from Big Energy

The petition is here. Go sign it, then tell your friends to do the same. Post it on your blog, mention it in appropriate blog comment threads, facebook and twitter it to hell and back.

They’re finding a lot more tortoises than they expected at

Solar Done Right up and running

It’s been quiet here lately, in part because I’ve been working on an action to protest the upcoming destruction of Ivanpah (more on that Monday) and partly because of this:

Solar Done Right is a coalition of public land activists, solar power and

A few other desert solar things

Item: I had a significant uptick in people signing off of the email version of this site’s feed as soon as yesterday’s edition hit the tubes, no doubt due to my dissing the Sierra Club. Such things happen, but it reminds me that I should make

What’s wrong with this picture?

The Sierra Club National defends its support of paving desert wildlands with solar sprawl by saying things like “rooftop solar is great, but we can’t install it soon enough.”

Apparently they really meant that. Our pal Morongo Bill did a little

The real truth about heaven

… (continues)

The Rainbow Bridge ain’t nothing but a hunk of rock in Utah

PZ has a brief item up with a one-sentence review of books about how pets go to heaven, and Orac has a sad anniversary today, and both got me thinking about something I wrote that until now lived on only in the Wayback Machine Archive, which is

Googling Carl Buell

I was looking for a particular image by my friend Carl Buell so I Googlimaged him, and was slyly happy that his painting of me and my dog was in the first page of results.

And I then realized it’s been almost five years since Carl painted it and

Advertorial: Poisonous and Destructive

Commenter Devonian wraps things up in the ScienceBlogs/Pepsi thread on Metafilter:

One of the most poisonous and destructive forms of paid-for content is advertorial: adverts disguised as editorial. It is something that is constantly - and I mean

ScienceBlogs Diaspora RSS feed

[This post has been rewritten to make sense of all the updates.]

Carl Zimmer has started a list of sites where ScienceBloggers who have left due to the ethics violations of their host have landed.

One of the benefits of having all those fine

I don’t see how this could possibly end badly

ScienceBlogs has launched a new food science blog with content written by PepsiCo.

I’d find the utter and complete violation of any semblance of journalistic and publishing ethics utterly laughable, except for one thing: dozens of good people have

July 4 2006, Central Valley CA

[Way back in the first decade of the 21st Century I was briefly a guest-poster over at Michael Bérubé‘s joint, and during that period in which Michael had inexplicably entrusted me with his readership I posted this as a July 4 travelog-essay. I was