Coyote Crossing

Notes Toward A Taxonomy of Sadness

Dave Bonta is in fine form:

There’s the sadness of 100-year-old postcards that were written on but never sent, the sadness of an alarm clock that was turned off three minutes before it was due to throb, the sadness of countries too small or

More grist for the desert solar mill

The Western Lands Project, a wonderful and effective small non-profit working to protect public lands in the western United States from encroachment and privatization, has just put out its newsletter. Aside from a nice plug for this here site, the

Getting them in the right order, now that’s the hard part

A cloud, constructed using Wordle, of the most commmon words in the first six chapters of the Joshua tree book.

… (continues)

Soullessness

Doctor Science kindly reposted one of my articles over at Daily Kos, and there are more sympathetic and interested commenters there than I would have guessed, or hoped. It seems the campaign to inspire people to preserve desert wildlands has made

Wow.

This is some great desert writing with a fantastic ending, and I mean that “fantastic” in a couple senses. Go read it … (continues)

A gift from The Very Silly Raven

… (continues)

A trip to the Yuha Desert

My brief account of business conducted in the Imperial Valley this weekend is up at … (continues)

New Nevada Wildlands Website

From Graham Stafford in Reno:

I have just designed and built a new website at http://www.nvdesertmtn.org.

Nevada is a large geographical state. Its the 7th largest and the 35th in population. I sometimes feel, because of the large distances

Snippet from an email a couple years old

“On my way in to UCSF today: two starlings mobbed a crow mercilessly, harassing her into annoyed, almost panicked flight across the road in front of me, and on the far side of the road the ruckus startled a red-tail, which took off out of his perch

Things of which I have never really seen the appeal

Arena rock. Sliders. The NFL. Cola. Leonard Cohen. Dr Who. The Nashville Sound. BBQ ribs. Grunge. The Sopranos. Gold jewelry. Financial gain for its own sake. Off-roading. Going to Las Vegas and staying indoors. Phish. Cadillacs.  Downhill skiing.

I’m really sorry

I really wanted to write something for the blog tonight. I’m drawing a blank.

Well, not exactly a blank. I’ve had two or three good ideas that needed more development than I had energy for tonight. I wrote the first stanza of a sonnet that I then

Kathy McCarty Has A BLOG

Yes, that Kathy McCarty. The Coyote Crossing regular, raconteuse and Austin foodie, rock-diva-without-the-attitude, front man for Glass Eye, and occasional popularizer of the works of Daniel Johnston Kathy McCarty. How did I not know she had a

CC Postcards

Redbubble has added postcards to the range of formats in which you can buy images, including mine. (An example of one of mine above.) You can peruse the possibilities … (continues)

Morongo Bill Visits Ivanpah

Coyote Crossingian* Morongo Bill left his Backporch for a couple days and went out to what old desert hands still call the “East Mojave” — The Mojave National Preserve and my adopted home, Ivanpah Valley.  He took a hike on the site of the proposed

I Ishimaerukoru

Here following, 13 notable leading lines from works of fiction written in English, then fed into the Translation Party engine, chewed up and spit out. See if you can guess the origins of each. If you’re stuck, each result links to the original

The Internet just got less funny

I’d heard something about this earlier today, and couldn’t bring myself to go look until just now.

Al Weisel, the brilliant writer behind the purportedly eponymous blog Jon Swift, has died.

“Jon” was consistently one of the kindest, most humane