Desert Oracle Radio

Well here's an episode that fits with the past couple of episodes, as your host Ken Layne dredges up some tales from too many decades as a writer & whatever else. We got our newspaper/podcaster pal Matt Welch on the line to talk about the turn-of-the-century sensation that got everybody very excited for a little while: Weblogs! It sort of became a long career for a lot of people, and many have never quite recovered. We'd like to think that we recovered just fine. (Back to the desert on our next episode, don't worry.)

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Where's the beautiful part, anyway? Well, start by walking about a mile past the last parking lot or dirt road or residential car-parts dump or informal halfway house or accidental pit-bull breeding farm, and keep going in the direction of the difficult terrain: the hills and the mountains and the boulders. Not the hills covered in radio relay towers, but the ones with nothing up there at all, nothing except more boulders, more spiky yucca trees that slash your arms, gnarled junipers and needle-armed Joshua trees, up to the craggy peak where the stately pinyons stand proud. Keep going that way.

On the second half of the program, Patrick Donnelly — here's his Sand & Sage newsletter — from the Center for Biological Diversity returns to Desert Oracle Radio to talk about an international land grab dreamt up by a local commissioner in Lincoln County, Nevada, along with the nation of Denmark, which plans to destroy centuries-old forests of pinyon and juniper on your public lands to mush into "bio-fuel" for container ships. What?! New soundscapes from RedBlueBlackSilver. Written & produced by Ken Layne.

Thanks for supporting this advertising-free show via our Desert Oracle Patreon. Soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver; written & produced by Ken Layne.

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One thing people like to do when they’re given some liberties — or when they take the liberty that’s usually there for the taking, if anybody wants it bad enough — is to go on a long walk. Whether you call it a pilgrimage or walkabout or "through-hike" or country ramble, such excursions really take you out of the day-to-day, even as you occasionally rub elbows with other people doing the same thing.

PLUS: Information regarding the October 20 show at Jacumba Hot Springs and the October 29 Campfire Stories at Yucca Valley's Tiny Pony Tavern. Thanks for supporting this advertising-free radio show & podcast via Patreon!

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/desertoracle

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On this Easter weekend, let’s do our best to bring back the ghosts, the supernatural. Let us recognize and respect the mysterious entities that come not from some imagined, distant star system in the cold lifeless vacuum of space, but from right here where we experience them! Backroads, mountains, spooky desert trails at dusk. Jesus loved wilderness and often talked to ghosts, after all. And that's something people of any philosophy can enjoy.

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The storms continue, the wildflowers begin to appear, and Chantel our PCT through-hiker probably made it to the Canadian border without any kind of Mountain Monster getting her, which is good. Also: What is the Voice of the Desert? New soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver, written and hosted by Ken Layne.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/desertoracle

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.