Good Hallowtide to you all, on this Halloween week during the three-day festival of the Dead and their various souls & spirits. Tonight we are driving the nocturnal highways, listening to ghosts of times past crackling through the car-radio speakers. With new soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver and some classic Desert Oracle Halloween calls in the second half. This is EPISODE #232: UP FROM THE GRAVE, with new soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver.
Be not a-feared of our yearly remembrance of the dead, of ghostly visits from our beloved and maybe not-so-beloved relations and ancestors. Know ye Death as an old friend who eventually comes around, for you and everyone else. If your belief in the immortality of the soul is secure, do not shudder and sputter over the enjoyment of pumpkins and haystacks and comical gravestones made of scrap wood and whitewash. It’s October, as long as you ignore the weather, and that means it’s time for EPISODE #231: STRANGE RITUALS OF HALLOWEENS PAST, with new soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver.
Have you heard what the “green energy” corporations are doing to the Great Basin Desert, with your government’s approval, on your public lands? The plan is to cover the pristine basin-and-range interior of Nevada with industrial electricity factories over endless thousands of acres of desert woodland. And the people who should be out protesting this, chaining themselves to the desert trees marked for annihilation, etc., well they don’t really care. Because they’ve been told “environmentalism” now means destroying the last wild places in America, the last wild landscapes, so a fly-by-night solar corporation can get free land to scrape clean of all living things.
Forest ranger, park ranger, Navy sailor, lumberjack, and cowboy — these were some of the jobs Stanley Jones worked before accidentally becoming a movie actor and acclaimed composer of classic western music. PLUS: Weird Annie had a bunch of weird raven children. Deus Pascit Corvus. This is EPISODE #229: GHOST RIDERS & DEATH VALLEY RANGERS, with soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver.
Did you know the current (?) president’s Quiet Quitting (via Twitter) on this Sunday in July was foretold by an astrologer on Twitter, two weeks prior? That’s no lie, and you can check it for yourself. The same seer predicted, back in August 2020, that the current vice president would be the party’s nominee in 2024, because it coincides with the VP’s Second Saturn Return. Which is also hitting your Desert Oracle Radio host right about now. This is an Emergency Broadcast about Prophecy & Portents, with astrologically appropriate soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver.
What does one do, in these bunker days of summer? Too hot to work, too hot to think, too hot to sleep, and time is running away. When it’s too hot to walk the dog at night, you know you’ve made a tactical error in life: You’re in the Mojave, in July, in yet another historic heat wave.
Well, sit yourself down beneath the swamp cooler vent, and get yourself a cold beverage, and enjoy our July 12 episode about the strange & historic times we are within. Thanks for supporting this program on our Patreon.com/desertoracle page.
Tonight we are celebrating the full moon and summer solstice, because this is all a dream, and this is EPISODE #225: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DESERT. Which means we’re halfway to winter solstice, and only three months & change ’til Halloween. Maybe that’s why we’re talking about Puck of Pook Hill and homemade cranberry sauce. New soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver, who has a Bandcamp site worth your attention!
It’s hot as hell and we’re throwing everything in the hobo-stew pot tonight: Desert-animal antics, Wild West extravaganzas, history’s mysteries, William Shatner shot up into space, etc., etc. The soundscapes are by RedBlueBlackSilver and the rest of the program is by your host & underpaid mail-order professional, Ken Layne. This is Episode #224, Slumgullion Stew.
Destruction of High Desert forest on public land has led to a 78% drop in pinyon jay populations over the past 50 years. This is EPISODE #223: THE BLUE CROW.
The pinyon jay is the steward of the pinyon forests, for which the forest feeds and houses this crucial blue crow. Of the thousands of pinyon nuts the blue crow puts away for the winter, usually working with its mate and both returning to the spot throughout the year to store or collect, the few pine nuts left behind grow into new pinyons, expanding the reach of the woodland. More woodland means more wildlife, more carbon-breathing conifers, more precious Western water stored in the ground, more wildlife corridors that connect mule deer and desert bighorn and mountain lions along mountain and valley to vast zones of wilderness. Now this iconic corvid of the West is threatened with extinction, and up for Endangered Species designation. You can take action, and the Pinyon Juniper Alliance and Great Basin Bird Observatory are good places to start.
Listen tonight on KCDZ 107.7 FM in the Mojave High Desert, or on the podcast now, and thanks for supporting DESERT ORACLE via our Patreon page and online store at DesertOracle.com. Back issues, signed hardcover books & our classic yellow-vinyl bumper stickers are currently in stock, as we dig our way out of many mysterious boxes.
