Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

It's Friday night on the Mojave.

And if you're visiting or if you live out here, but you can't remember where here is,

welcome to the Mojave Desert.

We're broadcasting from Joshua Tree, population 8,000, give or take several million annual drive-by visitors, and

uncountable thousands who spend a weekend or a month in one of our charming roadside

motels or national park campgrounds or Airbnb cabins.

We're in the high desert, which is also a description of our upper altitude mojave with its iconic

Joshua tree, a tall and often sinister yucca plant.

Yeah. tall and often sinister yucca plant. Mormon pioneers gazing upon these eight or ten or fifty armed monstrosities filled with

lizards and spiders saw the obvious resemblance to the famed Old Testament character called Joshua.

And so we call these things Joshua trees.

Joshua is Yeshua or Yeshua in Hebrew.

And Yeshua is also the name of Jesus,

which, when written in Greek and mispronounced by Western Europeans,

for a thousand odd years, developed into modern pronunciation via the King James Bible.

So Joshua trees are technically Jesus trees.

Imagine a place called Jesus Tree National Park.

Had our grotesque and beloved Yucat tree been given such a name.

Chances are the National Park would have kept its originally proposed name,

which was Desert Plant's National

Monument. That was a choice of Minerva Hoyt, the crusading amateur naturalist from Pasadena

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