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

Well, night has fallen on the American desert, and we've been real busy down at the Desert Oracle headquarters on the highway

and Joshua Tree.

Getting subscriptions and back issues mailed out, meeting with people, paying the bills,

changing the toner cartridges and the printer, all kinds of stuff.

Tax season. Spending so much time at the desk that the sunblasting through the Venetian blinds is giving me stripes.

A spring cleaning time, too.

You want to get the place cleaned up pretty well because all the creatures are about to come out and you don't want a nest of centipedes under some old pile of mail order catalogs and magazines you keep meaning to go through.

All those desert real estate ads, I can't seem to avoid picking up.

You go to the taco shop, you look at the real estate.

It's a sickness, really.

How much real estate do you need?

Well, in the desert, I need enough real estate to never see or hear a neighbor.

Neighbor humans, anyway.

And the less you see of the humans, the more you see of the coyotes, the bobcats, the roadrunners.

Anyway, these real estate magazines from last year are not going to help today.

Get in the recycling bin, all of you.

You don't want a lot of clutter around unless you want a lot of desert recluse, spiders,

and black widows and scorpions and other such things all over the place.

I mean, you're going to have some.

We're all going to have some scorpions and centipedes and such things

crawling around in the worst places,

...