Here’s a picture of a desert race vehicle, a class-11 VW, similar to the one featured in the upcoming “Off-Road: A Film Crew SHORT.” A rugged piece of machinery, with speeds maxing out at 75mph.
Month: May 2017
The desert tortoise features as a character and a premise in my upcoming YA short “Off-Road.” Here’s a bit of information on the tortoise. Enjoy.
The tortoise is the state reptile of both California and Nevada. It is a threatened, not endangered, species.
Defenders of Wildlife estimate, “In some areas, the number of desert tortoises has decreased by 90% due primarily to human activity. Desert tortoise declines appear to have been most severe and widespread in the Western Mojave Desert.”
The National Park Service says, “Since the reproduction rate of the desert tortoise is low, the survival of every individual tortoise is important to the continuation of the species. Many of the threats to adult desert tortoises are related to or are the direct result of human activities; please be aware of how your actions can affect tortoises.”
Here are several links to sites where you can learn more about the desert tortoise:
California Turtle and Tortoise Club
Mojave Desert Tortoise
Four years ago I wrote a post in my Creating Story blog about seeing Ray Bradbury at a 2009 book signing in a local bookstore.
Bradbury had arrived in a wheelchair, a rumpled man with a huge shock of white hair. He filled the room with excitement.
After speaking for a few moments, he had fielded questions from his fans. Someone asked him what he thought the future held for our young generation. He sat up tall in his wheelchair, his eyes sparkling, and almost cried out, “We should go back to the moon! Go on to Mars, with the moon as a base camp. Then go on to Alpha Centauri.”
Here was a master storyteller who spent a lifetime exploring this world and the entire universe in his imagination. His voice quivered with excitement when he told us of his own recent visit to the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California. The JPL scientists guided him as he drove the Mars Rover on the surface of the same planet he had visited in his imagination since The Martian Chronicles. This from a man who never had a driver’s license in all of his then almost 90 years,
This is the power of story. Travel back to the moon. Probe the vast universe.
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