DJ Yahshua

When you roll past the many gas stations, fast food joints and adult bookstores that line Main Street in the town of Mojave, you begin to lose contact with Los Angeles based radio stations. That means, for the next 300 miles, until you are in earshot of Reno or possibly Carson City, you have to endure non-stop Jesus Radio.

You can play Russian Roulette with the scan button, but it won't matter because every tower in the Eastern Sierras and the Owens Valley is pumping out the good word of the bearded one. In all the barely discernible flavors no less: Lutheran, Methodist, and the ubiquitous Southern Baptist.

If you're lucky, you might catch a snake-handling, fire-and-brimstone, talking-in-tongues preacher who understands that radio is still an entertainment media. I love these guys, particularly as a Jesus-denier, I like to know exactly where and how I'm going to spend the exceedingly warm days of my eternity.

You'd think technology might be able to solve this dilemma but you'd be wrong.

Why not turn off the radio and listen to an iPod, you might suggest. And you'd be smart. God knows I have plenty of iPods. My house is literally awash in them: old ones, new ones, pink ones purchased because my daughters loved the color. The problem is there still isn't a decent way to play music trapped on an iPod through a car's audio system.

We can arm a pilotless drone, the size of a bumblebee, to take out an entire platoon of Pakistani Taliban Jihadists but we still can't come up with a whatchamacallit to plug a damn iPod into a 2004 Toyota Sienna.

OK, I seem to have strayed.

Anyway, I can live with Jesus radio, I suppose I have no choice. I just find it ironic with so much proselytizing on the airwaves there seems to be such little effect. Particularly in the poorer high desert towns  where in addition to the intolerance and illiteracy you see the tell-tale ravages of meth and alcohol abuse.

I don't want to offend any friends, but I think Mahatma Ghandi said it best (and I'm paraphrasing here), "I like your Christ. But many of your Christians are so unlike him."