Although they could have named it anything, the owners of the racetrack outside Austin, Texas, chose to call theirs the Circuit of the Americas. I don't know what the other choices were, how they came up with that one, or why they decided that was the best, but there you have it.

The name doesn't make me mad, but it is embarrassing, and I wince a tiny bit in shame whenever I hear it.

For decades Formula 1 has determined its champions by having races at a series of races at different tracks, mostly one in a country and primarily in Europe. Over the years there've been a number of attempts at having one in the US, but for one reason or another, none of them have lasted very long. Last year marked another return to having a grand prix in the United States and this time it was held at a racetrack specially built for the task outside of Austin, Texas.

It's a decent enough racetrack, don't get me wrong, designed by the only guy in the world who seems capable of doing such a thing, Hermann Tilke. It has ups and downs and lefts and rights and all the things I like in race courses. But it also has an unnecessary letter S at the end of its name.

I'm used to the United States calling itself America, and had they called it the Circuit of America, I'd probably have been pretty happy. But, no, they had to go all out and call it the Circuit of the Americas, which I can't see as anything but an implication that it's the only one in the Americas.

It isn't, and isn't even the only grand prix circuit in the Americas.

For quite a number of years now they've held races in Brazil and Canada. Canada, of course, is in North America and Brazil in South America, so I kinda figure those are races held in the Americas. Soon there may even be a race in Mexico, another nation in North America, which would mean there'd be four races in the Americas, all at different race tracks.

It's not only dumb to call ours the Circuit of the Americas, it's factually wrong.

Since I wasn't privy to the selection process, I have no explanation for why Circuit of the Americas was chosen as the best name. If they'd called it the Best Circuit of the Americas, okay, we could argue that, or Hilliest Circuit of the Americas, or Ideal Circuit of the Americas, all of those might be boastful, but they wouldn't be necessarily incorrect. The Circuit of the Americas, however, is.

If we wanted to go all out and insult everyone, we could have called it the Circuit of the World, but presumably that may have been seen as a step too far. So, instead, we just insult Canada and Brazil by pretending their tracks don't exist or count, and call ours the only one in the Americas.

It strikes me as either the owners of the track ignoring or dismissing the rest of the world or not being concerned enough to do some simple research and understand what words mean. I know there are jokes about Texan's arrogance and America's stupidity about geography, but I don't know that we need to work so hard at living up to those stereotypes.

No one would seriously think of calling their restaurant “The Restaurant of Idaho” or any other state, much less “The Restaurant of the United States,” with the definite article implying that your restaurant was, in fact, the only one. It's great that we have our own racetrack for the Formula 1 series and I hope it's successful for quite some time and hosts lots of great races, but, really, we could come up with a better name.

One that doesn't insult other parts of the world would be a good start.

I know it's unpopular with some people to listen (or pay any attention) to smart people, but I get a lot of it. While those who choose to ignore people whom they consider elite (usually after calling them that name and others and otherwise dismissing what they have to say even before considering it) yell pretty loudly, I don't pay much attention to their shouts and, instead, often end up thinking about things in a new way.

The last couple weeks I've heard things about Facebook that make sense to me and let me look at it differently than I had.

Instead of seeing it just as way of being insulted by people who sought me out for friendship, trading "likes" with others I have no hope or chance of meeting, or letting others know what's caught my eye on the Internet or what I'm thinking about at the moment, Facebook also serves the valuable service of letting people know that I'm still alive and have survived whatever latest calamity the desert has decided to throw my way.

It's also, first and foremost, a business.

And that's where it's sorta the opposite of most of the things I think of as businesses, by which I mean stores. When I go shopping, I buy something that someone has made and while I lose money in the process, lots of other people get some. The people who actually made it get some, the people who employ them get some, the people who advertise it get some, the people who deliver it to the store get some, the people who employ the ones doing the delivering get some, the people who work in the store I bought it in get some, the people who own that store get some, and probably others I'm not thinking about.

I buy a shirt, a whisk broom, a chair, or some groceries or whatever, and other people make money on the deal. I'm a consumer in this case, and the product I buy is the product.

But capitalism works in other ways, too. Sometimes, such as when I'm watching TV, it gets a little more complicated. For one thing, I'm paying someone to provide me those channels, a service, but the channels I watch get most of their money from advertisers. The channels spend some money producing the shows and then sell to advertisers some time to try to convince the people watching the show to buy whatever is being advertised. So, yes, channel or network makes its money by selling my eyeballs to advertisers and, well, that makes me the product being sold.

With a few exceptions such as HBO, that's the business model. The networks sorta let you watch for free, but make their money by selling the audience for their programming to someone who's interested in selling you gold or car insurance.

And that, increasingly, is how Facebook is working. While I think of it as way of showing people what my dog looks like lying in the sand, Facebook could care less about that. What they've decided to do is to make me a product, not a consumer, and to make their money by selling my eyeballs to those who think I might want to buy a matchmaking service.

When I use or visit Facebook, I'm not a consumer, I'm a product. And, yeah, I have very mixed feelings about that.

In addition to the usual privacy concerns and distracting ads, I have some other problems with Facebook.

One of them, or maybe two, is of my own doing. Since I don't want the handful of people who follow me on Twitter to be left out, nearly every of my Facebook postings is a tweet that is also sent to Facebook, which means they're invariably very short and heavily edited to fit into the 140 character limit. Being me, I have much more to say than comfortably fits in that limit, but I try.

Also, I don't want to be one of those people with several dozen updates a day so I spend more time biting my tongue (and fingers) than is probably good for me. And, although I tell myself that I don't need to say it just this minute but can save it for later, I rarely do. This means much of my wisdom is known only to me, which is a tragedy.

Then there's the point of this entry: pictures.

I guess it's the nature of Facebook that what most people share are pictures, pictures of all sorts of things, nearly all of which are better than any pictures I take. A lot of those pictures are in fact cartoons, many are videos, and nearly all of them are fun to look at.

But I have little confidence in my ability to take photos and it's also sort of a pain for me to upload them. Just about everyone now has a smartphone or some such device that makes sharing photos easy, but not me. It's not that I'm necessarily cheap, but last time I checked, there's little to no coverage where I live. My old flip phone works okay, but 3G or 4G coverage is iffy, at best.

Also, I'm cheap and am saving myself some stress by my decision not to keep up with things. It's kind of refreshing, for a change, to be able to ignore a whole bunch of business and tech developments, just to look at them dispassionately and not feel bound to keep up or ashamed for not doing so.

But I'm not sure that's the point.

I'd be more than happy to share pictures of where I live and the places I visit except for a couple difficulties. One, I don't go out and visit very many places and even fewer of those could be considered interesting. I'm fairly certain just about everyone has seen what stores and supermarkets look like and the ones up here aren't any different than the ones everybody else goes to.

And, I live in the desert.

What that means, among other things, is not only is the landscape bleak and, to most people, uninteresting, but it only very rarely changes and even when it does, it almost always does so very slowly. Pictures of nature are always popular, but mostly if they're of something neat to see.

There may or may not be wildlife up here. Other than birds in the morning and evening, just about every creature that calls this place home has learned a valuable lesson: if you're exposed or can be seen, you die. If the desert sun doesn't get you, something else will.

So, while there may be many interesting creatures up here, I only very rarely see them. No flocks of rabbits, no epic migrations of turtles, not even any armies of snakes, rats, or other rodents. When I have managed to see something larger than my fist, it's an individual something and, most likely, soon to regret being so visible.

This area just doesn't support great or even noteworthy numbers of anything. Maybe it's a veritable hive of activity during the night, but that's when I'm usually inside with my dog, Minardi, whom I try to shield from scorpions and rattlesnakes.

I could conceivably take pictures of the birds I see every day, but not any good ones. For some reason, they flee as soon as I show up with my camera as well as not being anywhere I can see during most of the day. Besides, everyone has a pretty good idea of what crows look like and the Internet has much better pictures than I could dream of taking of mourning doves or roadrunners.

I do see plenty of ants, but again, they're not much different than the ones you see. I think sometimes a dragon fly buzzes around in the evening, but it may just be something that looks enough like one (a flying insect about as long as a finger) that I call it that.

So, everyone on Facebook wants pictures, not words, and not only do I feel more comfortable writing, but there's not all that much for me to take pictures of.

So, in the end, I don't have much worth sharing.

You'd think I'd be better about such things.

I wouldn't say it's a lot, but the amount of time I spend worrying about rats, mice, and snakes is certainly … noticeable. While it's true that things like that live up here in the desert, I honestly don't know if they're a problem in my little piece of it.

The land around here is littered with holes, which I take to be burrows, but one thing about the desert that's becoming increasingly obvious is that it doesn't change much. In fact, without someone or something doing something to it, it hardly ever changes at all.

It has no reason to, for one thing, but more importantly, I think, is what makes it the desert in the first place: no water.

Back in Junior High I heard the joke that science had discovered the universal solvent but had no place to put it (you see, being a universal solvent, it would eat through everything). Not particularly funny, I admit, but it laid the way for later on when I learned that water, of all things, comes as close to being a universal solvent as anything nature has given us.

Trees, rocks, dirt, mountains, you name it, water wears it down. Think of the Grand Canyon. It also, I believe, does its job at tearing apart vegetation and probably even dead animals.

There is no water in the desert, which I guess explains its name. This is taking me some getting used to. The guide book for the local Joshua Tree National Forest mentions in passing when talking about litter that many things like egg shells or orange peels that can be more or less safely discarded everywhere else have to be properly disposed of in the desert. Instead of rotting away and enriching the soil or whatever, they just lay out in the sun and dehydrate.

And, stick around forever.

Which brings me back to my burrows. Yep, they're out there. I'd guess there are a couple of hundred on my property alone but I have no idea how old they are or if they're “active.” With no rains to change the land, to crumble their edges, fill them in, or do any of that stuff, they just sit there.

A few days before I legally owned this place I was up here giving it a visit, looking at it and marveling that it would soon be mine. I was checking it out, seeing more closely what I was getting myself into, when a rabbit ran across what I now call the back yard (the area of my property that's outside the chain link fence).

Yes, I smiled.

In the four months or so since then, I've seen nary a thing on the surface. No lizards, no snakes, no varmints of any description. Nothing, really, except that one fuzzybug and ants both red and black.

I'm not entirely surprised by that, given as it's winter and I think this is when any self-respecting creature would be hibernating far underground instead of freezing it's ass off on the surface. When spring comes and encourages the plants to do more than just hunker down and put up with the winds, I suspect there may be more activity, maybe even more rabbits.

And then, I fear, more rats, mice, and snakes, but I honestly have no idea.

I'm worried about them being a problem without even knowing if they'll be a problem at all. Until I've lived here a year, I really have no way of knowing how “active” the land will be.

I remember feeling the same way about coyotes.

They're obviously up here and I've seen a couple, or the same one twice, on the road a few miles from my home. Once during the night when I was watching the sky fall in little chunks of meteors I heard them, far away, howling at something or other. I assembled a small pile of handy rocks near the door to throw at them only to learn from Jim across the street that he used to raise chickens and never had any problem with coyotes.

Which laid to rest my worries about Minardi fending off roving herds.

But, back to the rats. I've never seen any sign of them on the ground, but they're also very sneaky. A few weeks ago when I finally got around to cleaning out a shed that had been erected right next to the rear of the house I did (for me), a pretty thorough cleaning and in all my brushing and sweeping found a total of one of what my mom referred to as “calling cards.”

And that single, solitary tiny turd may have just as easily come from a mouse. And that, like everything else up here, may have been left any time since the day the shed was built.

When I tore down the bush by the corner of the house to get rid of the hiding place it offered to snakes and rats, the one living thing I disturbed in the process was a moth.

One moth.

So, yeah, I'm worried. All those burrows I found inside the fence have had their openings stepped on to more easily see if something comes out. But until I live through all four seasons up here, I have no idea if I have anything to worry about or not.

As they're wont to do, the Marines are flexing their muscles.

They've been exploding things willy-nilly the last week or so, but I'm thinking that instead of trying to show nature that they, too, can make you think of thunder that they have an ulterior purpose behind all these booms.

The explosions, frequent as they are, don't bother me or Minardi, maybe because they're far enough way to be neither sharp nor particularly loud. I sometimes feel them as much as hear them, which is pretty impressive, but they've got about as much land as Rhode Island for blowing things up and I guess they want to show that they need and use it.

Which brings me to my point. There's a real dilemma for the testosterone-driven, one that's been going for several years. On the one hand, the Marines want more land and back in 2008 asked for another 250 square miles or so to better practice blowing things up.

This, I'd imagine, would naturally be just fine with the pro-military types who are based or lived in the area and whom I'd imagine find very little reason to ever deny our armed forces anything they want.

On the other hand … King of the Hammers.

The “Hammers,” as they're called, is an annual off-road race that takes place in the area the Marines want for blowing up. This past week there's been increased traffic in the area as off-road racers have been hauling all manner of vehicles and, of course, RVs, trailers, and whatnot into the nearby Off Road Recreation Center that also serves as the home of King Clone.

I don't think the Marines particularly dislike off-road racing, but I'd have to admit anything they have for moving over the desert would make pretty short work of the professional's buggies and, being Marines, might even welcome the fight.

In any case, the expansion has been delayed or postponed or something and, as is the American way, is probably sitting around in some court or other. The Hammers people, in pressing their case, cite how important their event is to the community, talking about how much money local businesses get, how hundreds of thousands of people will lose their way of life by the loss of public land, and even that thousands of desert tortoises might get blown up. Their thinking, it must be assumed, is that that is a fate somewhat worse than being run over.

It's gotta be hard to choose between tearing up the desert and supporting the military, and even I'm of two minds about it. Without a strong, overwhelming military, we'd have hundreds of thousands more adolescents running around our cities maybe painting everything in sight or trying to get on YouTube by attempting some feat after asking a friend to hold their drink a moment.

So, I'm thinking the Marines are just showing off right now. Also, that the King of the Hammers race will be a success and might be worth a visit.

The desert is trying to kill me.

A couple days ago I woke up just fine, but while drinking some coffee I noticed that my foot hurt, that I was hobbling around, and that it really hurt to stand or to put any weight on my left foot.

This made me mad.

My body, it seemed, was falling apart, quicker and sooner than I expected, and no matter how frighteningly old and sad that guy who looks back at me in the mirror looks, I like to think I've still got a few good years left. But, no, it looked as if I'd be forever lame and immediately envisioned all sorts of drastic events.

When I took a shower, I felt refreshed and better, and not just because of my squeaky clean skin. I couldn't help but notice that my left foot, the one that was painful, was swollen, all pink and puffed up. Later, I looked more carefully at it and wasn't too surprised to see that on the ball of that foot there was a small circle, about the size of a pea, that was dark and in its center was what looked like a tiny bite mark.

So, there was a reason after all for limping, which was much better than thinking that my body was just failing in general. I was also pretty happy to see that there were no lines, dark or otherwise, leading up from the bite since I'd been told that was a sign of poison heading toward my heart and would severely limit my remaining life to a matter of hours.

A dab of antiseptic and a band-aid later, and I was good to go.

And go I did, outside to look at the desert and more specifically, at my little bit of it. This is a fairly common pastime of mine and not only gives me time to reflect but also lets me check up on the crap that still surrounds my home. Between desert winds, light sprinkles of rain and whatnot, it never hurts to check how things are holding up out there.

While still messy, nothing was out of place, but it did make me a little sad when I saw how overwhelming my future would be if I ever got around to actually starting to do anything.

So I went back to my chair by the front door, sat, and stared. This was better.

Or, it was better until I looked at the Comet cleanser that I'd poured around the entrance to my home, just around the threshold. I was told that was good way to keep ants out and, since that's the sort of thing I want, I'd done it and had been pleased with the results. I'd even seen actual ants approach the blue field, draw back, and walk its length before throwing up their tiny ant arms in frustration and returning to explore the larger, Comet free, desert in search of food.

While it works okay on ants, I couldn't help but notice that something else during the night had pretty much disregarded the repellant properties of household cleanser and had left a series of tracks along its length and width.

I first lied to myself that it must be lizards, but if so, they were left by some rare breed of lizards that don't have any feet since there were no foot prints. Nope, just squiggly lines in the Comet, ones that I immediately assumed to be those of young rattlesnakes since they were only about the width of a pencil.

The Internet told me that rattlesnakes like to live in or under bushes, rocks, and bits of wood. Not surprisingly, I have all three on my property, but between the door and the corner of the house, there's a bush that I never particularly cared for.

Not only does it have stickers and small puffs like a dandelion, but much smaller, but it's growing right alongside the house and, no doubt, undermining the foundation. Also, at the corner of the house is a small pile of rocks whose presence I've not quite figured out. The way I see it, there's two obvious possibilities: they're decorative or they're functional.

Many, if not all, of the homes out here have decorative rocks on the property, perhaps because they're everywhere out here and, at the very least, people move them out of the way so there are smooth places to drive and walk. The bases of the larger bushes on my own property have partial or complete circles of a variety of stones, so it may have just looked pleasing to someone to have some piled up at the corner of the house.

Or, they could be serving some useful purpose and maintaining the integrity of the foundation against wind and rain. In either case, it would be easy enough to move them (carefully, taken care not to be bit if snakes are living there) and get rid of the ugly bush, but I was a little worried about exposing the foundation.

In driving around, most of the places have exposed foundations, so my thinking of learning of how to lay brick may be a tad premature. What I may do is something I learned from the experts who came to repair our computers back in my working days and remove the rocks and then “monitor the system.”

By monitoring the system, of course, the techs meant hanging around, joking and talking and occasionally taking me out for sushi. It was a professionally accepted term for doing nothing and perfectly describes sitting back and watching nothing happen.

So, in addition to keeping an eye on my foot, which is pink like a baby and of a nice size for women if they were as drawn to thickness as they are foot length, I'll move the rocks, cut down the bush, and monitor my house.

At least until I actually have to do something.

In visiting King Clone the other day, a few things came to mind.

First, since it's no longer the oldest living thing on the planet, Americans don't really care much about it. It used to be number one, back before some discoveries in the past few years, but it's now dropped to third or possibly fourth, with the result that most people may think of it as an oddity more than anything worth seeing.

Still, it's out there, and not too far from my desert home.

Plants have a tough time of it, and not just those trying to eke out an existence in the high desert where there's very little rain and they're forced to live in sand composed of deconstructed granite.

Worse, other than vegans, vegetarians, and some foodies and gardeners, no one cares very much about the half of life that isn't animals. Even the best of plants aren't anywhere near as cute as a kitty and, to be frank, they don't exactly do very much. Oh, sure, some of them are pretty, but other than suffering the ravages of neglect and dying inside the home, if they can't be eaten or used as building supplies or fuel, we pretty much leave them alone.

In the case of King Clone, it (or he), is very much left alone, which is probably a good thing.

It may be over an 11,000 year old plant, but being located on the outskirts of an Off Road Vehicle area didn't bode well for its seeing its 12,000 birthday. So, someone put a wire fence around the area it's living in, which is about the only thing that sets it apart from everywhere else in the desert.

It used to be said of Microsoft that their policy against computer viruses and whatnot was keeping all their software secret. Whoever is interested in, or maybe even responsible for, keeping King Clone around, is taking a page from that book. I'm not sure there were ever going to be crowds of people flocking to look at an old plant, but there are certainly no lines of visitors, no souvenir booths, nothing in the way of guides or even signs. It's there, and if you want to look at it, you've got to find it.

Which, maybe I did.

Being unmarked has the advantage of keeping away the merely curious, which is probably a good thing in this land of rugged individualists. It's unlikely that anyone would just shoot it for the hell of it, but I wouldn't put it past those who haven't yet learned to put up with being told what to do or whose desires are solely driven by what they want, might just want to kick it, pluck at it, run over it, or otherwise destroy or injure it just for the hell of it. People are like that.

Since I'm guessing most people don't even know it's there, it's very much left alone.

The only indication I found of its location was placed by what I can only imagine are hippies since they made a tiny cairn on the roadside and a small arrow of rocks pointing under the fence. I hoped a similar cairn would exist inside, indicating King Clone's location, but I didn't see any.

What I did see was, of course, thousands of those creosote bushes, some in rings. Whether or not I saw King Clone is up for debate, but even with knowing that it was it, I'm confident I saw it since my eye past over pretty much everything in the area.

If it's still out there, I must have seen it.

(This website – http://www.lucernevalley.net/creosote/photo_tour.htm – does a better job than I could ever hope to do) The signs he saw, I didn't.