This cover from the Santa Fe Reporter, New Mexico’s favorite alt-weekly, has created a bit of a ruckus:
Santa Fe Reporter
No, I’m not talking about the bikini-clad Lady of Gaudalupe. I’m talking about the saguaros, those two tall-armed cacti in the distance. This outrage must not stand.
“New Mexico?” Chris Clarke wrote last year. “No tienen saguaros.” But to prove that I take my cactus humor seriously, I kid you not, we’re actually trying to grow a saguaro in our Albuquerque front yard – our living joke on all those tight-asses like, say, me, who like to complain about saguaros in New Mexico iconography:
Spikey
Me: “How do we spell ‘Spikey’?”
Lissa: “Dunno. I don’t think he’s alive.’
Ten or twelve years ago, we were doing content for a computer graphics training CD. We used the big solar telescope at Sunspot for an example of the architectural, mechanical and engineering modules. We sent photos to the graphics company in Vancouver, BC, that did the visual razzle-dazzle. Sure enough, the first roughs came back showing a dry desert full of cow skulls and saguaros, not the heavily forested Sacramento Mts.