Ed's not here, man

by Amy Maestas

Blog Last Updated; 11/20/2009

Ed's not here, man

There are a lot of you Ed Abbey fanatics out there, so here's your chance to really take it over the top. A home Abbey owned in Moab, Utah, is for sale. Abbey bought the house at 2240 Spanish Valley Drive in 1974. He lived there off and on until 1978, when he moved to Tucson, Ariz. It isn't the one-room trailer Abbey lived in when he first moved to Moab during the area's uranium boom and when he worked as a ranger for the park service. Rather, this house is where he wrote the mucho-famous The Monkey Wrench Gang.

The house is 2,800 square feet, has four bedrooms and two bathrooms, and it sits on 1.41 acres. It's yours for $290,000. I think that's a screaming deal for a house that size in an ever-growing tourist trap of a town once owned by an all-but-canonized author and environmentalist.

Reportedly, Abbey bought the house for $26,000 and sold it for $40,000. Wonder how many wrenches Abbey bought with the profit?

Yup, you're out of your league

It will be hard not to make fun of the target audience of this new gadget on the market. But the tongue-in-cheek name of the gadget is setting itself up. Don't read on if you are a young, upwardly mobile professional.

ACR Electronics recently released put on the market a personal locator beacon that sends out long-range and satellite-assisted signal to search teams when the user is lost or distressed in the wilderness. That sounds like a great tool to have on hand. But rescue teams throughout the country are distressed themselves: people who shouldn't be or aren't fully prepared to be in the wilderness.

GPS technology has given a certain segment of people the false sense of security ? and, frankly, a set of guts they didn't previously have. That's because they can go on an adventure and know that their GPS gadgets will get them out of trouble if they encounter it. These devices they use have earned them the not-so-friendly moniker of Yuppie 911.

"Now you can go into the back country and take a risk you might not normally have taken," says Matt Scharper, who coordinates a rescue every day in a state with wilderness so rugged even crashed planes can take decades to find, told the Associated Press recently. "With the Yuppie 911, you send a message to a satellite and the government pulls your butt out of something you shouldn't have been in in the first place."

Ticked off in Taos

Just because you are a successful business man does not mean you're the brightest. The saga continues in Taos, N.M., after Whitten Inn owner Larry Whitten began telling his employees recently that they could not speak Spanish and they had to Anglicize their Hispanic names. Since Whitten did that, there have been protests at the inn, and also calls to boycott his business.

So far, Whitten has been numb about his short-sighted act to try to whitewash his inn and employees.