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This is the fair city of Sonora in the Mother Lode. ‘Queen of the Southern Mines’, says the city council’s webpage , taking time out of their not-so-busy closed-to-the-public deliberations regarding the approval of a new subdivision. Having traveled recently through their fair metropolis, my one comment would be ‘better get on clearing that brush or you might end up like Paradise one of these days’. One of the most interesting facts I can find about Sonora is that the population is roughly the same as it was in 1849. The town was named colloquially because a lot of miners from the Sonoran Desert were camped there, and upon looking it up, I was surprised to find that ‘Sonora’, same root as the English words ‘sonorous’ & ‘snore’ has to do with sound. Why in the heck would you name a desert the ’Desert of Loud Sounds’ in the ‘State of Loud Sounds’? Mysterious. I wonder what sounds were heard? The etymologists are trying to say it may be a corruption of Señora and a reference to the Virgin Mary, but that sounds slightly dubious to me as the corruption would have had the native populations unable to pronounce the Spanish, and then the Spanish adopting the corrupted pronunciation, and then nowadays the native populations are perfectly able to pronounce the Spanish ñ like nothing ever happened and no one ever returned to the correct pronunciation. First record is from Coronado who talked about a Valley of Loud Sounds in 1540. Like I said. Mysterious. Especially when you consider that one of the largest ‘where did they vanish’ mysteries about an entire people are just north of there, the Anasazi . Not that the people themselves necessarily all vanished, bunch of them joined up with the Hopis, but everyone decided to leave their cities all at the same time and no one has ever figured out a good reason why. Maybe hearing loud sounds out in the middle of nowhere desert may be as good an explanation as any. Or maybe the state government kept hiking taxes in order to install high-speed camels between Bakersfield and Modesto, I might say, with my dry sense of humor.
Which would make the loud sounds into Xander whispering darkly in my ear something like ‘Do you have a loicense for that joke?’

Description

This is the fair city of Sonora in the Mother Lode. ‘Queen of the Southern Mines’, says the city council’s webpage , taking time out of their not-so-busy closed-to-the-public deliberations regarding the approval of a new subdivision. Having traveled recently through their fair metropolis, my one comment would be ‘better get on clearing that brush or you might end up like Paradise one of these days’. One of the most interesting facts I can find about Sonora is that the population is roughly the same as it was in 1849. The town was named colloquially because a lot of miners from the Sonoran Desert were camped there, and upon looking it up, I was surprised to find that ‘Sonora’, same root as the English words ‘sonorous’ & ‘snore’ has to do with sound. Why in the heck would you name a desert the ’Desert of Loud Sounds’ in the ‘State of Loud Sounds’? Mysterious. I wonder what sounds were heard? The etymologists are trying to say it may be a corruption of Señora and a reference to the Virgin Mary, but that sounds slightly dubious to me as the corruption would have had the native populations unable to pronounce the Spanish, and then the Spanish adopting the corrupted pronunciation, and then nowadays the native populations are perfectly able to pronounce the Spanish ñ like nothing ever happened and no one ever returned to the correct pronunciation. First record is from Coronado who talked about a Valley of Loud Sounds in 1540. Like I said. Mysterious. Especially when you consider that one of the largest ‘where did they vanish’ mysteries about an entire people are just north of there, the Anasazi . Not that the people themselves necessarily all vanished, bunch of them joined up with the Hopis, but everyone decided to leave their cities all at the same time and no one has ever figured out a good reason why. Maybe hearing loud sounds out in the middle of nowhere desert may be as good an explanation as any. Or maybe the state government kept hiking taxes in order to install high-speed camels between Bakersfield and Modesto, I might say, with my dry sense of humor.
Which would make the loud sounds into Xander whispering darkly in my ear something like ‘Do you have a loicense for that joke?’