A few roadkill advertisements from my travels

There’s a lot to worry about when driving America’s back roads, particularly west of the continental divide. Signs warn about dust hazards, rough pavement, steep grades, sudden storms, high winds, flying gravel, fresh oil, and falling rocks, oftentimes accompanied by nerve-racking illustrations of your car tipping over or diving into a canyon. But it’s the animals that really twist the screws.

On the east coast, you’ll sometimes see a sign for deer and it’s usually taken as a remote possibility – e.g. “somebody spotted a deer here a few years ago, so we put up this sign”. In states like Colorado and Nevada, however, these signs mean “at least a dozen of these things will jump in front of your car tonight.” And what signs they have! Deer, cattle, elk, wild dogs, scorpions, snakes, and a few animals I can’t quite identify. Cougars? Leopards? Sometimes the Department of Transportation just throws up its hands and installs a sign that says: “General Wildlife Crossing, Next 31 Miles.”

Here’s a brief inventory of the things that I’ve killed over the course of 22,315 miles: two birds, eight rabbits, two skunks, one raccoon, one turtle, several mice, possibly a porcupine, and countless bugs filled with neon juice. Things that have almost killed me (e.g. me slamming on the brakes and/or swerving off the road in profane terror): five deer, three cows, two bison, one dog, and countless rabbits (and eventually I gave up — see rabbit kill-rate above).

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Actress – Crushed
from Hazyville. Werk, 2008 | buy it
One of last year’s most overlooked albums, Hazyville delivers a beautiful mixture of dusty samples, trunk-rattling loops, and narcotic house from Darren Cunningham, one of the players behind the formidable Werk Discs imprint and the Hyper Dub scene. A lazy shorthand might be Gas + Moodymann + Burial, but it sounds much better than the math. Thanks to imunderpressure for the recommendation.

Actress also delivers one of my all-time favorite tracks which I will probably use to start every deejay set from now until people tell me to stop:

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Various Production – Lost (Actress remix) 
from Versus. Various Production, 2008 | buy it