Life in California is full of head-scratching questions—like, is the term “California girl” deeply sexist or a compliment? So Alta Journal has enlisted two experts to answer your pressing queries: Stacey Grenrock Woods and Gustavo Arellano, both of whom bring decades of hard-won knowledge and laser-sharp insights into the Golden State.
Have a question of your own? Ask a Californian!
Word in the wilderness is that it’s currently coyote mating season. How can one tell this amorous season is upon us, and in what ways does this affect coyotes’ human neighbors?
—Nosey in Novato
Stacey: In early spring, a young canine’s fancy turns to thoughts of love, so whether by the fitful shrieking of a nearby pack or the fitful shrieking of cautionary memes, you’re bound to have heard that coyote mating season is upon us.
Specifically, how? From about January through March, normally active coyotes become abnormally active coyotes, and instead of just carousing, they’ll be carousing. And if they’re anything like us, all that sex gives them a real hankering for Maltipoo.
You’re most likely to see coyotes at dawn or dusk, or night or morning, or really anytime they feel emboldened to emerge, especially if you live near a wilderness area, a park, a water source, residential neighborhoods, parking lots, softball fields, major airports, or Alcatraz. And you’ll sometimes spot them at the cemetery, digging up graves. For most of us, it amounts to little more than an uptick in communication with neighbors, who will dutifully warn when there’s a coyote somewhere—like maybe over there, or over there. But if you’re unaccompanied by anything small or tasty, you needn’t be too worried. Coyotes aren’t very interested in humans. (Sorry, Furries.) They’re saving their strength to scale that six-foot fence you think is protecting your dog, which should never be left in your yard at any time or even walked with one of those retractable leashes. (Sorry, Fluffy.) If you do encounter a coyote, don’t run. Simply grab your dog, blow your whistle, and brandish your stun baton (What? You don’t have those?) while making yourself big, staring the beast down, very loudly telling it to bugger off as you very slowly do the same.
Gustavo: I hear it’s coyote coitus time when our furry, feared friends collectively recite—in Coyotese, of course—the best-ever poem about spring and love in the Golden State: “California Madrigal,” by Bret Harte. Those lines about how “the oath and the jest ringing high o’er the plain, / Where the smut is not always confined to the grain”? It’s ostensibly about agriculture but describes what coyotes and anything with a pulse will be seeking from now until Memorial Day. If you see them doing the deed, do what any self-respecting person would do: Go home and do the same!
Governor Gavin Newsom seems to be eyeing a run for the White House and looks more than ready to leave the Golden State behind. Who do you think would be his best replacement for California’s 41st governor, and why?
—Goodbye, Gav
Stacey: Ready or not, his time is up, so if he’s taken anything of yours—your job, your roads, your Dyson Supersonic—you’d better get it back now.
You ask about a “best replacement,” but that would be someone just like him—a “960 SAT guy” with silly hair and a podcast—and as far as I know, Eric Swalwell doesn’t have a podcast. Besides, I think our position as a global leader in empty $5,000-a-month apartments is secure no matter who’s in office.
Do I need to confine my pick to someone who’s actually running? Because that presents a bit of a problem. On the left, the main players are Swalwell, who’s got cheeky Instagram content covered, and former L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The city was far less terrible during his term, but he slid into my DMs once, so I can’t vote for him. There’s also a UCLA student who wants to build the unhoused tiny-home villages with libraries and gardens, a 29-year-old actor with two Facebook friends, a few other people who don’t stand a chance, and Katie Porter. On the right, there’s Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host who’s British. I don’t know what to say about that. So until we enact a lottery system and the job goes to my neighbor José, who always has a kind word and who brings in everyone’s trash cans, I’ll just have to do what I must in November: close my eyes and think of Oakland.
Gustavo: I will not praise any of our current gubernatorial candidates because pols always tend to lose if I say anything nice about them, and I’m still hoping Danny Trejo becomes Machete-in-Chief one day. So for the June primary, I’m casting my vote for General Sherman. It’s the perfect leader for California: Everyone loves the giant sequoia; it’ll never say anything stupid; it’s multicolored and both male and female. At about 2,200 years old, the 275-foot baller knows how to age gracefully, knows partisan politics is for the birds, wears its 102-foot waistline with pizzazz, and never plans to raise your taxes or pine—pun not intended, but man, did it land!—for higher office. Affairs? It’s been spreading its seed since before there was even a saint for forests (that would be Hubert of Liège, who lived in the eighth century). Platform? Um, life? All Governor—excuse me, General—Shermy asks of us is to take care of it and nature—which of course means he’d lose even against Chad Bianco because Republicans would call the tree a trans communist and the Dems would want to cancel it because it’s named after Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman and therefore problematic. And now you know why California is the way it is.
Is anyone else’s smartphone weather app a total liar? Mine will promise storms, thunder, and lightning, and all we ever seem to experience is a mild drizzle and the occasional dumb or horribly manageable rain. What gives?
—Unused Umbrella
Stacey: Total liar. The weather app, I’m sure we’ll find out, is in league with the weakstream media, which is controlled, for sure, by Chicken Little, and together they think up ways to make every ordinary rainstorm into an “atmospheric river.” I have a friend who will use an impending “Flood Watch” as an excuse to cancel plans, which is absolutely infuriating, not just because I didn’t think of it first.
Gustavo: The only app I ever bought was some fancy weather thing my wife swore was more accurate than the free one I use—worst $5 I’ve wasted since some fried nastiness or other at the Orange County Fair. But I like to garden, so I’m actually very good at predicting weather: I’ll go outside in the morning and feel how the sun hits me, greet the clouds, and tell the wind, “Please blow away Jax from Vanderpump Rules/The Valley from television already.” I’m better at predicting the weather than Steph Curry is at nailing threes!
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Stacey Grenrock Woods is a regular contributor to Esquire and a former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She writes and consults on various TV shows, and has a recurring role as Tricia Thoon on Fox’s Arrested Development. Her first book is I, California.
Gustavo Arellano is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. In 2025, Arellano was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning ¡Ask a Mexican!, a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Arellano is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impact Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and he was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Arellano is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one of whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.
