Expect hippies to be blaming this on climate change in 3…2…1
Eric Worrall writes: | The Burning Man Festival, a famous Nevada cultural festival, dedicated to sharing, art, self reliance, self expression, burning a big wooden statue, and sky high ticket prices, has reportedly been delayed due to the rain.
According to the report, the festival hopes to open its doors tomorrow.
No doubt this inconvenient delay will give participants an opportunity to practice their self reliance, as they figure out where they will camp for the night, while pondering the possible environmental benefits of not setting fire to that big wooden thing this year.
Or who knows – perhaps the organisers have a plan “B”, which involves splashing a lot of fossil fuel onto the wooden man structure, before striking a match, to ensure all that wet timber lights up.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/burning-man-delayed-gates-closed-because-of-weather-2014-8
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USA Today reported it as:
Burning Man gate shut as surprise rain soaks desert
An unusual rainstorm in the desert north of Reno, Nev. has shut the main entrance to Burning Man, disappointing thousands of would-be attendees to this performance-art festival and rave.
Monday showers turned the Black Rock Desert into “mucky mud,” Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Dan Lopez said. Law enforcement officials were turning back a long line of cars and camping vans.
“With rain attached to (playa dust), people get stuck everywhere,” Lopez said.
Rain in the Black Rock desert happened in 2010 and 2013. Seasonal monsoon patterns, that’s all. No surprise.
It seems to have been re-opened today:
Tickets going for $380 up to $1000 according to the article. That’s some rich hippies.
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Jimbo: August 26, 2014 at 12:17 pm
I think the Breitbart line was what is known as humor.
BM2007
August 26, 2014 at 1:20 pm
“This is a great site but very seriously let down by the lack of facts, ”
2007: “The Man was prematurely set on fire around 2:58 am, Tuesday August 28, during full Lunar eclipse. A repeat Burning Man prankster, Paul Addis, was arrested and charged with arson,[37] and the Man was rebuilt for regular Saturday burn. Addis pleaded guilty in May 2008 to one felony count of injury to property, was sentenced to up to four years in Nevada state prison, and was ordered to pay $30,000 in restitution.”
Those hippies sure take their woodpile seriously.
Source: wikipedia
Fire is a serious matter. Even the small fires allowed for fire dancers and camps have to follow safety rules.
Consider this: when an effigy burn is planned, a perimeter is set up to keep people at a safe distance, fire suppression equipment is staged to deal with secondary fires etc, and the decision to go ahead depends on the weather (esp wind conditions). All of this is needed because just setting fire to something that big without precautions puts a lot of people in harms way. Realize that there are people in and around effigies during the event. There’s a whole temporary city surrounding them.
What a hoot.
My son and some of his pals are giong as a rite of passage and to enjoy the high desert air. Not a hippy, just some tech guys trying to get out of town for a long weekend.
Maybe next year there will be a discount dry lake bed in the running. Call it Fire-Mart.
I do find the use of the term survival in this context to be a mockery of the term. I lived in Gerlach for 4 years, and to this day still camp in northern nevada all 12 months of the year, rain, snow, sleet, hail, sun and wind. You want to survive, go camping in the winter for a week or two in a place where anything can go wrong, and you are a multi day walk from the nearest human being or cell signal. People may remember the family that got stuck in the snow last winter, that was about 60 miles as the crow flies south east from the burning man. Or perhaps the Stopa family about 20 years ago with the baby, who wandered around in the snow for 9 days, that was about 80 miles north of the burning man.
@ur momisugly Alexander Feht on August 26, 2014 at 12:47 pm:
We keep loosing historical cultural references. To many “Burning Man” sounds like a guy who needs antibiotics and condoms.
How can one doubt our country’s return to greatness with citizens such as these? By the way, exactly who are these people? What do they want?
Every year Burning Man has a theme and a few years ago when I attended it was “The Green Man”. Of course there is nothing green about Burning Man. They do fund local solar projects for schools and such but the event is FAR from green. Just the fuel to get 60,000+ people out there leaves a huge carbon footprint in the playa.
I’m disappointed I couldn’t get a ticket this year. After some articles in widely read places like HuffPo it’s very difficult to get tickets now. Crazy weather only makes it more fun!
NPR had a bit on naked campers arrested due to the burning man rain: http://www.npr.org/2014/08/26/343352117/naked-campers-told-to-put-clothes-on?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=storiesfromnpr
Well, $1,000 sounds like a lot. But hey, you could upgrade your iMac to the latest model, or upgrade next year and go to BM.
Some digital cameras cost $50,000.
Not that I am much of a traveller. But I try to not criticise things about which I know nothing.
And I don’t see why hippies ought to be poor?
My old eyes would really appreciate a return to an unbolded Helvetica like font for the body. The names are huge and the text is hard to read. Gosh, we stopped writing reports in Courier and Times New Roman years ago because studies showed how hard it was to read. Please. Old eyes need less strain.
Surprise? How surprising can rain be, in the SW US, in August? I guess they never heard of the SW Monsoon.
That’s probably Yucca Mountain in the background, you know, the bone-dry nuclear waste depository (proposed), just down the road from Burning Man. After decades of reassurance regarding the low water table one bright scientist quantified the seepage of rainwater through the rock from above and threw a spanner in the works- canisters rusting away in a few thousand years. Glad to see he was probably right.
Jimmy Carter strikes again.
I well recall the report by Willis on this event a couple of years back. Made me want to attend, although geography, age and financials make this a near impossibility.
One thing that stuck in my mind was Willis saying the event was climate-alarmist-free. And neither were the attendees hippies. Apparently they all paid their own way to get there and coughed up a substantial attendance fee. Maybe they shared some attributes with hippies but were, at the most, hippie-ish.
They struck me as interesting people, fascinated with art and having a good time . . . something the world needs more of.
More like Flaming Hippy.
No more hippies and anarchists at Burning Man. It is now socially tiered like the rest of the planet….those who pay for everything and those who do their work, and loads of cops to keep everyone in line.
Also, it has rained on Black Rock City several times over the years. But these showers left enough standing water for waves to form!
Also of note, SpeedWeek at Bonneville flats cancelled because of flooded playa…
http://www.scta-bni.org/index.html
Here’s an article with pics on Speed Week cancellation
http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/2014-speed-week-bonneville-salt-flats-cancelled-due-flooding
How do they burn it without releasing CO2?
Yes. (I’d like the text to be black, not gray, and for it to have serifs, and not be Times New Roman.)
Sans serif is better for reading on computer screens. I don’t know what it is about the new font, but I simply find it less readable than before: I find myself not wanting to read whole posts or comments. Strangely, text as it appears in this comment box before being posted is just about perfect. Please, please, can it be changed to match the comment box appearance?
Don’t mind people having parties, gabfests, effigy burnings…
I just find it odd that we never celebrate the critical things that got us here and keep us here. The things we would shriek for if we lacked them for even a day. Among them are fossil fuels. There are no coal festivals, or, if there are, their hipness factor would be “Barry Manilow minus”.
Yet, when you think about it, there ought to be splendid coal festivals, dentistry festivals, washing machine festivals, obstetrics festivals, mass production festivals etc.
Think actual and act actual.
There are several petroleum festivals in South Louisiana and the Houston area. We celebrate the harvest of a different sort of cash crop here. Nature has been good to us in many ways.
When I was a youngster, there was an annual Oil & Gas Expo where service companies showed their latest equipment. You could get right up to (or upon) some very hi tech equipment like centrifugal separators, cut away motors, drilling rigs, sit in helicopters, walk on rig floor. Some of these devices were designed by not so well educated Cajun “engineers” who became very wealthy by finding ways to make their jobs easier.
Kids were allowed at the expo, and all the vendors gave away tons of goodies. We would walk out with bags full of stuff. Of course there were lots of rent-a-babes at the booths for young folks like myself to admire, and older guys to…er…converse with.
The most popular freebie for kids was a plastic easter egg filled with a water based synthetic drilling mud called “silly stuff”. It was mostly water, cool to the touch and felt slimy. It would run between your fingers like thick water, but not stick to your skin. I believe it even made it to the broader toy market later.
Anyway, we celebrate hydrocarbons here. I like to think we are the real counter culture!
Lovely stuff, Dave. Around here on the midcoast of NSW people still love their rodeos, buggy races and monster trucks. (I was at the council meeting which huffily refused to allow our airport to be used for drag racing.)
What you are describing would be a sensation. To the south of me, the inaugural Hunter Coal Festival is due next year. Let’s hope it’s not in any way defensive or apologetic. Time to get loud and proud about locally harvested fuels. Putin, Maduro, Nigeria and the Saudis can get on a queue to sell their products. Might make them a bit saner to know they’re not so special.
I prefer Arial font. Anyone else use that?
Can’t stop with the counter culture theme.
I am glad to be part of this counter culture.
I believe Bill Gates is at the cutting edge of this movement. He has not been a proponent of the Climate Change culture. He is in favor of African nations developing industry, which runs counter to the apparent IPCC policy of maintaining a welfare state there “for the benefit of climate”. Gates seeks to help these folks develop medical, educational and energy infrastructures that will raise their standard of living. He agrees this can only be accomplished with an industrial base fueled by cheap energy. if this counter culture succeeds, the world will be a much better place for all.
The alarmists are the conformists of today. We are the revolutionaries!
I like the reply feature!
One day of rain is not going to stop Burning Man. Mud is probably more acceptable than the usual sand storms. The mud will dry up in less than a day. This is a non story…
This has nothing to do with global warming or climate change – Burning Man is about ART. Check it out.