Seen Today

Last night I watched the Mazu Temple burn, a glorious shower of fireworks followed by a beautiful flower of fire that left a steel column holding a lotus blossom behind.

This morning, I saw the DPW finally – after a week of delays – use their trebuchet to launch a flaming piano into the air.

Then, on my way back to camp, I saw a grown man with a young girl who was holding a basket full of candy.

“Ice cold M&M’s!” the man called out.  “Get your chilled M&M’s!  All you have to do is take candy from a strange child!  Go ahead!  Take candy from a strange child!  It’s all right!  You can do it!”

Who says kids have no place at Burning Man?

I thought you would want to know.

About the author: Caveat Magister

Caveat is Burning Man's Philosopher Laureate. A founding member of its Philosophical Center, he is the author of The Scene That Became Cities: what Burning Man philosophy can teach us about building better communities, and Turn Your Life Into Art: lessons in Psychologic from the San Francisco Underground. He has also written several books which have nothing to do with Burning Man. He has finally got his email address caveat (at) burningman (dot) org working again. He tweets, occasionally, as @BenjaminWachs

3 Comments on “Seen Today

  • Kilmer Gouger says:

    OF COURSE we wanted to know… you know, enquirering minds and all.

    I hope you didn’t eat the brown M&Ms, everyone knows about the brown M&Ms, especially from a strange kid, strange kids and clowns man, strange kids and clowns….

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  • The first ‘Trebuchet Piano’ was more like they ignited the piano by trebuchet on youtube.
    Later attempts showed more piano slinging action.
    I am only gratefull for any from the playa information I get !
    Love the streams, read any bit of the blogs.
    Went to the toilet during the portapotty leave of the art tour mentioning to have to get back before the fog horn of the Elizabeth sounds.
    A little off topic
    Listening to BMIR September 5th 2015 17:01-18:00 some DJ nick named Caveat presenting.
    Your christmas carol exceeds all previous x-mas announcements, the ‘Global Petrodyne’ sponsoring is totally weird <wow>
    Can you hand them over to the year round random playlist guys please.
    Perhaps as well as the audio art tour, after years of only Enki those would be refreshing.
    The ‘Global Petrodyne’ only gets better 17:35 I have heard these before!
    And some way more off topic
    Why does the ‘new style’ WEBsite _require_ an ‘upto date’ browser?
    This means you have to invest in hardware and or software beeing a commercial requirement.
    (Posting {or reading} this I can not use 20% of the right side of my window as some buggy script {actually a CSS} holds it hostage)
    The general question on the radio show:
    What does beeing a commodity or not beeing a commodity mean to you?
    To me; I try to be of some assistance (anyway), more to the point;
    I tryed to write a less encyclopedic entry about the Burning Man Project and a more informative then the previous version.

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  • Murat says:

    While you are correct that a rrquieed minimum investment is not rrquieed for do-it-yourself’ self-publishers, if they turn to one of the larger self-publishing companies to do the work for them, there can be some rather exorbitant fees. Perhaps not as much as when the self-publishing business was new, but they are still considerably more than when one uses a company like CreateSpace.As you suggested, it all depends on the author’s expertise as to how professional’ their self-published book will be. For those who have minimal skills and do not wish to expand their knowledge, the costs go up commensurately.Thanks for visiting my website.

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