Jason's blog thingy

“…as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And then there’s Burning Man. I fuckin’ hate those bastards”
– Donald Rumsfeld

I think my favourite moment this year was riding out with Jo onto the open playa at night for the first time. She said, “I was expecting something, but I wasn’t expecting this”

I said almost exactly the same thing when saw ‘it’ for myself the first time. Afterward, back in default world, Fiona and I would spend hours trying to explain it to people; this bright cacophony of insanity. There’s a strong urge to share and try to impart some idea of this rough, squiggly, bifurcatious unfuckingbelieveable  madness to others. But words are simply inadequate. Like the matrix, you have experience it to understand it.

And in the inability to express, it becomes a little totem inside. A secret memory that stands your hair on end, skips your heart a beat and brings an idiot grin to your face.

The Greatest Show on Earth.

And on to the Summary!

Approximately 24.3 people have asked me how my trip was (It was great/nice/{insert placid adjective here}) and about 10 or 15 have actually asked how “that desert thing”/”that festival”/Birmingham was. I told them it was boring. Most people get that as a joke, but really, since it sold out this year (53000 attendees) its time to start putting people off:
Don’t come – its too crowded, there’s no room on the grass anymore
Don’t come – the dunnies have flooded 2 years in a row now
Don’t come – they haven’t cleaned up the dust from last year
Don’t come – I’ve heard its not going to be that good this year
etc.

The weather was totally ridiculous. The nights were warm except for two, maybe three nights when you needed to rug up a bit. The days were mild – mid to high 30s (celsius) at the most. And NO DUSTORMS! That’s just crazy. We’ll there was a little wind and little bit of dust after the temple burn, but that doesn’t count.

The eye-spa just gets better and more pro every year. With 83 (yes you heard right) people in our camp, it was fine for me to do just a day, feel the love, give the love and still have time for doing other Burning Man stuff. Got a few nice photos too.

An Embarrassing Incident

It is left to me to relate an awfully embarrassing incident. I know that everyone else has been circumspect out of some kind of respect, but the truth must out!

We were on the floor of the respected, historic, fabulous (but occasionally boring) Opulent Temple, one of the premium and obviously exclusive dance floors at Burning Man. My friend Jo Mott was dancing. But she doesn’t just dance, she takes over the floor! Jumping, gyrating, swamping, vogueing and just plain dancing well beyond the capabilities of we mere mortals!

And then she broke the floor!

That’s right! Her crazy moves were too much for the dance floor – she actually broke it! It collapsed! Half the dance floor had to be cleared while a specialist team came in and performed emergency repairs. So picture this: there’s a whole pile of people waiting off to one side while people in reflective flouro tops are frantically bolting down new flooring. Its lucky Opulent Temple was so well prepared – it didn’t take too long before everything was back to normal.

Now Jo? Honey? Next year maybe tone it down a little?

 3 Projects…

Project 1: The Bunny
Was a qualified success. It was supposed to ‘run’ in time with the speed of my bicycle, using magnets on the wheel and a detector. Worked perfectly on the test rig. Failed over and over on the playa, so I gave up and ran it in test mode (means he runs at one speed).

Of course everyone who saw it thought it was fabulous, and I got lots of wonderful comments from fellow burners. The plan now is to build some smaller, easier to mount ones, so fellow dpeeps can join in. My bunny will have babies!
And fix the magnet crapola.

Project 2: The Remote
Was a full success! Yay! In 2010, with a friend (Hi Amy!) we went to a pretty big event: Deja Solis singing under Bliss Dance and we lost our bicycles for 2 hours. Now we had bright flashy things on our bikes, so they should have been easy to find, right? Imagine a sea of 20 to 30 thousand bicycles all with flashy things!?! 

Something more than just flashy was needed. I built a unit that included a 100m remote control system with a keyring type fob that controlled (press 1) a triple strobe light attached to a fishing rod that put it about 8 feet high, (press 2) a fairly loud reverse beeping alarm and (press 3) a _very_ loud 110 decibel alarm siren.

And it worked a treat. Used  it to find my bike 3 or 4 times. And made people jump with the siren once or twice. Unfortunately the batteries ran out on Sunday night and I LOST MY BIKE! Aaaargh!

Project 3: Solar Power System
Dear reader, if you have been an astute follower of this unread blog, you will have read of this project in the previous post. You will know that this project cost some sweat on my part and that as I built it I had no idea if it would work, no way to test it before it was put to use, and no idea if it was even wanted. So here readers, the results are in:

Pros:
a) Everyone loved it. I think maybe they even loved it a little beyond just being nice to me.
b) It worked. It worked really really well. In fact, with daytime input from the solar panel between 2 and 3.5 amps and the car stereo load at 0.5 to 1.5 amps it could easily run music night and day non-stop. 80 amp hour battery was an expensive but good choice.
c) Putting it all in an eski (that’s cooler to the U.S. readers and ‘chilli bin’ to the 0 N.Z. readers) worked much better that expected. The inside was was generally about 2c cooler than outside.
Cons:
a) I had no time to make any instructions, label anything, draw up a schematic. Its a big box ‘o ??? Hopefully I can sort this out for next year
b) The stereo couldn’t handle pumping out the big db when we wanted louder music for the dpeeps at night. So I see either a bigger car stereo or a switchinable booster amp for night time.
Rating:
Great success

And Almost Finally

One more post after this dear readers…..