Welcome to March everybody. In like a lion and all of that. At the first of every month I will try and keep everybody informed as to what is happening with the best Village and group of theme camps at TTITD. Also every month I will try and throw in a link that may or may not be necessarily germane to the subject at hand. I want to find links about BDC&WB, but that’s not always possible. Below is a little song that someone wrote about Burning Man.
WARNING: It uses very bad language so if you play this at work, keep the volume down low. And I think it is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek.
http://ia311534.us.archive.org/1/items/mark.silverman.burning.man.2006/01burningmansucksdontgo.mp3
First off, we have submitted our applications for several of the theme camps within our Village: Eden, BDC&WB, and Black Rock City Body & Paint. We have yet to hear back from Playa International. Janice and Tracy will do Preserved In Time and Levy will do Boosh: The Canadian Splinter Squad. The Alaskans will be placed within our Village but likely not be registered with the BMOrg, which is fine. We also are adding another theme camp: Clan O’Crash which will also be placed on the Village map but not listed, unless Crash chooses to do that himself. We will be submitting the Village application later this month and will be asking for more than 100,000 square feet of space and requesting 87 early entry passes. That should be enough for everybody who needs one.
We have a few things on our Wish List that we hope to have for this year’s event. The first thing we would like is a burn barrel. If anyone has metal-working expertise and would like to design one (there are pictures of some if you Google it) for the Village, that would be nice. Should we get a burn barrel then we will cross the bridge of firewood. The reason we, as a Village, could use a burn barrel is that we generate so much paper trash that if we could somehow incinerate it ahead of time, that would ease some logistical problems. On the negative side of the ledger (there always seems to be one) is that the ashes and the barrel itself will need to be brought back to wherever it came from. We do have room in the storage shed for it for the duration of the year.
The next thing on our Wish List is for someone to design an evaporation process that actually works. Our shower gets a lot of use and is really one of the best ones I have ever seen at a theme camp at TTITD, since it runs electrically so you can actually get clean. The problem is that the water we use overwhelms the evap pond and flooding always occurs. Personally I can chalk some of that up to “dust abatement” but even by my slovenly standards it is getting out of hand. If any of you know how to make a workable evaporation process that would be an excellent contribution to our Village.
The last item on the current Wish List, and this comes up every year, is the design for the 2010 BDV t-shirt. Sunset did it two years ago and last year the design was done for us by an artist with some dubious talents at caricatures while on the playa in 2008. So now we need to come up with a new design for this year. You can submit your ideas on an 8 1/2″ X 11″ piece of white paper so the printers can easily transfer the design onto the shirt. (Shirts will remain gray with burgundy lettering.) We will need the finished product in by July. As shown in the past, no idea is too stupid to be considered.
I would like to introduce a few new members of our Village. We are taking on an increasingly international flavor. We have two ladies joining us from France, Laura and Shirley. They are newbies and have made the brilliant decision that BDV is the place to be. Laura can be reached at: bottin.laura@gmail.com . We also would like to welcome another newbie, a friend of Tracy’s from England, Roamer U. And finally we are welcoming back into our fold Marcus from Switzerland. You might recall he came up with me and Blowfish and on Sunday vanished into the dust with some cute burner gal he met out at the Opulent Temple or some such place. Well he’s in Guatemala right now and will be heading back for the festivities and this year even promises to bring something to eat. Probably a good idea.
For any of you Barbiebarians in the New England area come the middle of April, some of us are gathering at Kat’s in Cambridge on April 17-19. I will be running the Boston Marathon on April 19th (more on that in April’s newsletter) and we will be getting together to “rehydrate” and “liquid carbo-load” before and after the race. We would love to see any of you again if you’re in the area.
And to end on a positive note, kudos go out to Harmony who is going to be featured on a TV show that will air later this year on the DIY Network: Turf Wars. She and her team battled for more than 36 hours straight another team to see who could put together the finest looking yard for two competing families. I am not going to give away which team won, but Harmony’s team worked like a well-oiled machine and turned what was a desert post-apocalyptic landscape into a virtual paradise complete with a new fountain and running stream that harkened back to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Good work Harmony; you and Ericka, Skirblah, Trevor, and the rest should all be very proud.
I will keep you posted as other things develop.
Doc Pyro, MOBDV