Did I mention the orgies and drugs?

Sorry to be talking about this again, but I just want to assure you that I'm not panicking. I know you definitely read The Daily Mail article entitled "Panic grows that iconic Burning man festival famed for drugs and orgies is on verge of COLLAPSE [sic] after washout 2023 event," and I just thought that you should know that nobody is panicking. 

Pictured: the sensationalized, passive voice headline can be found in the 
lower quarter of the screen above that's not filled with ads for container homes
 and scrap metal recylcling companies. The algorithm's outdone itself this time!

Huh, the folks at Orgy Dome don't look
all that panicked. I wonder why the article
even mention--wait, do you suppose...

Well, not about this. There's plenty else to panic about. The climate, humanitarian crises across the globe, MAGA goons, the fact that there's a sequel to Beetlejuice coming out despite the track record of sequels that happen decades later. Lots. But whatever the hell this is? Not panicking. Obviously, nobody takes The Daily Mail seriously, but even for nonsense news sites, that headline is a masterpiece of click bate. Are there orgies and drug use at Burning Man? Yes. Does that have anything to do with the story? Not even a little.

The caption could also read: "Festival-
goers wait patiently in line to exit
Burning Man. But it doesn't say that.

There's also a shot (left) which is captioned: "A mass exodus consumed the festival as fed-up revelers fled Nevada's Black Rock Desert last year after torrential downpours turned the drug and orgy filled experience into a muddy mess. (Pictured: A massive traffic Jam as people tried to leave the festival)." Sigh. Couple of things. For one, the mass exodus didn't consume anything, the line to get out always looks like that. And it looks like that because the organizers pulse the traffic out so as not to overwhelm the highway and the small towns it passes through. 

To most people stuck with tickets I say,
"Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that." To ticket
re-sellers I say: "whomp-whomp."

They also didn't miss another opportunity to mention drugs and orgies, did they? Anyway, The story itself is about how demand for tickets was probably affected by last year's weather, which is true. Like I said, we talked about this already, but the idea is that the demand is low and supply is high. There are almost certainly a lot of folks, some of them friends, who are going to be hurt by the financial impact of unused tickets. That's terrible, and I definitely feel for them. There're also going to be speculators who thought they'd turn tickets around for a profit. That's schadenfreude and I don't so much feel for them.

Pity them not is what I'm saying.

But growing panic that Burning Man is on the verge of collapse? Eh...Would it be the worst thing in the world if this was the last Burning Man? The glamper festival kids who lost their minds when it rained last year would just take their culturally appropriative headdresses and RV's to Coachella or whatever. As for more dedicated Burners, they're adaptable, and would probably just go to regional events (mini-Burning Man things that happen, all over the world). 

Apart from the folks who work for the organization, the actual victims here would be people who live in the nearby communities who've build small industries around the event. And that doesn't even get a mention in the article. 

But curiously enough, they did mention the orgies. Like, more than once.

Today in Boeberting:

Also, the restaurant is an Applebees.
All restaurants in hell are Applebees.

There is a warm spot in hell for people who talk during a movie. It's one thing when you're on a couch at home, it's quite another when you're pissing off complete strangers who are under no obligation to pretend they like you. If that's the case, then there's an even warmer spot in hell--say, at a table right next to the kitchen so you keep getting the back of your chair smacked every time a server goes in or out--for people who talk in a theatre. 

Above: actual Denmark.

As in "re" theatre, like, actors on a stage who, like those sitting around you, can goddamn hear you. I bring this up because last night I saw some of a production of Hamlet. "Some?" you might reasonably ask? Yes, "some..." I reply with obvious irritation in my tone. My friends and I had, let's say, not the best seats. And it wasn't because better seats would have been too expensive, they would have, but that's not why we were seated in actual Denmark. It was because I may have left buying tickets until the last minute. Procrastination thy name is me.

"Sit. The fuck. Down."

-me, last night

As if the nosebleeds weren't ban enough, we had the misfortune of sitting behind a whole family of folks who've clearly never been to a play before. Or left their home and interacted with others. They talked, they constantly opened food in plastic wrappers. They passed said food back and forth. They had conversations about said food and the passing back and forth of it. They stood up and stretched like it was the seventh inning of a baseball game. Yes, that was a baseball reference. That's how upset I am: I'm reaching for sports allusions.

Clearly he missed the part about the
custom being more honored in the
breach than the observance.

My favorite among the group was drunk, like, visibly inebriated, and felt the need to anticipate lines. That is, Hamlet would start in with "What a rogue and peasant slave am I--" and drunko would announce loudly: "Here it comes!" Which, I mean, my dude. It's ok, the guy playing Hamlet has it covered. We don't need the hype-up. And when I say this guy was my favorite, understand it's not because I enjoyed his running commentary. No, it's because he passed out after he came back from intermission. Like, slumped in his chair, out cold for the entire second half of the show. It was bliss. 

Yeah, so I got stuck behind the literal worst people ever, ok, but how was the show? No idea. I mean, most of the time I was thinking about how much I wanted Drunky Magee to shut up, or his buddy to sit in his seat like a human. Did I tap them on the should and ask them to please quite down? No. Of course I didn't, and here's the really messed up part of this whole sorry affair: I didn't want to be rude. You know, in some ways I feel like part of the problem.

Remember that time Lauren Boebert got kicked out of a theatre
for giving her date a handy? Yeah, this wasn't that, I just wanted to
remind us all of the kind of person that is rude in a theatre.

To be clear: all dogs are good dogs.

I just want to say upfront that your dog is great. He, or she, or they is a good dog. A guddog. 

Pictured: a dog. Yours, someone else's,
it doesn't matter. I will presume it's a good dog.

"Hurray."

-me, in regards 

to your choices

I myself, however, am not a dog owner. Or a cat owner. Or a pet owner of any kind. I have tried it (fish ownership, if you must know), and I've decided it's not for me, along with plant and child ownership. Parentship? What's the word for when you choose to have a child? Whatever, my point is that I don't disparage anyone for their choices. Want a kid/pet/plant? Great, go buy and/or create one. Good on you. It's not for me, but I respect and even celebrate your choices. But I'm a little sick of dog presumption. Wait, where are you going?

Pictured: Noted dog murderer Kristi Noem.
Also, I think she's a governor or something.

The dog isn't presumptuous, the dog, as previously mentioned, is a guddog. Perfect and blameless in all things. What I'm talking about is the presumption on the part of some that merely by including a dog, I should be somehow inclined towards them--that is, the human using using the dog for their own gain, not the dog. And if it sounds like I'm going out of my way to explain to you how I've got no beef with dogs, it's because people who don't like dogs are, by and large, the worst people in the world.

"What are you? Kristi Noem?
Laugh! This is funny!"

-some movie

This came up from me recently when I saw the latest Deadpool movie. It was, you know, two hours of Ryan Reynolds reminding us of awesome stuff from comics. But there was this moment where they introduced Dogpool which is like Deadpool, but a dog. Doesn't matter, the moment he appeared on screen the audience lit up with--what's that thing people feel? It's an emotion...uh, joy? Lit up with joy and laughter and I felt nothing. I just felt like the movie was telling me I should laugh because dog.
 

Wait...are they throwing the
dog in with the tickers?

And, I don' know, it just felt a little exploitive. Like, that dog isn't being paid for his work, and I can't help but feel that folks were laughing at him. He is, if you're unfamiliar, a peculiar looking dog, and I think was included for that reason alone. And then the other day, while blogging about how many Burning Man tickets are floating around, I saw someone use their own dog in a Facebook plea to buy their tickets. And it wasn't the first or last post I would see where someone tried to leverage their dog's dogness to unload an unwanted ticket. What does the dog have to do with this? The dog didn't make them buy too many tickets. And what is the dog getting out of this? Nothing that's what. Have we, as a culture, just accepted the exploitation of our most loyal companions?

Well I'm not standing for it. Are dogs great? Sure. Did we spend thirty-thousand years domesticating them just so they could help us sell suggestive popcorn buckets and Burning Man tickets? No. And we sure as hell didn't domesticate them so they could star in one of the laziest covers in all the Hudson News Airport bookstore's "Thrillers for Dads" section:

You'd think #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Dean Koontz's
publisher would drop more than twenty bucks on cover art.

This year in flooding the market:

What if we had a Burning Man and nobody came? Welp, we just might find out. Every year there's something that's going to ruin the week-long let's get weird in the desert festival, but doesn't. Glampers, bugs, smoke from wildfires. Last time is was supposed to be rain.

Above: ok, it actually was rain last time. We kind of saw that coming.

It was a disaster, Diplo was
very nearly inconvenienced. 

But before the rain rolled in and turned the five square miles of drylake bed into the consistency of cookie dough, the expected catastrophe was supposed to be glut of speculators offloading their tickets at the last minute, which is weird because this year it's a glut of speculators offloading their tickets at the last minute. Yup, it's happening again except this time it's also regular people trying to offload their tickets at the last minute and the Burning Man organization flooding the market with still more tickets. If you ever wanted to go, this is the year.

By roll up, I mean creep towards the entrance
slowly for six to ten hours in 103º heat.

On the other hand, if you don't want to go, this was not the year to have already bought hundreds if not thousands of dollars of tickets on the off-chance you might change your mind because now, you're probably stuck with them. Which isn't unheard of. When I first went back in  2010, you could just roll up with cash and get it, but the following year it sold out and has every year since. You could usually pick up tickets close to the even as people for whatever reason had to sell, but for the most part they've been hard to come by.

Pictured: $925 of buyer's remorse.

This year however, not only is social media drenched in tickets like so much unseasonable rain, but the non-profit that runs Burning Man has released still more tickets into an already saturated--I can't get away from this analogy, can I?--market. Why? I'm guessing that the Org held a number of tickets back so as to keep them out of the hands of speculators. Which, if true, is super. Good for them fighting back against ticket parasites. But plenty of people have unexpected things (kids, work, the sudden realization that it's actually a gigantic pain in the ass and possibly more work than fun) come up and just can't go. 

So now a lot of burners are understandably upset that the Org is making their life difficult. Why buy from some rando on Facebook, when you can get them through the actual organizers? If the Org was indeed trying to look out for Burners, it sounds like it might have backfired. 

This year's Man--that is, the giant effigy that burns at the end of
the week--will be constructed entirely out of unwanted tickets.

Some schadenfreude, you know, as a treat.

Above: history's most recent victim
of history's dumbest electoral system.

Like a lot of us, I think I'm, what's the word? Traumatized? Yeah, actually that fits. Traumatized by that time we all knew, knew Hillary Clinton was going to win. And then she didn't. Well, I mean, she did in so far as more Americans voted for her than they did the other options, but because there's like a whole system that was designed to give underpopulated states some input, but was then exploited by autocrats to eek out technical wins that override the will of the majority.

So we had four long years of the former host of The Apprentice bloviating away what little credibility we had left. Four long years that ended in, just to remind ourselves, this:

Pictured: a literal coup attempt.

This, but schadenfreude.

Anyway, my point is while I'm feeling something akin to--well, not hope--perhaps less dread? Sure, I'm feeling something akin to less dread about the future. For now anyway. And so I'm going to treat myself to a little schadenfreude at the way the candidate who's name I shan't mention's campaign reacted to the news that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has been chose by Vice President Harris to be her running mate. That is to say with comically on the nose Right-Wing Satanic Panic.

Unleashing Hell and breaking ties in the
Senate. The VP actually has an important job.

Evidently the former President and if there is a God in heaven, future inmate, went so far as to release a memo suggesting that Walz will: "...unleash HELL ON EARTH" (characteristic and completely unnecessary capitalization, his). Bold claim, right? He also said that Walz will open the border to criminals (again, strong words coming from a convicted criminal), that Kamala Harris plans to light money on fire, and that Walz would be the worst Vice President in history. And that's coming from a guy whose own VP was nearly hanged by his supporters.

And sure, I know that the guy who was so bad at business that his casino went under will say anything, literally anything up to reassemble the coalition of rubes who catapulted him to an electoral, but not popular win the last time, but accusing a former geography teacher, National Guardsman, and current Governor of Minnesota of being a harbinger of Satan, feels like a little much. Even for him.

Pictured: Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz, seen
here holding a piglet at the Minnesota State Fair...and paving
the way for the Prince of Darkness. He later had some pie.