Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Force, a happy 50th, and some condolences. Empathize civilian-style along with Jimmy Stewart in 1966's Flight of the Phoenix. It's Lifeboat in the desert, or maybe a grim, post-war Gilligan's Island, with Stewart as an old-dog Skipper forced to yield to the "push-button world" and the ice-cold young German (the Professor?) who embodies it. You'll wince, maybe proudly, when Stewart tells us that "the little men with the slide rules and the computers are going to inherit the Earth." And then consider that this week, the whole thing could have been...
Bonfire of the Techies? The Burning Man festival of 21st-century-style paganism begins tomorrow in the northern Nevada desert...
...muffler bolted to go-cart wheels; he sits in front of the glowing, screaming toy and zips across the alkali flats. It's nothing like piloting a computer. And there's the elaborate camera obscura some thoughtful person usually sets up, big enough to walk into and see the desert upside down. And this year, if my girls can be talked into it, we'll squish in the mud of nearby hot springs and wander around as dried-mud people, just like everyone else...
Burning Man almost did not rise from its last pile of ashes. Two of the key organizers quit last year after one young man died in the chaos and dust storm churned up by thousands of vehicles driving every which way on the roadless flats of Black Rock Desert. The karma of mayoring such a bohemian city was more than they bargained for. But Larry Harvey, a visionary in the classic sense of the word, is undaunted. "They told us it would fall apart at 1,000 people," he says. "Then at 5,000. But we could have a million...
...event--the pyromaniac camp, the rave camp, the wind-surfers camp, the rainbow camp--and then standing before the terrible heat of the very big fire of the neon-lit man, the answer is not any easier to articulate. Harvey, in the sly coyote logic of a true desert mystic, puts it this way: "If we didn't burn it, we wouldn't be able to burn it again next year...