Dancing In The Streets

"The question that motivates this book originates in a sense of loss: If ecstatic rituals and festivities were once so widespread, why is so little left of them today? If the 'techniques of ecstasy' represent an important part of the human cultural heritage, why have we forgotten them, if indeed we have? If we possess this capacity for collective ecstasy, why do we so seldom put it to use"?

-Barbara Ehrenreich

Dancing In The Streets, A History of Collective Joy

No problem for the annual migration of "Burners" that take to the Nevada desert for a bit of "ecstatic celebration" and all sorts of creative foreplay in the process.. All the latest from SFGate here, and from 10 Zen Monkeys here, which includes the silly guy that wanted to "Burn the Man" a couple of days early. Not a good boy...

But what would you expect from such a character?


Everyone else seems to be having a grand old time..

I always thought it might be a bit uncomfortable camping out in the blowing sands for a fortnight with very little else to do but build and burn...but hey, haven't been there, so I will trust it is a tribal thing.

In tech news, the Wikipedia vandals have been found out, and now you know where some of those entries come from, and what happens to them (and by whom). Pretty clever.

Who's afraid of Google? The Economist asks the question, and according to them, plenty of folk. Mainly around privacy concerns, but anytime you have a company that grows that fast, it just has to have some kind of secret agenda. Doesn't it? Simply to organise and rule the world's information, seems fairly innocent enough... Yeah right. It is really a targeted advertising company selling you products aligned with your specific interests that they just happen to know about because of your search history. OK with that?

At least they have got some characters working for them, like this guy, reported in NYTimes, who gets his photograph taken with all the VIP's passing through the
Googleplex. Just an ordinary engineer, eh?

Gotta be a fun place to work, though...


No doubt everyone saw Miss South Carolina give her answer to on a Teen Beauty Contest as to why so many Americans cannot find their way around a map...
It makes Bush seem articulate!

Biopics of famous people, dead or otherwise, have been prolific in recent years, especially in the musician category. Paul Harris in Alternet asks why Bob Dylan himself doesn't play a role in the upcoming movie about his life called I'm Not There. Perhaps he thought 6 actors was enough.

Want to know all about private islands, and the eccentric people that own, inhabit and visit them, for say, up to 8years at a time? Well look no further. Private Islands blog is here.

Pick one up today. And don't forget to invite me around.

Gotta love those Africans.. They are becoming adept at blending culture and technology into a real art form:

Now that's what I call Hands Free!