Someone has posted a highly accurate Craigslist Job ad. Hat tip to @defango for this.
Burning Man Camp Lead (Black Rock Dessert)
compensation: Varies depending on experience
employment type: full-time
Job DescriptionResponsible for all camp planning and logistics: camp member recruiting and ticket and vehicle pass purchasing, placement application (interactivity, acculturation, layout planning, camp gifting, camp events, etc.), Bureau of Land Management permit application, fundraising, accounting, vehicle purchasing or rental, vehicle maintenance, inventory, on-Playa leadership and crew coordination (including team creation, task assignment, motivation, scheduling, etc.), clean up, social media coordination, media liaison, website development, camp communications and training, storage, travel, food and water (including Nevada state certifications), services liaison (fuel, power, and potable water, gray water, black water), engineering certifications, etc. Expect to be on-Playa counselor for members with troubled relationships, overworked setup crew, picky eaters, and members of the public that would like to complain about your camp. You will also carry the legal liability for the camp (recommend procuring insurance).Passion for people a plus, but not required. In fact, that’s just for your benefit. Cranky as F*@! may actually make you a better fit for this position. Must be able to meet deadlines. Travel required. Must maintain high tolerance for drugs and alcohol (especially in others). Must love dust.
1800-2200 hours per year. Part time November through June (about 20 hrs/week), full time June and October (40 hrs/week), double time July-September (80 hrs/week). Burning Man time commitment (including setup and tear down) is two and a half time (100 hrs/week)*. No overtime compensation.
0-5 years experience (manage teams of 3-20 people)
Compensation: First several years requires you to pay approx. $15,000 annual out of pocket. Although this cost may decrease over time (or increase).
5-10 years experience (manage teams of 20-50 people)
Compensation: Unpaid. Profit (and loss) sharing (but probably loss).
10+ years experience (manage teams of 50-100 people)
Compensation: Minimum wage. Profit (and loss) sharing. No benefits.
*Decommodification Principle disallows financial compensation for responsibilities performed at Burning Man.
Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
do NOT contact us with unsolicited services or offers
OK to highlight this job opening for persons with disabilities
Australians. Can’t live with ’em, can’t send ’em any further away.
One enterprising young bloke from “the ass end of the world” has used his time in America and his trip to Burning Man to achieve international notoriety.
In August 2015, children in a sleepy suburban neighbourhood of the Californian city of Sacramento noticed a white, windowless van parked on their street.
Across the side of the vehicle, someone had painted the words “Free Candy” in a bloody shade of red. A cluster of handprints were smeared nearby, suggesting that some candy-seekers may have come to the wrong kind of sticky ending.
A 12-year-old named Lawrence Bellow uploaded a photo that began to spread around the internet. Soon local news stations were interviewing local parents about the “suspicious van” rolling through town.
“It just felt like they were trying to attract kids, and it just gave me a creepy feeling,” Lawrence’s mum told the local KOVR TV station.
The van’s driver was Australian Ron Jacobs, 28, who had stopped overnight on his way to Burning Man, the month-long music festival in the middle of the Nevada desert.
By the time he arrived his van had already gained internet fame.
“I was just living in the van and I was just hearing it explode all around me,” Jacobs said. “I woke up one morning, some guy just screams out, ‘I saw you on the internet, I love your van!'”
Since then the “Free Candy Van”, which does actually give out free candy, hasn’t stopped getting attention.
Jacobs said the idea for the van came after his life in Perth fell apart “in a whole bunch of ways”.
“Life. Work. Family. The whole shebang,” he said. “All at the same time … I ended up picking up my savings and chasing my dreams.”
Those dreams involved a “big international adventure”, so he left to travel the American southwest and camp out while skydiving, windsurfing and attending music festivals.
Rather than live in a tent, Jacobs decided it would be better to buy a second-hand van, but knew he was trading comfort for the stigma associated with being a strange man in a white, windowless van.
Instead of shying away from the image, he decided to play up to it by going over the top.
“I was just kind of thinking, like most things in life that you can’t change … what you can do is embrace it and celebrate it,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs, an engineer who spent a year studying at Penn State University, has since given out $1500 (£1500) of free candy.
He said most of his interactions with other people involved a “rollercoaster” of reactions, starting with horror before moving to a sense of relief, and even delight.
Jacobs has been stopped by police eight times while driving the van. A friend from Perth who borrowed the van for three weeks was stopped seven times.
“I consider this van a mirror of American society,” Mr Jacobs said. “The whole experience I’ve had has just been me, a tourist, living American everyday life as their… public enemy number one, and it’s just been such an experience.
Once again, over-protective and nervous parents found something to be over-protective and nervous about:
Here’s the Free Candy whistleblower explaining how he saved the day:
And here’s the perpetrator’s apology – in which he says that American society itself created the Free Candy Van (and its registered trademark and website):
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the idea was original:
Parents, be sure to talk to your children about “stranger danger”.
The story behind America’s suspicious free candy van
A vintage van complete with blackened windows, no number plate and branded with ‘free candy’ in blood-red writing has been cruising around the streets of America giving out free candy.
It might sound the epitome of a parent’s nightmare, yet the menacing van contains nothing more harmless than a few extra trips to the dentist. There are more important things to focus on, like fixing that grinding you hear from yuo kid’s rooms at night. Sollution: mouth guard for teeth grinding.
Perth hippy Ron Jacobs settled on the idea behind the van en-route to Burning Man festival this year; a stop before he headed off for three months of ‘wing suiting’, a sport where you fly wearing a suit that looks like an overgrown fruit bat.
Despite the media attention he received for the van, which wasn’t always positive, Ron assured sceptical onlookers that it was nothing more than a tribute to the Burning Man’s celebration of absurdism, and a product of his own unique humour.
“At the Burning Man it’s all about the giving, so what am I going to give?” he told ECU Daily.
“Oh and I’ve got to get to Burning Man. So I’ll need transport. I’ll also need somewhere to stay there … Okay, let’s connect all of these dots: FREE CANDY starts making a lot more sense.
“It’s just going to have to be completely over-the-top and really deliver on the promise of free candy at each and every opportunity.”
He said the joy and delight I received driving others around, while handing out free sweets, was amazing.
“I get as many of my friends and their friends’ friends to drive around in it and give out free candy too,” he said.
“It’s such a blast. The sensation of being able to take someone from immediate shock-horror all the way through to gratitude and hilarity with a drizzle of irony in less than a second is outrageous fun in my book.”
The van made American news headlines, with some of the bold statements including: ‘Free Candy van creeps out parents in Sacramento’, and ‘Free Candy van upsets Sacramento residents’.
Luckily, these weren’t the only responses.
“I only ever heard the story from other peoples’ mouths,” Jacobs said.
“One interesting example was when one morning I woke up to a man shouting out at the top of his lungs at the van: “I saw you on the internet! F*** love your van!”.
So what’s next for the wing-suited, parent-creeping-out world traveller?
20th Century Fox has a new film coming out “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials”. Quiznos makes sandwiches. Put two and two together, and what do you get?
Burning Man 2.0. When the Shark ate the Subway.
Here’s the “offensive” commercial:
Taco Bell did it first. Without any known repercussions. So why wouldn’t their competitors try it too?
BMOrg are pissed. Could it be because these guys hit a little too close to home, and somehow nailed EXACTLY the problems happening with our culture now? You know, the ones BMOrg either deny exist, or tell us they’ve listened to us and completely solved (while actually doing nothing), or if there is any acknowledgement, blame on us?
Laugh at yourselves, Burners. Because some of this is really freaking ridiculous. A unicorn car that shoots fireballs? Is that somehow not ridiculous?
Some choice quotes:
“Don’t you understand?
Understand what?
How to look cool on Instagram?”
…
“They lied to us. They said it was an anti establishment society based on radical self expression. Now it’s become a place for rich people to tick off their bucket list.“
True dat.
How does BMOrg respond? “Ha ha, yes that’s funny, everything we do is just an ironic prank, like all the Satan/Hellco stuff, or being the first org since the Nazis to officially employ a Minister of Propaganda?”
Burning Man isn’t laughing at a new Quizno’s advertisement.
The toasted sandwich company published a parody video, “Out of the Maze and into the Playa,” on YouTube earlier this week, a day after the weeklong utopian arts celebration in Northern Nevada’s Black Rock Desert concluded on Monday. The plot sends the characters of the “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials,” a not-so-well reviewed science fiction thriller to be released later this month, to Burning Man as a test of character…
Burning Man takes issue with the clip and is considering legal action, not because of the mockery it makes of the more than 70,000-person annual event but because the video is theft of the event’s intellectual property, according to Burning Man spokesman Jim Graham.
“We are pretty proactive about protecting our 10 principles, one of which is decommodification,” Graham said. “We get a quite a number of requests each year from companies wanting to gift participants with their product or to capture imagery or video of their products at the event, and we turn them all down…We’ll be coordinating with our legal team to see what action we can take…Burning Man’s busiest time of year, when it comes to defending decommodification, is immediately after the Burn, Graham said, when companies and individuals attempt to market their products by paring [pairing] them with Burning Man content.
…Burning Man has taken it to legal action in the past…Burning Man won the lawsuit against Girls Gone Wild, Graham said…Burning Man makes an effort to support certain businesses that serve the Burner community, many of them Reno-based, by promoting them in one of Burning Man’s annual newsletters each year before the event.
It’s not Commodification when BMOrg does it. Still, I’m all for supporting local Burner-friendly businesses, including the 100+ vendors licensed to sell stuff at Burning Man. Quiznos seems pretty Burner-friendly to me; clearly, they understand where our culture is at in late 2015.
Burning Man had not taken any legal action against Quizno’s as of Thursday evening.
I find some chuckles in the empty threat of the $30 million charity tax-exempt non-profit BMOrg suing the $8 billion phone hackers over at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, or the $14 billion hedge fund behind Quiznos. To make their case, Larry and Marian would have to swear on the Bible that parody is not a legitimate art form and must be censored and suppressed. Then they would have to prove how their sold out event was financially harmed by millions of dollars worth of mainstream media advertising – while the other Fox product, The Simpsons, can parody Burning Man and that’s totally fine.
Personally, I think this Quiznos ad is brilliant. Timely. Poignant. Very funny. #nailedit!
“The course of this festival will determine the course of humanity. Until next week when you return to your desk jobs”
If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?
Perhaps this is karma for all the Satanic pranking of Burners by BMOrg lately, such as “bugs are here and they’re everywhere and they crawl up inside you and bite” at burningman.com, or “don’t share photos that we share on social media, that’s why we have teams of lawyers”; or lining up at Will Crawl for 8 hours with no shade or water to pick up your $400 tickets; or the idea that we are saving the world through a dusty rave; or that we are supporting the arts by underpaying artists and screwing them in contracts and saying they shouldn’t ever sign their work. Even the theme this year was that we’re all chumps, suckers, and rubes, while they’re hucksters and carny barkers.
It sure has seemed like they’re laughing at usin recent years. Well, now the whole world is laughing at them. Let’s see how they take it. So far, not so good.
BMOrg’s usual trick of going to the media to fight their battles against small town judges and sheriffs, ain’t gonna work against the world’s biggest and most powerful media group and the world’s 13th largest hedge fund.
Quiznos is a privately held company with revenues of about $400 million and more than 2000 stores around the world. It is the #2 sandwich maker in the US, after Subway. Since 2012 they have been majority owned by Avenue Capital Group, an international investment firm with 200 employees and offices in 8 countries. It is the 13th largest hedge fund in the world, 15% owned by Morgan Stanley, with $14 billion assets under management. Chelsea Clinton worked there from 2006-2009.
The founders of Avenue Capital previously worked for multi-billionaire Robert Bass, who is Chairman of Reno-based supersonic aviation company Aerion Corp, a DARPA contractor.
Quiznos has a long history of legal battles, they are no stranger to court and seem to have used lawsuits for marketing before.
[Update 9/12/15 3:10am PST]
Thanks very much to Nomad for finding this. Toasty.TV is part of a broader Quiznos parody marketing campaign.
The toasted sandwich company
