...i'm not sure PJ's numbers are reliable for the amerindians...more like a hundred million. meso- and south-america, remember, were home to many complex, urban civilizations well before the arrival of whitey. the incas, alone, controlled an empire which included 10 million people. My number is abs...

...the move to agrarian lifestyle in humans is often attributed to efficiency, i.e. not having to work so hard to get your resource needs met. My wife is a cultural anthropologist, and once cited me a study that showed hunter gatherers spent roughly 40% of their day making ends meet whereas agraria...

it took agrarian culture to create beer... or maybe people actually settled down to farm when they realized beer would be a possible gain... So, beer being either the impetus for or the happy side-effect of agararian culture, and beer being a really good thing, I have to say "Yo - farmers, props to...

...tilling the earth only gets you so far. what about a philosophy of nomadic wanderings? An excellent question. It's good for entertainment, education, and self-enlightenment, but ultimately nothing's getting accomplished by wandering in and of itself. If you turn it into good stories that's not t...

is this the result of a near death experience, or the sudden and unexpected loss of a loved one? Not yet. It's more of a philosophy forged on the farm, honed in any number of unpleasant jobs, and thrust into the clarity of intense daylight by recent discoveries. The big events aren't things that pe...

Trade ya some for a carwash. The only finite resource is time. Time spent washing a car is time gone forever and nobody cares if your car is clean or not. Spend some time entertaining somebody instead, because that makes for a good time for both of you simultaneously. You double your time investmen...

Don Muerto wrote:FUCK Mondays

I'll take every fucking Monday you can throw at me. The more the better. You don't like your day? Add it to my total, thank you very much.

While we're at it, shitty weather is better than no weather at all.

If my understanding of the genesis of the Center Camp Cafe is correct, coffee sales exist for one reason only: Larry likes coffee.

But you never see Larry without a cigarette--he goes through more of them than cups of coffee. So why don't they sell cigarettes too?

FWIW I have a fast PC, running an older (smaller) OS (WinME), with fast graphics hardware and a fast Internet connection. I'm geographically-farther from the various servers than are sundry Californians. And my E-Playa page load speeds and latency are both quite irritating, whereas the 3playa is nea...

A benefit to having them fight in the Thunderdome is, although there's a winner, because padded batons are used even the loser is still fit enough for sex.

Yer all Nazis.

Hope this helps.

http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/g/ ... s_Law.html

tzimisce1313 wrote:i think fighting over a single (well, more or less) women can be petty.

It's not petty if it happens in the Thunderdome.

Ivy wrote:..y'all are welcome to start "Burning Ivy," a place where people burn shit all the time an no one has to be nice to anyone else.

I'm envisioning a smoldering heap of defective, inadequate, and broken sex toys.

Rob the Wop wrote:If you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

Crippled children works for me.

Patience wrote:"I'm only an alcoholic because it's so easy to make the beer come out of this tap!"

If you're smart, you'll copyright that real quick.

...I suggest buying heritage seeds every year--none of this hybred, frankenfood, hot-house flower, round-up ready crap... Good luck. Humans have been genetically-altering food grains and other edible crops for thousands of years, mostly by making hybrids and selectively harvesting seed grain. Ditto...

...if people have enough time and energy to build their own boards, their energies would be better spent helping us run our boards better and make improvements... Not to belabor a point, rather to make a different one: Many otherwise-worthwhile people aren't natural "team players." While they have ...

Bob wrote:My idea for 2004 -- The World's Most Dangerous Theme/City/Shade Structure/whatever.

I suppose I could build a combination electrical substation/jungle gym.

...if people have enough time and energy to build their own boards, their energies would be better spent helping us run our boards better and make improvements... Not to belabor a point, rather to make a different one: Many otherwise-worthwhile people aren't natural "team players." While they have ...

...he will fail to be a solution because he will lie through his teeth. I wonder if there has ever been a politician that didn't lie? Many of the best lied reflexively no matter what question was being asked, and switched to telling the truth half way through their statement having realized that th...

i always liked hummers when they first came out in the military market. Seemed eminently utilitarian. Ambulance, troop carrier, throw a howitzer in back...it could do it all. Now the commercial version carries a maximimum of four people. My Chevy could carry five, and could've carried six if I coul...

Two minutes spent watching California traffic on any highway indicates that, as a group, Californians don't give a damn about minimizing their environmental impact via their choice of automobile. Nearly every automobile has a single occupant; almost none of those automobiles are Geo Metros or Honda ...

All the grousing about the comparative environmental benign-ness of automobiles directly powered by a supply of petroleum they carry, or by electricity no matter where it's generated (even by hitherto-undemonstrated tankered fuels such as hydrogen) is moot. Crude oil sells for between $20US/bbl and ...

...Seemed to me the entrenched were on an ego trip. That pretty much go's for the whole front line camps. Some have been there much to long. Some stuff they presented as art has been around for years... So? Every year there are plenty of newcomers that be experiencing something old for the first ti...

If you watch "Pumping Iron" its impossible to say that Arnold isn't the devil... I've never seen it. From what I've read about it I'd been supposing that it's more of a work of fiction than a documentary. I've seen his Conan the Barbarian movie though. He seemed pretty barbaric in that one but I've...

dipfuckshitwittedASSHOLE. That ratbastard owes me a set of handlebars If you can vomit on command, a good moment to do that is when you're sprawled on the car hood. Aim for the driver's side of the windshield. Breakfast chunks s-l-o-w-l-y creeping down the glass really adds to the overall effect. N...

I don't have to give shit how much depleted uranium has seeped into my refried beans. I'll confess that's a brand-new worry I'd not heard of. Traditionally, radioactive items in Mexico are contaminated by errant nuclear medicine waste. I'd like to think that all the lead in the water and food prett...

joel the ornery wrote:I guess feeding the poor in a soup kitchen is out of the question.

Like they want soup. Nobody wants soup.

What they want is $200 tennis shoes.

Soup. Sheesh.

JezebelinHell wrote:I like the anti-grafitti commercials better. Where they say if your kid owns sharpies and a sketch book that means they're a tagger.

Around here a bigger danger sign would be, "Does your child speak Spanish?"

But I suppose the public service announcement twits would run the ad in English.

But is that the message you want to give the world about what Burning Man is about? It's a great place to sell last year's stale leftover Halloween candy to inexperienced raver wannabes. "You heard of E? This is F. It's the next thing, dude." http://images.webshots.com/ProThumbs/12/17312_wallpaper2...