If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build. -- John Perry Barlow
Otters! The latest in a string of bizarre and unexplained
attacks rocks humankind. From Florida to Romania, one word
is striking terror in the hearts of humans everywhere.
Otters! Otters!
Dateline: Romania. An innocent fisherman in a sleepy hamlet hauls in a fish.
The otters attack. The crafty mammal sneaks up on its prey, then sinks its
otter teeth into his fleshy Romanian buttocks. Though the catch
represented the biggest fish the fisherman had ever seen, the otter sprang its
aquatic companion from the human captor, in an apparent them-versus-us show of
solidarity.
It's a troubling development, conjuring nightmarish images: armies of otters rampaging
through our wildlands, like some horrible campfire ghost story come true. It
resonates on a primitive level, a surreal and haunting message about the
inherent futility of man's aspirations. You hope, you dream, you plan for the
future -- and then an otter bites you in the ass. You're realizing your
pathetic small-town glory of lifting the largest fish you've even seen in your
life from the local lake -- and then an otter bites you in the ass.
