Beth Orton: baby on stage

Went and saw the fabulous and visibly pregnant Beth Orton last Saturday at the Filmore. She was even more amazing live then I had heard and I was very glad I caught her this time around, since it could be a while before she tours again. But I was quite proud of her to see her out on the stage rockin' the belly and just plain rockin'!



On another note, I uploaded this vid using VideoEgg and quite impressive video publishing tool that I've been working with this week for implementation at dogster. should be great to have it out there in the community in the next few weeks! Can't wait to see what people do with it.

House of Masks on the Esplanade!

This week theme camp addresses were announced and once again the House of Masks will be on the Esplanade! This time it's at 8:30 @ Esplanade, right next to the Kostume Kult. So after people costume up, they can come by and make a mask. This year we'll also be setting up some playa side kickball games.

For all your last minute Burning Man spending, check out the "Official" retailer of Black Rock City Playazon.com which now stock the indispensable "Hands-Free" Merkin Flashlight
and tons consumer goodness.

Last weekend I took up the Black Rock Desert. My camp-mate, Todd, had to go out to the Burning Man Ranch to check in with the crew that are constructing the Man Base structure. It's a rather complex structure this year that is designed to actually raise and lower the Man. Should be amazing to see it out on the Playa in a few weeks.



We also did an amazing drive through the High Rock Canyon along the Lassen-Applegate Wagon Train Trail. It's very hard to image people passing through those parts in the 1850's but they did.


More Photos

MasterCard Add spoof

My brother, Ilo, sent me this. Pretty well done.

New wheels!

Since starting my new job, I've been riding my bike to work about four days a week. But what I've been has been my 15-20 year old beast of a bike, that had been out to Burning Man for the past few years. So after taking my friend Jeff's bike for a spin the other week, I decided it was a time for a new bike. Saturday I went over to Pedal Revolution and picked out a 2005 Fuji Silhouette. What a difference to be riding something lighter, with better running gear and missing the left over playa dust

Lounge Unit #1

Lounge Unit #1
Originally uploaded by leef_smith.

Man, I'm exhausted. A few of my camp mates got together today to build a prototype of the units that are going to makes up our lounge this year. We knocked it together in a few hours and learned a lot for building the next one. Only eight more left to build!

Naughty Bees

Tuesday, my friend Sara got hooked up with tickets for the "adult" version of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, so she, Pam and their friend Alison and I all went to check it out. It had enough risque language that I wondered what the "clean" storyline was, but the stuff that actually sort of bothered me was the "ethnic humor". One of the main characters was Korean, and the word she got to spell were all Japanese words like miso. And then when she asked for it to used in a sentence, of course, the sentence was "Miso horny". But on the other hand, the play did have an Asian Jesus...

Update:
I was at Raleigh's in Berkeley last night and there was Derrick Trumbly who played Leaf Coneybear, the Haight-Ashbury kid who discovers he's actually smarter and a better speller then anyone thought. I wanted to go up and tell him, I was the real Leef, but let him just enjoy his beer instead

Inconvenient Truths

Yesterday, I work up to NPR talking about a tyrant ruling over America. It took me quiet some time to figure out that they weren't speaking about our current tyrant, but rather King George III, in the Declaration of Independence. Later in the day I saw Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth and the footage of the 2000 election broke my heart as always. The railing at the current the administration was actually fairly minimal. But bigger then all that, was the message the Al Gore was trying to present in his slideshows and now in this film, that the time for action to prevent catastrophic global warming is now, and that using today's technology and simple steps, we, Americans have can have a profound affect on the problem. Of course that's because we, and our over consumption of resources, are a major part of the problem. Later this month, my Buddhist center is giving a serious of lectures on conscious consumption, which I'm really looking forward to.