So excited! Received an advanced copy of “Only Time Will Tell” from Jeffrey Archer, my favorite author! I think it is time to put down “The Sixth Man” by David Baldacci and read this before my friend Kevin gets here Friday night.

One of the Founders of Double Trump (a company I’m on the Board of graduated from the IDF Talpiyot program.  They are smart guys, it is easy to see how this environment breeds successful executives. Wall Street Journal – July 6, 2007 SECRET WEAPON How an Elite Military School Feeds Israel’s Tech Industry Groomed for Defense Jobs, Talpiot Grads Go Private; The Cradle of ‘Star Wars’ By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS JERUSALEM — After graduating from high school in 1993, Arik Czerniak entered a secretive Israeli military program called Talpiot. The country’s most selective institution, it accepts 50 students a year and trains them in physics, computers and other sciences. Its mission is to create innovative, tech-savvy leaders capable of transforming Israel’s military. Upon graduating from the nine-year program, Mr. Czerniak took a different route: He helped launch Metacafe Inc., an online company that lets users post short videos, such as a clip of an acrobatic squirrel and one of a bikini-clad woman making a snow-angel. Now 32 years old, Mr. Czerniak spends most of his time in the Israeli company’s new offices in Palo Alto, Calif. Three decades after Talpiot was founded to modernize the Israeli army, the program has created an unforeseen byproduct — a legion of entrepreneurs that has helped turn Israel into a technology juggernaut. With fewer than seven million inhabitants, Israel has more companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange than any country except the U.S. Its start-ups attracted nearly $2 billion in venture capital over the past two years, equal to the amount raised during that time in the much larger United Kingdom. Israeli companies pioneered instant messaging and Internet phoning. Mr. Czerniak and other Talpions, as graduates are called, have started dozens of these companies in recent years, specializing in security equipment, encryption software, communications and high-end Internet hardware. Many, like Mr. Czerniak, have moved to Silicon Valley. Christopher Rhoads The Talpiot program’s symbol But the results have prompted concern about whether government resources should go toward minting tech millionaires. In its goal of creating a new generation of military leaders, critics say, the program has fallen short. Graduates and Talpiot officials say fewer than a dozen Talpions in recent memory have gone on to attain senior ranks in the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF wouldn’t disclose the number of Talpions in top positions. Some early supporters of the program are now asking whether the military, rather than a university, is the best way to nourish some of the country’s brightest minds — something they say a small country surrounded by enemies can ill-afford to waste. They also acknowledge that the booming tech sector Talpiot helped create, with its big paychecks, could work against the program’s goal of retaining graduates in the military. The questions arise as Israel’s military leadership comes under broader scrutiny for last summer’s stalemate against Hezbollah in Lebanon. “The successful high-tech industry is a problem for the military,” says Zohar Zisapel, 58, considered a father of Israel’s technology industry. Mr. Zisapel’s Tel Aviv-based RAD Group has launched 28 tech start-ups over the years, six of them listed on Nasdaq. “It provides opportunities for Talpions the military cannot match,” he says. Israel’s military says it has been more successful than it expected at retaining program graduates. “We think it’s excellent these people who carried out important jobs in the army later move on to contribute to the development of the high-tech sector in Israel,” the IDF said in a statement. Uzi Eilam, a retired brigadier general who fought under Ariel Sharon during the Six-Day War in 1967, gives a tour of battle sites around Jerusalem to first-year Talpiot cadets. Unlike Talpiot’s sometimes highflying graduates, the program itself operates mostly out of view. During a rare recent visit to the classified program, housed on the Hebrew University campus here, officials would not disclose the work done during the military phase of the program and identified cadets only by their first initials. Though the cadets, who include a handful of females in each class, spend most of their days together, they do share some classes with other students on campus. Talpiot’s roots lie in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Syria and Egypt launched attacks on contested lands held by Israel. The conflict shattered confidence within Israel in its military prowess. “It was the anguish of this surprise war — there were so many casualties,” says Shaul Yatsiv, a retired professor of physics at Hebrew University, who with another physics professor proposed the idea for Talpiot. Mr. Yatsiv, along with some in the defense community, argued that given Israel’s scant manpower and limited natural resources, its military needed a technological edge. Young Talent Many in the military opposed the idea, arguing that the country’s young talent could be put to more immediate use as pilots and intelligence officers. After several years of debate, the military leadership agreed to launch Talpiot, drawing the name from a Hebrew word loosely meaning a well-built structure. Hebrew University agreed to host it. In 1979, the first class of 25 cadets entered Talpiot. The class size was later increased to 50. Each year, the program selects the most promising high-school graduates in science and submits them to three years of grueling study, paid by the government, followed by six years of paid service in the military. That’s twice the normal military service required of Israeli men. Women serve two years. Instead of serving in combat units, Talpiot cadets are charged with improving the armed services through technological innovation. Some of the cadets delivered. Avi Loeb, who entered Talpiot in the early-1980s, developed a way to make projectiles travel at more than 10 times existing speeds, propelled by electric rather than chemical energy. In 1984, Mr. Loeb, who was then 21, was asked to present his project to a visiting U.S. military officer, who turned out to be the head of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile-defense program known as Star Wars. Mr. Loeb says the officer, Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, agreed to provide U.S. government funding for the project, which quickly grew to a group of about 30 people headed by Mr. Loeb. Lt. Gen. Abrahamson, now retired from the military, didn’t respond to calls for comment. Another Talpiot innovation came from Amir Beker, who turned down medical school to attend the program. During his military service under Talpiot in the late 1980s, Mr. Beker learned that Israeli helicopter pilots were suffering from severe back pain from vibrations during flight. To build a better seat, he first had to determine how to measure the effect of vibrations on the human vertebrae. Together with a Talpiot classmate, Mr. Beker led a team that installed a custom seat in a helicopter simulator, cutting a hole in its backrest. Training a pen on a pilot’s back, the team used a high- speed camera to photograph the marks caused by a range of vibrations. The researchers analyzed the computerized data to come up with a way to redesign the seats. In the program’s early years, many Talpions went into academia or stayed in the military. “We had no idea about tech start-ups then,” Mr. Beker says. “Only the grand pursuit of helping our country.” Mr. Beker, now 42, earned a Ph.D. in physics after the program and helped start a private college for financial studies in Tel Aviv. Mr. Loeb, now 45, pursued postdoctoral studies in astrophysics at Princeton University and is now a tenured professor of astronomy at Harvard University. Talpions’ pursuits began to change in the 1990s, as the global tech boom got under way. Israel began to develop its own start-up culture, in part by using tax incentives to establish a local venture-capital industry. The country also benefited from an infusion of talent from abroad, primarily from the collapsing Soviet Union. Among more than one million Russian Jews who arrived — increasing the total population by one-fifth — were well-trained scientists and engineers. By the current decade, U.S. cash began pouring in. In 1999, Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that invested in Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc., opened an office near Tel Aviv. It now has five partners there managing close to $400 million in funds devoted to Israeli start-ups. Venture-capital firm Accel Partners has directed about 35% of its $500 million for Europe and the Middle East to Israel, after opening a London office in 2000. Today, the office parks in northern Tel Aviv and in nearby Herzliya – housing lawyers, venture-capital firms and start-ups — evoke the atmosphere of U.S. tech hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128, even down to the coffee shops where deals are done. Some call the area Silicon Wadi, after the Hebrew word for a dried-up stream bed. “Taking risks, realizing it’s OK to fail once or twice, wanting to strike out on your own and make something happen — that is very hard to replicate,” says Moshe Mor, a partner with Greylock Partners, a Walthan, Mass.-based venture-capital group with an office in Israel. “Those attitudes are very prevalent in Silicon Valley and Israel.” About 30 Talpiot graduates return every year to run a two-day test to select the next class from a group of about 100 applicants. That number is winnowed down from the several thousand top scorers on a test taken each year by all of the country’s graduating high-school seniors. During a blustery winter afternoon in a drab, four-story stone building where Talpiot’s 150 cadets reside on the Hebrew University campus, the two-day selection test was taking place. Talpions ran one exercise by dividing applicants into groups of 10 in different classrooms. A psychologist who helped design the exercises moved silently among the groups. In one classroom, the 10 applicants, wearing blue T-shirts with the program’s winged symbol emblazoned on the back, were given several minutes to complete a task. Without warning, a Talpion said they had less time than they had been promised. At other times, they were told suddenly to switch roles. “We need to move on! We need to move on!” one candidate shouted to the other group members. After more minutes passed, a Talpion stopped the exercise. The allotted period had already expired, and he wanted to know why they hadn’t kept track of the time. The idea was not whether they got the right answer, but how they tried to find it – testing for creativity, leadership and social skills. Final applicants appear before a panel of judges — professors, military leaders and other officials — who ask for explanations on things like the theory of relativity and how solar heating works. Missiles in Haifa Some of those selected by Talpiot say the biggest challenge is realizing they will devote their military service to research, not fighting. During Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, missiles rained down on the northern part of the country, reaching as far as 30 miles inside the country to cities including Haifa. Cadets say it forced friends and family in the area to abandon their homes. “All of our friends were fighting in the war, and we were here studying for exams,” a lanky third-year Talpiot cadet said one evening, sitting in his dorm room. Posters of rock bands and the Kramer character from “Seinfeld” covered the walls. “I felt ashamed that I couldn’t do anything.” Another in the room, with a neatly trimmed dark beard, said he has to convince himself that the “changes we are making are far bigger than anything we could do in a combat unit.” Over dinner in the building’s simple cafeteria, cadets lamented that soldiers, in particular fighter pilots, are far more popular with girls than “computer geeks.” But they think that is beginning to change as tales of technology IPOs become more common. The commander of Talpiot, Maj. Roy Shefer, says he tries to counter the trend toward the high-tech world by instilling in the cadets a sense of obligation to country. He recently took the first-year class on a tour of the Nazi concentration camps in Poland. “We view them as a national resource, and we want to determine how they can best contribute to the state,” says Maj. Shefer, a 28-year- old with thick-framed glasses. He acknowledges, however, that the private sector’s pull is difficult to resist. He sometimes questions whether the country, and in particular the military, benefits as much as it should from the program. “Some commanders have tanks,” he said. He nodded toward photo identifications of the 150 Talpiot cadets, attached to a whiteboard on the wall next to his desk. “I have them.” Second Thoughts Talpiot co-founder Prof. Yatsiv says he’s having second thoughts about the program. There’s no evidence that cadets couldn’t receive better training elsewhere, he says. “No one knows if we developed resourcefulness — or if such things just grow naturally in people,” he says. He doesn’t mind that graduates are getting wealthy, but says that if they aren’t working in the country, “Israeli money should not be invested in them.” Aharon Beth-Halachmi, who helped create Talpiot as the brigadier general in charge of the military’s research and development arm in the 1970s, says the Talpiot approach is necessary in a small country. “What we are showing is that you don’t need a lot of people for breakthroughs, just the right people,” he says. Today he runs his own venture-capital firm from offices next to a seaside hotel his company owns in Tel Aviv. Mr. Czerniak of Metacafe suggests the military could retain Talpions by managing their careers more carefully. Mr. Czerniak and his class were trained in paratrooping, operating armored tanks and firing a variety of weaponry, and he realized a childhood dream by becoming a fighter pilot. He considered working on a multimillion-dollar flight-radar project, but he says a superior made him a flight instructor instead. The military “didn’t always step back and look at the big picture,” he says. The IDF says it places a priority on using Talpions to their full potential. After completing his service in July 2003, Mr. Czerniak was recruited to help launch Metacafe, first in the basement of his grandmother’s house near Tel Aviv, then in a loft and now in an entire floor in a large office building in downtown Tel Aviv. During one afternoon, employees dressed in jeans and T-shirts, most in their 20s and 30s, moved about desks made of light wood and separated by glass walls. Mr. Czerniak, who last November opened the company’s Palo Alto office, has tapped his Talpiot network for new recruits. A year ago Mr. Czerniak hired Ido Safruti, a Talpion who finished the program last July, to run the Tel Aviv office. Talpiot is “a very aggressive, extremely competitive, stressful environment,” says Mr. Czerniak. “This is why we hire from there — it’s a stamp of approval.” Mr. Beker, who developed the helicopter seat, has gotten the start-up bug as well. Three years ago he began working full-time on a new company, Biological Signal Processing Ltd., that has developed software he says can test for heart disease at one-tenth the price of prevailing methods. After listing on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange last year, the company opened a sales and marketing office in Rockville, Md. The company’s head of research and development is also a Talpion. Though most graduates aren’t involved in defending Israel, Mr. Beker acknowledges, their role in the country’s economy is just as important to Israel’s survival. “What we are doing is generating new ideas and solutions,” he says. “That is very difficult to wipe out in a war.”

We arrived a week before Burning Man to create The Life Cube in the Black Rock Desert. This video shows a little of what it takes to bring art to the playa. This project involved a year of planning, 100s of volunteers, major help and contributions from other artists, volunteers, The Artery, DPW, Heavy Equipment, Burning Man Org, friends, family, photographers, Camp Tititcaca, Indiegogo, and The Generator Space in Sparks which provided space for us to pre-build. Also thanks to the Sands Hotel in Reno that provided rooms for our build team, and Manto’s Pizza for providing food for the people who endured heat, rain, flooding, thunder, and dust storms to help The Life Cube rise again at Burning Man. There are many more photos to come. More info can be found at http://www.facebook.com/thelifecube and http://www.thelifecube.org . Huge love and appreciation to all that made this possible. skeeter Artist, The Life Cube #indiegogo #burningmanart #envisionthelifecube #BM2013 #Burningman #wishcube #lifecubeproject #lifecubeproject #skeeter #brc13 #fireart #lifecubethelifecubeprojectlifecubeprojectBarbTraub #lifecube #lifecube #TheLifeCube

Mike Prevatt Wed, Feb 5, 2014 (2:42 p.m.) Scott Cohen wants to help you meet your goals—by burning them in front of everyone. On East Fremont between 9th and 10th streets, he’s currently developing his Burning Man-inspired, 24-by-24-foot Life Cube, which will showcase not only art, but aspirations written on either the Cube itself or postcard-like “wish sticks” deposited into smaller cubes. On March 21, the whole project will go up in flames, unleashing everyone’s dreams into the air. It’s a crowdsourced project, so anyone seeking to contribute time, creations, money or wishes should visit lifecubeproject.com. http://lasvegasweekly.com/as-we-see-it/2014/feb/05/burning-man-inspired-life-cube-downtown-las-vegas/ #art #project #burning #Burningman #scott #cube #man #fremontstreet #LasVegas #cohen #life #Weekly #downtown

As of midnight on Friday, our project on Kickstarter ended successfully, exceeding our financial goal with over 600 backers! I am overwhelmed by your support, friendship, and passion for our project.  Look forward to sharing pictures of the design, build and Burning Man experiences in September after the “burn and return”. Don’t forget – we are granting wishes at The Life Cube in Black Rock City.  If you haven’t already done so, please email your wishes TODAY to thelifecube@gmail.com so we can deposit them into The Life Cube… if you can’t be there.  Subject:  Wish for The Life Cube. With enormous and heartfelt gratitude, skeeter #art #Burningman #thelifecubeartprojectatburningman #bm2012 #skeeter #tlc #kickstartersuccess #burningman2012 #artburningman #TLCV2 #TheLifeCubeV2

Start-Ups Seek to Cash In on Web-Video Ads By KEVIN J. DELANEY March 2, 2007; Page B1 Several start-up companies are hoping to cash in on the exploding viewership for online video with systems that can match advertising to video content. Google Inc.’s enormously successfully online-ad system works by identifying key words users are searching for or seeing on Web pages and placing ads alongside them that are targeted to the same words. So a consumer who reads a Web site that includes the words "Canon" and "digital camera" might see ads from Google for retailers carrying Canon cameras. Now a handful of start-ups is deploying advanced technology to take a similar approach to advertising that appears with online video clips. Most agree the market for such ads has enormous potential as blue-chip advertisers look for some of the same branding boost they get from TV. Web publishers also say they quickly sell out ads linked to professional and semiprofessional videos. But advertisers are just beginning to tap the marketing potential alongside the sea of amateur clips that consumers put on Web sites such as Google’s YouTube. There is little consensus, however, on the best means to scan videos for content, how to display the ads or how to target them to consumers who will be most receptive to them. The start-ups, with such names as ScanScout Inc. and YuMe Networks Inc., are trying out various high- and low-tech tools to scrutinize the content of online videos, ranging from software that generates transcripts of audio tracks to human editors in India who try to verify that videos’ creators have accurately characterized their contents. Closely held ScanScout has some of the most ambitious plans. The Cambridge, Mass., start-up uses technology to recognize words spoken in the audio tracks of clips. It then lets advertisers choose to have their ads appear at the moment in the videos when specific words are spoken. The company tested the program with video sites late last year and plans to make it widely available next month. In a demonstration, ScanScout’s system displayed an ad for a sports-car brand at the bottom of a video clip as the people on screen were discussing that type of car. Consumers can click on the ad to pause the playback and see a video commercial, or be taken to the advertiser’s Web site. By analyzing a video’s content, ScanScout can help companies steer clear of subject matter and language that make them uncomfortable, potentially increasing the confidence of traditional advertisers in buying ads on amateur videos. It can also place multiple ads on a given video clip as what is being discussed changes, something that could let Internet companies tap additional ad dollars. "This becomes a new revenue stream on top of what [online video sites are] already doing," says Sarah Fay, president of the Aegis PLC digital marketing subsidiary Isobar U.S., which has advertiser clients that plan to try ScanScout. Some experts also predict that similar ad-targeting systems will eventually be used in television set-top boxes to match commercials with TV shows. ScanScout takes a commission on ads it sells that are carried on other companies’ sites. Borrowing from the search-ad model, it charges advertisers only when a user clicks on an ad, with the flat fee set at roughly 50 cents or less a click to start. Its investors include Georges Harik, a former Google executive who helped build the technology behind some of the search company’s ad systems. ScanScout is already gaining some traction with customers. Online video site PureVideo Networks Inc. of El Segundo, Calif., says it plans to begin testing ScanScout, probably with standup comedy videos on its StupidVideos.com site. Blip Networks Inc. of New York has tested ScanScout on its blip.tv video site since the fall, and Chief Executive Mike Hudack says he believes it is more effective than just matching ads with the descriptive information the videos’ creators supply. Brian Buchwald, general manager of an NBC Universal digital venture who has been briefed on the system, says he is impressed with ScanScout’s approach. "If the technology does what they say it can do and it improves over time, it becomes a business execution question for them," he says. Closely held YuMe Networks, meanwhile, relies on information supplied by video creators and other data sources to group video clips into categories, such as "automotive." Advertisers can then select the category alongside which their ads will appear. YuMe, Redwood City, Calif., says it verifies the information using speech-recognition technology that picks out words in the audio track. It also employs people in India to make sure that videos purporting to be about sport-utility vehicles, for example, are what they say they are. Internet executives say amateur video creators often lie about the contents of clips or are sloppy when they supply information. PodZinger Corp., a Cambridge, Mass., subsidiary of BBN Technologies Corp., uses technology to generate word-for-word transcripts of the audio tracks of clips that appear on its partner sites. It then classifies videos based at least partly on the transcripts, such as by grouping together clips related to professional basketball. Advertisers select categories of videos they would like to advertise in, and in some cases they can identify specific spoken key words they would like to target. Some say applying a key-word targeting approach for online video clips may not be the most effective way to go. Online video search start-up Blinkx says it recently tested targeted ads with video from Britain’s Independent Television News Ltd., but it says identifying key words in the text generally didn’t produce better results for advertisers than just identifying the type of content and likely demographic traits of viewers. Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx’s founder and chief technology officer, also says there currently aren’t enough video advertisers to provide ads that match many specific key words. For example, even if you identify the words "Canon digital camera" in the dialogue on a video clip, there may not be a video ad to go alongside. Online-video company Brightcove Inc. says it is selling targeted ads based on the data supplied by the video creators rather than the audio or video information itself. But Brightcove founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire says there is often a disincentive now to applying more specific content targeting to video advertising. Sites with high-quality videos can garner premium prices for online video ads using the traditional online-ad model, with advertisers paying for the number of visitors rather than the number of visitor clicks. In some cases, the start-up ad systems could generate less revenue as a result. ScanScout co-founder and President Waikit Lau says his company lets advertisers pick categories of videos they want to target, in addition to having their ads appear alongside specific key words. He says ScanScout will at least initially tap nonvideo ads, such as graphical and text ads, to appear alongside videos to compensate for any shortage of video advertisements. And Mr. Lau says Web sites can run their high-priced ads as well as the ones from ScanScout, since its ads appear only intermittently during the clips. Looming over the start-ups is one worry: that some of the current Internet advertising giants may jump into the game. Microsoft Corp., for one, says it is researching such video-ad targeting. Joe Doran, general manager for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, says technology that ScanScout is using to try to analyze video images is "pretty interesting stuff." Yahoo Inc. says it doesn’t match ads with video clips analyzing the words spoken but declines to say whether it is interested in the area. Google doesn’t currently let advertisers target their ads in this way either, instead targeting ads based on information provided by the video creators. (Dow Jones & Co., publisher of this newspaper, is testing distributing nonbusiness video clips combined with advertising from Google. It also uses Brightcove technology to distribute video online.)

What a fantastic week. We are lucky to have been provided amazing space at the Generator in Reno for pre-playa construction of The Life Cube. The team came and built, and built, and built. Lumber was delivered last week, by Saturday, we had used almost all we had, and ran to get more on Saturday, and more on Sunday! The walls are framed, the pillars are built, panels for the Tapestry Wall are coming in every day. Huge thanks to fellow artists that offered a hand, to the folks in Reno who came and helped, and showered us with love. Thanks to the Matt and Andy for letting us take over so much space. I am awed by the support and help. #RENO #Burningman #brc #TheGenerator #preplayaconstruction #blackrockcity #BurningMan

Had to replace my Asics 15s. They now make the 17s. First impression is not impressed. They changed the lacing, and the shoes feel heavier. I have to admit that I don’t like change — but why change a running shoe that works? #AsicsGelKayano17vsKayano15

I wrote this about a week ago and submitted it to Huffington Post and letter to the editor at NYT, buy nobody responded with interest.  Decided to just post my thoughts on my blog (we are not so selective) (smile) Jerry is Dead (or Dying) (a business executive’s advance obit) While Jerry Garcia is already dead (old news), Jerry Yang’s business career at Yahoo is set to end soon.  Twelve months ago, his grand return to Yahoo!  was billed as “critical to Yahoo’s long term success,” as he was expected to clean up the mess the prior CEO Semel had made of his company .  In June of 2007, Yahoo!’s stock was selling at $27.  Today, it is valued at a reduced price of about $23, fluctuating dramatically between $19 and $31 during that time period. These have not been Jerry Yang’s finest hours.  In addition to long-term strategic and management challenges, Jerry handled the takeover overtures from Microsoft as badly as you possibly could.  He and his staff allowed Balmer to create such chaos that we have heard of rampantly poor morale and a mass exodus of Yahoo!’s best and brightest.  Last week it was announced that Yahoo signed a deal with Google to give away their search business.  Kevin Lee, founder of Didit.com was quoted in USA Today as saying: “It’s difficult to imagine a situation where Yahoo both invests in its own search platform and uses Google’s superior system to earn better revenues" Noted corporate raider and Yahoo! stockholder Carl Icahn is on the warpath, leading the charge to remove Yang and the rest of the company’s 10-member board of directors. Jerry is a fighter and a warrior himself, and has a reputation as a terrific poker player, but I’m not certain he can dodge the arrows and big guns holding him personally responsible for Yahoo!’s stock price drop and reduced market cap of $23 million below its recent peak of $33 million in March of this year. While Jerry remains the CEO for now, I predict it is only a matter of time before many newspapers and bloggers will be reporting on a new CEO, and a new regime at Yahoo!.  And as the other "Jerry" and his band The Grateful Dead sang in their ode to change, there’s always a new season ahead after the dark, gray days of winter.  Let’s see how long it takes until Yahoo! shines again: Winter gray and falling rain, we’ll see summer come again, Darkness falls and seasons change (gonna happen every time). Same old friends the wind and rain, summers fade and roses die, You’ll see summer come again, Like a song that’s born to soar the sky.

Project Update #4: We did it! Posted by The Life Cube Friends and supporters of The Life Cube have contributed over $10,000! We have a few more days and welcome any additional funds. Make sure to email your wish, or if private, call or email and we can figure out how to get your wish to me in a way that protects your anonymity. You are all awesome, and I look forward to hearing stories of how your dreams, wishes, goals, and ambitions come true. The Power of the Cube – it works!  All wishes are almost 100% guaranteed to come true in your lifetime. With huge gratitude, skeeter (email thelifecube@gmail.com) #burningmanart #TheLifeCube #dimestore #Cubelifecubelifecubeprojectlifecubelifecubeproject #redtiemedia #Burningman #redtie #artatburningman #bm2012 #skeeter #playaart #redtiemedia #redtie #TLCV2 #247media #scottcohen #dimestoremedia #TheLifeCubeV2 #liveperson #BurningMan

The following was written by Jessica Bruder and published in the New York Times “The Opinion Page” last month.  I shared it on Facebook, and found that it gave a better understanding to many of the people who have struggled with why I (and 50,000 others) go out to the Black Rock Desert for a week for Burning Man. I’m posting it here for future reference.  It clearly articulates what the feeling of participation in a community and being a creative artist is all about. skeeter Op-Ed Contributor Burning Man’s Cry for Help By JESSICA BRUDER Published: March 29, 2012 LOTS of people think that going to Burning Man for the art is like reading Playboy for the articles. But an art experience is exactly what I had in mind 10 years ago, when I was 23 and first visited Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for the festival, which is often mistaken for a no-holds-barred bacchanal. I was excited but also terrified by the event’s credo: “No spectators, participants only.” I was no artist, just a writer. How could I participate if I didn’t know how? My answer wasn’t very clever. I showed up with a bicycle and 40 Chinese kites that resembled red fish. Every time I managed to get a kite airborne, I pedaled away with it and handed the string off to a stranger. I’d be lying if I said that particular act changed my life. What felt transformative was this: I spent a week outside my comfort zone, with thousands of people who were also exploring their boundaries, and whose artistic efforts succeeded or failed magnificently. In the following years, I learned how to cut and weld steel. I helped install some of the event’s large sculptures, including a 168-foot-long skeletal serpent with 41 flamethrowers along its spine, a project designed by a Bay Area arts collective called The Flaming Lotus Girls. But if Burning Man hadn’t set the bar low enough to trip over in the first place, I never would have made it out there. Today the barriers to attending Burning Man are staggeringly high. The festival is still five months away, but no tickets remain for sale to the general public except through scalpers. (At one secondhand ticket Web site this week, the cheapest of more than 80 available passes cost $1,225; one likely prankster was asking a cool $999,999.The aficionados who call themselves “Burners” are petitioning the site’s owners to discontinue all Burning Man-related sales.)Serendipitous trips to Burning Man, like the one I took in 2002, are a thing of the past. How did this happen?Last year, the festival sold out for the first time,creating a market for scalpers. This year, some 40,000 tickets were distributed in February using an untested lottery method; it apparently attracted buyers who were willing to beat the system by using multiple credit cards and hoarding passes. A large portion of “winners” appeared to be first-time attendees and scalpers, which sparked a panic among the Burning Man faithful and, according to an announcement from the event’s organizers, “created holes in our social fabric.” More than 10,000 tickets still remain for Burning Man, which culminates over Labor Day weekend. They were originally allotted for a public sale starting Mar. 28. Now, however, they will go only to handpicked attendees who “already have a relationship and contact points within the organization” of Burning Man. In other words, Burning Man is building its own kind of caste system, choosing insiders and outsiders, curating the community’s most valuable members. Why does this matter? We live in tremendously creative times. Thanks to the Internet, the tools to make and share art have proliferated. Offline, however, we’re still largely stuck in a culture where some people make art and other people consume it. There’s a dividing line between celebrities and fans, performers and spectators. How often do people get to co-create culture in the physical world? For more than two decades, Burning Man has been the antithesis of the art establishment, avoiding the social stratifications created by fame and pedigree, embracing a credo of egalitarianism and “radical inclusion.” If you wanted to show your art there — even if your art was stale Twinkies stacked to look like Stonehenge, which I saw my first year — no curator would turn you away. Burning Man is the only American event of its scale that actively attempts a democratic system for face-to-face artistic exchange. Though the festival’s organizers have moved quickly to solicit feedback and hope to roll out a better ticketing system next year, they’re up against a hard truth: it’s unlikely that supply will ever exceed demand again. “We’ve long been aware that the event in the desert would reach its limit,” conceded one of many announcements addressing the situation on the festival’s Web site. That kind of scarcity, however, is the enemy of serendipity. What that will mean for future Burners — and the longstanding festival community ready to receive them — is unclear. I’m glad I got to be the well-meaning misfit with the kites that first year. I don’t need to attempt that project again. But I’d like to think someone else could. Jessica Bruder teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is the author of “Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man.” A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 30, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Burning Man’s Cry for Help. #NYTANDBurningMan #NewYorkTimesANDBurningMan #BurningMansCryforHelp #Burningman #newyorktimesANDburningman #JessicaBruder #NYTandBurningman #artatburningman #BurningMan

I like this quote. I need to start thinking of design and quotes for TLC V2.