Snail at Oakland Art Murmur
Zolie and her Cousin Stellan shooting fire from the Golden Mean Snail car.
Great story at the East Bay Monthly
Railroad Revival Tour… Oakland
The Railroad Revival Tour with Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Mumford & Sons, and Old Crow Medicine Show, started its first journey last Thursday with a concert in our corner of West Oakland. The Golden Mean and the crew got a chance to perform and see the show and what a hoot it was!
Great to meet some of the band members and play with the kids. We all throughly enjoyed a relaxing show with a great promotion company, music crew and audience. Great day!
Wish we could have seen more of this band. Their music has been the sound track to the Snail car and the Front Porch for the last 2 years! Next time this tour happens they need to hook up a few flat beds to the train for us to take our toys on!
Happy Birthday Lydia! Wish I was still 22!
Zolie Kyrsten & I on the Golden Mean enjoying a beautiful sunset over San Francisco bay from the lower bottoms of West Oakland
Beyond Wonderland 2011
Beyond Wonderland 2011
Great to be back for our 3rd show with Insomniac! Lots of familiar faces and a warm welcome for the snail and crew! This year we brought our new remote fired flame ball and let the crowd light up the night sky to warm the rest of us. I always enjoy seeing people smile when they realize they just made that huge fireball. Meet up with some great DJ’s and even got to hang out with Paris Hilton!
John in his steampunk finest letting the girls shoot fire balls.
Each one of these fire balls shoots a different shape. Disk, ball and a ring.
The die hard fans waited in line to get a turn at shooting the fire from the snail. Lots of smiles.
Burning Man 2009
Burning Man
Kyrsten on her new Electrobite car. This was a huge hit.
What a rocket! the inside was just as nice and the fireworks we saw were over the top Zack!
Day before opening and they are still putting on the finishing touches. Zolie noticed the Monkey’s head didn’t work and impressed most people who didn’t even notice the monkey in the mans tummy.
The porch! We rolled with them most of the week and put on the 1st Steam punk rave Friday night after the rocket.
Pictures of the Steampunk Rave
Electrobite, Snail and the porch
Kids-ville with fresh cookies from the porch
Perez and Sarriugarte Family outing
Houston we have a problem!
DPW parade with a live band on top! We got 19 people in the snail at the end!
Quite the show. I really liked the scale of the Man this year. I hope it keeps getting smaller.
Camp Mates jump for Joy!
Snail Crew stops to enjoy the moon.
Oilpunk Rave with the Hobo Goblins, the Porch and us. John hooked us up with a wireless mic and the snail became the PA for the porch most the week. Thats our spot light as well.
Craftsman Workshop of the Future Contest Winners
Here are the winners of the Craftsman Workshop of the Future Contest ! The grand prize of $20,000 in tools brought out lots of amazing entries. All sorts of fantastic creations came out of the woodwork and here at Instructables we were delighted to see what people came up with.
After all the entries came in there were three rounds of voting and judging. The first round of public voting selected 30 Round 2 finalists. The first round of judging then narrowed those down to 15 Round 3 finalists. Finally, Craftsman judged the Round 3 finalists and has selected the grand prize winner as well as the runners-up who will be receiving $500 worth of tools each.
These 11 Instructables are amazing and well worth checking out for inspiration for your next project. But don’t stop there. Be sure to check out the rest of the entries and get ready to show the world something fantastic all your own.
The Snail Car the Golden Mean Was one of the 10 Runner-ups
See all the winners here
The Edwardian Ball In San Francisco
The Snail crew pulled off another wonderful night of fun, dress to the 9’s in our best Edwardian gear. We had so many talented and wonderful people stop by the Golden Mean for a song, a story or a nip. I so enjoyed the great costumes, dancing and the smell industry from the steam engines inside.
My pictures of the night
Golden Mean Fan Club on facebook
There is now a fan club for the Golden Mean on facebook
Keep track of the Snail’s events and news
Join
The Snail meets the Dragonfly
After a very early morning photo shoot of the snail, while trying to find someone who was serving pancakes, Lisa and I are approached by a guy on a Segway wondering if we have 110v power on board the snail. He asked if it could run a vacuum cleaner and would we like a ride in his helicopter. I stepped out of the car to make sure I understood his request and quickly said yes. I followed him back to his camp to pick up gear, friends and our tip…
While they were loading, a couple of clean guys got in wearing Enron shirts and tossed in this neatly stacked $50,000 bundle of cash! I grabbed it and thanked them for our tip. They laughed, took our picture and then showed us the center was all ones.
I stopped by camp to pick Kyrsten up (took a slick tongue to get her out of bed that early) and 20 min later we are vacuum cleaned and seat belted in.
Paul, the guy who stopped us, and the snail in our prop wash.
These guys brought out a plane too. Here it is after they crashed it a few days before. As we head straight at the side of Trego mountain and pull up just in time to barely make it over the top, we are starting to wonder if we should have said yes to this ride. I found out after the ride that Lisa is terrified of flying!
One of the interesting things I saw from the air was the large dune we kept hitting riding the snail around that week. You can clearly see it in this picture as a dark fuzzy line running from the bottom left, though the camps, twords Trego mountain (looks like a road). Turns out this is where last years trash fence was! I took a look at aerial shots (see below) once I got home and you can see many years of scars left from having the event out there. I think this is a great event, but I wish there was a more open dialog with burners and BM about the damage being done. The combination of lack of rain and years of BM is why this years event was so dusty. This event leaves a huge trace, what are the real impacts on this area and how long will the desert take to recover?
What a ride! Thanks Paul and crew!
Burning Man and the Golden Mean
Well we are finally here. The Snail is a BIG hit and everyone loves it. Our DMV shifts helping people register their cars went so smooth and visiting with people there is one of the highlights of my trip. The dust is bad, but one of the best nights was riding around with Kyrsten and Merrilee on bikes and running into wonderful snapshots of playa life that faded away with the next brown out and rain. Everyone out seems happy and ghost like alive in their dusty best.
The Girls loved the snail. Merrilee has story time in it each afternoon.
Our camps round up of Art Cars.
Kyrsten and I dusty and happy burn night
Moths caught in our 500 watt spotlight. We’re having so much fun lighting up everything with it!
Fire!
Morning on the playa
See you at home, back in West Oakland!
the Golden Patina
With the head now done it’s time to add a patina!
I posted more pictures here
When I have more time I’ll post about how we did the patina.
before (I hated to change it!)
During
After. Wow!
