Fire Arts Festival at the Crucible

Scott and I joined the Winking Lotus crew for Oakland's fifth annual fire arts festival last night! It was very much like a miniature Burning Man without dust! The pictures you see are not ours, by the way, they were scavenged from the internet. We saw some of the same sculptures that were on the playa last year, but some cool new surprises cropped up. The funniest addition was a game called "Dance Dance Immolation", based on the "Dance Dance Revolution" game where you follow directions on a screen and tap your feet on a sensitive floor grid. You win the game by dancing the correct series of moves. Well, in *this* version of the game you wear a an oxygen mask and fireproof suit, and mistakes are rewarded with a blast from a flamethrower!



Another nifty item was a water fountain that had white gas pumped up through it and ignited. The flames floated on top of the water and were eerily reflected in it. As long as you rolled up your sleeves you could dip you hand in and perhaps scoop up a bit of the bluish flickering "firewater". We tried it and got a flash of heat, but nothing close to burning hot.



Other attractions included Dr. Megavolt, a man in an insulated suit who plays with a giant (we're talking 15 foot high) Tesla coil! Thick jagged fingers of electricity arced down onto the guy's head from the coil, and when he jumped you could see two columns of light between his feet and the ground. When he sat on a stool by the coil, there was enough energy traveling through his suit towards the ground that it set the stool aflame! Freaking craaazy! Then there was the tornado of fire--two people in fireproof suits aimed jets of fuel into the midst of a vortex. The vortex was created by several strategically aimed fans around the perimeter. The column of swirling fire they created looked about 30 feet high, and when the wind blew seemed to almost touch the BART tracks above. When a train passed most of the fire exhibits came on full blast, to either the delight or horror of people plastered to the train windows!