Burning Man festival is currently happening, which would explain any sudden influx of bright colours and naked people that may have appeared on your Instagram feed. The annual festival of things has transformed a section of the scorching Nevada desert into a massive temporary city full of people chasing self-expression, art, fluidity, and the abject immolation of a criminal giant wood man.
In recent years, so the story goes, the festival has increasingly become a destination for the rich and affluent to make appearances at, and the list of creature comforts they’ve been able to bring in from the outside world has been getting more and more outrageous.
The festival ground already sports a temporary airport to drop those who can afford it directly into the site, but a group of Google employees might well have taken the cake this year.
Collaborating with a Maine-based company, the Google group has reportedly managed to get a box containing around 10 lobsters sent to their camp at the festival grounds.
Lobsters.
Alive ones.
The company, Lobster207, successfully shipped the box of live lobsters, weighing in at around 10 pounds, all the way from Maine in the US north-east to an address in Sunnyvale, California. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the NorCal area that neighbours the home of the sprawling Googleplex corporate HQ.
From there, the still-at-that-point-very-much-alive critters made a two-day road trip into the hot-ass Nevada desert and the site of Burning Man.
Remarkably, the monetary of cost of achieving this feat wasn’t even remotely astronomical; the whole order was completed and delivered for a grand total of US$139.58.
But as to why exactly you would do such a thing – keeping lobsters alive on a hellish cross country journey only to summarily smother them in the desert – the answer, according to Lobster207 manager David Sullivan, is fairly peak-affluent Burner.
I would guess by talking to the guys from Google that they thought it was a really cool idea to say, ‘Hey we got Maine lobsters all the way from the east coast from the cold waters of Maine out here to the desert. They asked if we could ship them out so they could take them to Burning Man and see if they could survive the journey basically from the ocean floor to the deserts of Nevada.
“Because they can.” Nice one.
If it’s any consolation (it’s not), the Google crew reckons the eventual meal of seafood that they consumed in the exact opposite of the sea was “fresh and lively.”
So there’s that.
