click to enlarge Black Rock City Playa Info/Facebook 
 
 A new breed of Burner. 
 
 Marcia said that one had flown into her mouth gotten lodged between her teeth. She reports that they are quite bitter to the taste...Twin Peaks, who’s leading the construction of the Center Café, was talking about how bad they are when she jumped a little and pulled her t-shirt away from her body. A good-sized green bug fell to the ground. It had crawled into her bra...Metal Shop Heather wears a welding mask most of the day. Bugs have crawled up inside her visor and nestled around her eyes. 
 
 Burning Man is being invaded by something more grotesque than techie billionaires. According to the Voices of Burning Man blog, the playa is crawling with voracious bugs. “We don’t know where they came from, but there are two main theories: One is that all the spring and summer rain has hatched critters that lie dormant, or usually come to life at a different time of year. Or maybe they hitchhiked in on a load of wood from somewhere,” blogger John Curley writes.It’s a been a warm, dry season for the Burning Man build — ideal conditions for bugs to spawn. Insects are reportedly blowing up "inches deep" against the commissary tent. They’re embedding in carpets like spilled rice. And judging by a picture on the blog , they're bloodthirsty.Life in Black Rock City has turned into a David Cronenberg movie:A self-described entomologist on the blog identified the creatures as winged ants and stink bugs. Another commenter, alias Dan Fox, wrote that he was “eaten alive the first few days of the Trojan Horse build in 2011” but the plague then “faded away to nothing.”Another commenter read the whirlwind of bugs as a bit of poetic justice:“Perfect! This is mother natures answer to all the rich [fucks] who have brought the default world to BM and have changed it from an alternative to mainstream. They’ll need to hire extra sherpas to follow them with a fly swatter."Or, as Champagne Lounge wrote on its Burning Man community page on Facebook, you could always pack bats alongside your bug spray. ||||| Breaking news out of the Black Rock Desert: Burning Man is infested with huge, biting bugs. 
 
 The weeklong festival — which has become increasingly popular among the tech elite in recent years — hasn't started yet. Still, horrifying photos of swarms of unidentified bugs have surfaced on Twitter over the last few days. 
 
 The infestation was confirmed by John Curley on the Burning Man blog: 
 
 You may have seen the bug rumors on the internet. We are here to tell you that they are all true. Well maybe not all of the rumors, but the bugs are real. They're everywhere. They bite. They crawl all over you. They get up and in you. 
 
 ... 
 
 What's going on? We don't know. We don't know how the little critters survive in the heat and the sun. All we know is that if you pick up some wood, you're likely to uncover hundreds or thousands of the things. They've blown up inches deep against the sides of the Commissary tent. They've covered the carpets at the Depot. They're all over the Man Base. So it's not a localized occurrence. It's everywhere. 
 
 We don't know where they came from, but there are two main theories: One is that all the spring and summer rain has hatched critters that lie dormant, or usually come to life at a different time of year. Or maybe they hitchhiked in on a load of wood from somewhere. Or maybe, as Shade postulated out at Man Base, there's a Johnny Bugseed making the rounds at night, sprinkling them anywhere and everywhere. ||||| A live bedbug provided by Terminix crawls across a dime. (Photo: Ken Lambert, Seattle Times, MCT) 
 
 A Detroit man was so overwhelmed by the bedbugs in his Midtown apartment that he sprayed himself with alcohol and then tried to light one of them on fire, badly burning himself in the ensuing flames. 
 
 By the time the accidental fire was extinguished, about four units had been destroyed by flames, and two dozen more received water damage. 
 
 The fire started at around 4:30 a.m. Sunday at the St. Antoine Gardens apartment complex on Chrysler Drive, just east of Wayne State's campus. That's when the man thought bedbugs had returned to his apartment and sprayed alcohol on his couch and body in an attempt to destroy them, said Dan Austin, a mayor’s office spokesman. 
 
 But then, while sitting on the alcohol-doused couch, the man lit a cigarette and also tried to set one of the bedbugs on fire, Austin said. That caused the couch to catch aflame, along with the man’s body. 
 
 Within minutes, Phyllis Waller heard shouts from her room just down the hall, on the building's eighth floor. When she looked through the peephole, the smoke was so thick that she couldn’t see the door across the hall. She said she escaped by crawling to the stairwell. 
 
 The man who started the fire escaped as well, but his burns were severe. When resident Johanahn Larsosa saw him in the lobby, the skin on his arms seemed to be falling off. While they waited for help to arrive, the man got to his knees and asked Larsosa to pray with him. 
 
 “He was melting,” Larsosa said. “I was scared. He was screaming.” 
 
 The man was taken to a hospital, where he is still recovering, Austin said. 
 
 Bedbugs are endemic to St. Antoine Apartments, residents said Friday. Fifth-floor resident Rolando Millender said he knows of seven people on his floor alone who have filed complaints about bedbugs before. 
 
 Buy Photo (Photo: Daniel Bethencourt Detroit Free Press) 
 
 A management official on-site declined to comment, and other officials with the company could not be reached. 
 
 The man who started the fire had been complaining about bedbugs for at least four months, Waller said. Though she noted that a crew had been coming every two weeks to tackle bedbugs, Larsosa noted: “Obviously they didn’t do enough.” 
 
 The situation has been made even worse by the response from the building’s management, according to multiple residents. 
 
 When the Red Cross arrived on Sunday, residents by and large did not get help because the building’s property manager said the “the situation was under control,” according to resident Phyllis Kuhn, who watched the exchange take place. 
 
 The Red Cross did find housing for one woman and her nine-month old child, but officials did not think that anyone else needed temporary housing, said a Red Cross spokesman, Perry Rech. On Thursday night, the Red Cross returned with 25 cots and blankets for residents at the request of the building’s management, Rech added. 
 
 The management staff also bought about 20 pizzas for the residents on Sunday, and donuts and coffee on Monday and Tuesday, said resident Rolando Millender. 
 
 Still some people, like Waller, are living in their apartments, even though the hallway to her room remains seriously damaged. She added she has been coughing painfully throughout the day. 
 
 “It’s extremely disappointing,” Kuhn said. She added, “We’re dealing with management that doesn’t have the empathy to be concerned with our needs.” 
 
 Many of the residents are receiving Section 8 assistance, though it’s not clear if all of them do. The complex has about 120 units. 
 
 The man, who has not been identified, is not the first to spark a major fire in Detroit while fighting bedbugs. Sherry Young said she had been battling bedbugs for close to a year on the city’s west side when she put rubbing alcohol all over herself and the floor, even as her oven and stovetop were on as well. 
 
 The fire caused the 48-unit complex roof to cave in, and most of the building was destroyed either by fire or water damage. Five people were taken to a hospital, including Young, who had minor injuries.. 
 
 Contact Daniel Bethencourt: 313-223-4531 or dbethencourt@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @_dbethencourt. 
 
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– There's a burning question in the days leading up to this year's Burning Man: Who let the bugs out? And while that may seem like an ordinary question at the start of any Burning Man, this year it's particularly literal as early-arriving Burners photograph an apparent infestation ahead of the festival's start on Aug. 30, reports Business Insider. The complaint originated on the Burning Man blog, where John Curley wrote: "It’s not a localized occurrence, it’s everywhere. We don’t know where they came from, but there are two main theories: One is that all the spring and summer rain has hatched critters that lie dormant, or usually come to life at a different time of year. Or maybe they hitchhiked in on a load of wood." The bugs are clearly bloodthirsty, reports SF Weekly, with images of bites now making the rounds. One woman reportedly had a bug fly into her mouth and lodge itself between her teeth. (Apparently they taste bitter.) Another wrestled one out of her bra. A self-described entomologist is calling them winged ants and stink bugs. Time will soon tell if the bugs put a damper on the impending festivities, because the critters are clearly no picnic. "They bite," Curley writes. "They crawl all over you. They get up and in you." And so far, they don't seem to mind the burning hot desert sun. (Check out what revelers at a Burning Man knock-off in Israel accidentally torched.)