Craigslist is the mostly free on-line want-ads and personals site that pretty much put the newspaper industry out of business. You can find anything — or anyone, I suppose — on Craigslist. The “Missed Connections” section is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a place where people who may have almost met, or locked eyes across a crowded subway, can connect. Each “Missed Connection” ad is a romantic mini-drama to the person who placed it. But to the reader, they’re all pretty much mini romantic farces.

Take a moment, if you can, to savor the “Missed Connections” from last week’s Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.  Burning Man, for those of you who don’t know, is a days-long encampment in Black Rock, Nevada — about 100 miles north of Reno — where the young and the wish-they-were-still-young gather to run around freely, nakedly, and probably seriously high on more than the desert air. Worse, people often adopt “playa names,” a sort of Burning Man nom de guerre. If you sat down to invent a more irritatingly pretentious and pompously progressive event — up to and including the array of private jets that ferry the extremely rich to the site every year — you’d be hard pressed to come up with a better example than Burning Man.

But, okay, the kids have fun and that’s what’s important, right? Though if the Burning Man Missed Connections are to be believed, the kids need to learn an important lesson: if you’re wasted, you won’t remember her name: