Speaking of physics in the southwest... has anyone here attended the
"Burning Man" festival of performance-art and weirdness? I hear that it's
grown fairly huge over the years. Some of the "events" of previous years
have included combustion and high voltage devices. It seems like the
perfect challenge for professional physics demonstrators. Burning Man is
way out in the desert, where fairly destructive "classroom demos" could be
enormously scaled up without (much) harm. (Gotta bring your own
gas-powered generator though.)
Here are a couple of my own ideas along those lines...