3 Dead in Crowdsurfing Incident at Rock Fest: a Dubuque Geology Conference

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Ironically, this person misspelled Einstein, might as well have gone with Ein-stone?

The horror that played out at this year's geology conference, "Rock Fest," seemed all too similar to every geology-themed horror movie ever made, a la Dante's Peak or Probably one episode of Bill Nye.  Death, booze and plate tectonics all played a part in the annual boulder brouhaha.

Investigators point to a simple misunderstanding of homonyms as the root cause of the tragedy.  The deceased, Alistair Honey, Moonbeam Zappa and Greg, all were self-identified "star-children of rock n' roll," according to leaked Facebook records.  Friends explained that the three were always in search of the next big rock n' roll festival, which led them to attending festivals in the past year which included Forecastle, Bonnaroo, and their final adventure: Rock Fest.

However, as fate would have it, Rock Fest has little to do with music and sound, aside from 3-hour symposiums on the vibrations and sounds recorded during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Above is the complimentary 3-day pass bracelet of rare igneous rock, that is sure to be worn by all attendees at least until next year's conference.

Following in typical music festival rituals the three misplaced attendees imbibed heavily on liquor they snuck past the non-existent guards in various receptacles (evidence of these receptacles shows the culprits to be ziploc bags, watermelons, and water balloons).  Once heavily inebriated, and confused by the complete lack of music, the outdoors, stages, shirtless people, and tie-dye, they had a noticeable change of heart.

"We were neckties deep in a debate between leading collectors of igneous and sedimentary rocks, when a strange happening began taking place in the front of the auditorium," said 9-time conference-goer Rick Little.  Video shows an angry Greg angrily tossing down the frisbee he and his cohorts had been flinging.  "FREEEEEE-BIRRRRRRRD!" Greg spit out, much to the enjoyment of his friends.

The three music-starved men began chanting the most cliched concert-call they could imagine in the hopes that music would be the professors only response.

What the geologists hope they look like.

"They continued chanting until it became apparent to even their booze-soaked brains that Richter Scale, wasn't an up-and-coming art-rock band, and that they in fact were at a conference for higher learning," reported Little, "and that's when they really got into the hard stuff....and I'm not talking about the Earth's crust."  Little faced this reporters silence to his joke with an quick redaction, "I'm sorry, geology humor, I meant drugs, by hard stuff."  

Once the music-fiends were dancing to the music in their chemically-induced minds, they followed the crowd to the conference's keynote speech on Pangea, which they misread as a set by heavy metal band Pantera.  "The crowd was really buzzing before Dr. Sanjay Andreas speech on continental drift, it might have been misinterpreted as music, if the music you listen to is mostly just the sounds of large crowds making small talk erratically and uncomfortably," said Little.

It was minutes before Dr. Andreas was to take the stage when Honey, Zappa and Greg hopped onto the stage clearly looking to be tossed off by security as a cool story to tell their buddies back home, a rebuttal to friend Shirley Greengrass being tossed from the stage at a recent Iggy & the Stooges show.

"We really never needed a single security guard at one of these conferences before," said head of the conference hall security Robert Zimmer, "if I had hired a guard, I would have literally felt no danger if he was blatantly napping on the job for this conference."

After running circles around the stage to literally no applause or notice of their hijinx, the three music-heads leapt from the 35-foot high stage to what they assuredly hoped would be the strong arms of a waiting crowd.  The men fell far short of even reaching the first row and died on impact, destroying the few brain cells they had remaining.