Runaway flying concert pig found in pieces

I thought that this was a funny story.  Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd fame, was playing a concert at the Coachella music festival in Southern California, when his famous giant inflatable Pig made a break for it and floated away.  The Pig is from one of his songs of the same name, on Pink Floyd’s 1977 anti-captialist Animals album.  The album was inspired by George Orwell’s book Animal Farm.

I saw this Pig at Veteran’s Stadium during Pink Floyd’s 1994 Division Bell concert, and it is huge.  The one from the concert that was lost was as tall as a 2 story house, and as wide as 2 buses.  It’s funny since I’m listening to all Pink Floyd at work today.

INDIO, Calif. – When things go bad for a huge inflatable pig, don’t expect it to be pretty.

A helium-filled swine, released into the night sky during Roger Waters’ headlining set Sunday at the Coachella music festival in the Southern California desert, has been found in pieces.

Two couples found tattered halves of the pig in their yards, a few miles from the festival grounds.

Concert organizers had offered a $10,000 reward for the pig’s return. On Tuesday, pieces of the plastic carcass were examined.

“That’s definitely our pig,” producer Bill Fold said.

Susan Stoltz found a plastic heap in her driveway Monday, but said she didn’t know what it was until she read about the missing pig in the Desert Sun newspaper.

“My kids are going to think I’m so cool,” she said.

Another resident of the same neighborhood, Judy Rimmer, said she found a piece of the pig draped over a front-yard plant.

The two couples will split the cash reward, Fold said.

As tall as a two-story house and as wide as two school buses, the pig was led from lines held on the ground Sunday as Waters played a version of Pink Floyd’s “Pigs” from the 1977 anti-capitalist album “Animals.”

Then it just floated away.

“It wasn’t really supposed to happen that way. I don’t have the details,” festival spokeswoman Marcee Rondan said.

The pig displayed the words “Don’t be led to the slaughter” and a cartoon of Uncle Sam holding two bloody cleavers. The other side read “Fear builds walls”.