There can be only one!

In olden days, beauty pageant winners demonstrated their singing/dancing talents in addition to answering a question about today’s popular issues in the news.

Not anymore.

This year’s winner of the Miss Kingsport contest had to be the last one standing. Literally.

Kingsport-Times-News-2014-07-06-Miss-Kingsport

We’ll let the rulemakers, the “Members of Amtgard,” describe the new contest requirements:

A blow to the arm or leg and you can no longer use that limb.  A blow to a kill spot and you are out.  The last two contestants have to battle it out until one beheads the other.  The last one standing is the winner.

Congratulations to Sullivan Central graduate Kylie Burkey for the surprise, last-second victory over Jacquelyn Crawford, the presumed winner who, although she won the the Jean Hilton Memorial Swimsuit Award and the Evening Gown Award as well as took tops in the talent contest by performing a graceful classical ballet dance to “Via Dolorosa” by Sandi Patty, lost her head in the final battle.

In 2013, Burkey became the first in Sullivan County history — and the first in at least the recent past statewide — to win gold at nati0nals.

When asked for comment, Crawford choked on her words but humbly admitted defeat.

When asked about her future plans to take other crowns such as Miss Tennessee or Miss America, Burkey said, “Right now, I’m just focusing on King.”

All contests are designed, run and judged by industry using industry standards.

Before losing her head, Crawford replied about her successful rise to the top of the program. “This is my first year being completely in charge of the Church Hill program, and it’s a really big responsibility,” she said, in regards to the Feed The Needy Program that believes no one in the community should go hungry during these times of heavy underemployment in the area.  “We feed nearly 150 to 200 undocumented immigrant kids a day to the homeless and homebound elderly.”

As I backed my back looking for backup in the backyard to back down…I’ll be right back

My Earth roots call me and when they do I give them full attention to avoid the remorse and regret that might creep into my thoughts when I bounding across the surface of Mars on a mission, alone with my gear but connected to the ever-present local overlay of the universe we shall call the ISSA Net (Inner Solar System Alliance Network).

Most recently, the Earth roots look like an acronym called the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a supranational organisation that, similar to the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) Financial Services Annex, serves as a nongovernmental body.

Given that I sit in the rectangular box-shaped architectural feature called a living room in which a 39-inch Emerson HDTV plays light classical music sent by the Charter Communications cable TV service through a Cisco Explorer digital cable TV converter box while I sip blackened liquid called Donut Shop coffee heated and dispensed from a Keurig coffee machine and type this blog entry on an Apple iPad (2nd generation), I am a corporate weenie, so take this blog entry with a grain of salt and a dose of tautological Möbius strip reality.

In my future, the concept of individual nations that are full of people who elect/select their leaders is passé.

Instead, people will often identify themselves with their tribal histories but they will live under the umbrella of a single fully-integrated global system, a seamless interchange of goods and services, with the requisite enforced laws and regulations to facilitate the interchange.

We will have the perceived freedom to not participate in that system, a freedom that few will exercise due to early indoctrination into the system, hooked on the chemical cues from conception, and verbal/visual cues from prebirth.

En masse, we will continue to transform this planet and flow with the transformational changes to the environment.

Meanwhile, a small group of people work on an escape plan, designing, testing and building the transportation devices that will carry life-supporting equipment off this planet.

The majority of the seven-plus billion of us and our ecosystems are serving that small group.

Thus, rather than an enemy, the TPP, TISA and similar organisations serve our extraterrestrial exploration plans.

Today is Friday, July 4th, 2014, according to the calendar on this tablet computer, many times more powerful than the computing system that powered the Apollo 11 Moon exploration spaceship, the day that a group of people, primarily Northern European men, declared independence from the rule of law governed by a monarchical leader in Great Britain during the 18th Century A.D.

We on Earth’s sister planet 200 marsyears from now will have vague memories of that event but it pales in comparison to the announcement of the first sol of operation for the Inner Solar System Alliance, an organisation not tied to one geographical feature or even one group of humans, but a consortium of sets of states of energy all created from components of this universe (terms such as human being, robot, cyborg, etc., will have fallen into disuse by then).

Be not afraid of the future.

Embrace change.

Celebrate your ancestry at the same time.

Another garage find…

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Found the empty box of our first (and last) foray into satellite dish TV, in this case the service was provided by DirecTV.

While tossing other cardboard boxes out of the garage I found a rodent skeleton, either squirrel or chipmunk, with a nest of material that left a pungent aroma in the air, attracting a both a curious squirrel and a curious chipmunk that overcame their normal shyness and ventured into the garage, most likely in pursuit of the odorous source?