Tag Archives: society

There can be only one!

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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

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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.

Barbara’s bartering banter

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Barbara, tell us your story:


Bartering as a Lifestyle

I’ve learned to live on very little money in order to support my lifestyle as an artist. I haven’t had medical insurance since 1985 and luckily I’m very healthy but whenever I have needs, such as dental work, and once, a doctor, I asked around and found someone I could barter with. I’ve bartered for airline tickets, amazing places to live, places to stay while I’m traveling overseas and this continent, and car repairs. I usually barter my art, but I’ve met people with skills such as massage, hairstyling, jewelry making, and bookkeeping, to name just a few, who have done well with barter. If you are willing to work, create art, or have something to trade, then you’ve got something you can barter with. I’ve found that there are many times people might not want to spend money but will barter.

When I quit my systems analyst job and didn’t want to be stressed out about money, as a single person I learned that caretaking other people’s property allowed me the freedom to make my art. This lifestyle has landed me in extremely beautiful places, with my rent, utilities and, depending on the situation, food, salaries, vehicles, and use of swimming pools, as part of the deal. On this blog site I intend to tell my stories as well as those I’m collecting from other people, and pass on some web sites that will help you meet up with other people interested in bartering.

In my twenties I traveled around the world and found wonderful opportunities for work exchanges along the way. In Australia I lived for a couple of years in the outback where I rented a house on a two hundred acre farm for the low rent of $80 a month in exchange for keeping an eye on my landlord’s cows. In Bodh Gaya, India I spent a couple of weeks in a Thai Buddhist monastery, in exchange I spent an hour a day helping one of the monks with his university studies. In Israel I lived on a kibbutz for three months and did a variety of jobs in exchange for everything I needed. I learned that honest, loyal, hard working people were really appreciated and could get jobs anywhere in the world.

In my thirties I finally settled down and worked as a computer programmer until I sold two of my short travel stories to a magazine and a piece of art that I’d created was accepted for an important juried show the City of Los Angeles was sponsoring. I quit my job and began looking for ways to survive as an artist, which in L.A. meant long-term house sitting and scenic painting for movies.

In my forties my first creative work exchange was as a scenic painter for the New Hope Theater in Pennsylvania. I spent the summer painting sets in the Pocono Mountains while living in a beautiful resort hotel. I stayed for two months in an apartment in Venice Beach, CA in exchange for doing all the black and white still photography for a video project an artist friend was working on. On vacation in Jamaica I met a woman who lived in a beautiful villa on a hillside overlooking the Carribean and ended up house sitting it for a week when she had to go away. While there I learned wood carving from a local artist.

One of my favorite work exchanges was for a real estate investor in Bel Air, CA. For three years I worked two days a week as his office assistant in exchange for a salary and a nice little apartment in one wing of his house. I had full use of the grounds and swimming pool. It was while living in Bel Air that I began carving large sculptures for the Treepeople Park in Beverly Hills. I finally left Bel Air to do a summer work exchange at the Avondale Forest Park in County Wicklow, Ireland where I carved a large sculpture (see photo above) from a famous tree that had died. After this experience many of my work exchanges were art related.

Several times a week I will update this site with these stories and many more. I’m hoping to interview Ryan McDonald of The One Red Paper Clip fame, have a piece on house swapping, do an article on business barter sites, and much more. Don’t get me wrong, money is great, but if you don’t have much, there are alternatives with bartering. World travel, living in millionaire homes, the sky’s the limit on what you can manifest.

You can see some of my work on these blog sites:
barbarayates-sculpture.blogspot.com
woodenbooks.blogspot.com
barbarayates-photos.blogspot.com

If you have questions to can contact me at: byates3347@gmail.com

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Barbara’s Bartering Blog

Multiple layers of creativity?

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How many layers of the creative process do you/I experience?

We experience the consumption of the creative process frequently, especially the creativity of our ancestors who invented language and others tools of our social structure — reading books, watching films/sporting events, listening to other people talking, learning through the apprenticeship method on how to mimic the use of tools to recreate something.

We constantly participate in the creative process when we rearrange words into sentences of our own, or even quoting others in the context of conversations, and when we use other tools in ways we hadn’t directly seen.

We create new tools.

We create new objects/processes with old tools.

We experience thoughts in the zeitgeist when we see/hear something and think/say, “Hey, I already thought of that or should have thought of that myself.” We are massively driven to think up the same independent inventive idea before seeing/hearing it from others.

I travel through time in my thoughts to keep me from being too much stuck in the jointly shared mass media moment. We all do.

We remember moments previously experienced and yet to be conceived in our linearly lived corporeal existence.

How then shall I ensure my future self on Mars gets as equal a stimuli-enriched existence as the one I have now?

How does one keeps the creative juices flowing?

What motivates us to go from thought to action?

My response to the newly proposed FAA regulation

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My father was a passionate builder of balsa model airplanes. I literally have drawers full of the planes he built and kits he had not finished. It hurts me to see the new regulations proposed by the FAA to dampen interest in so fundamental a hobby for many of who enjoy model aircraft.

Thus, I gladly submitted a personal response to the U.S. government for the FAA to stop or reconsider the wording of the potential new regulations…

The need to educate children in the disciplines of STE(A)M [Science, Technology, Engineering, (Art), and Mathematics] is more important now than ever. Getting them involved in hobbies like model aircraft is part of the excitement of those disciplines.

My father and I bonded when my father took me to my first model flying event when I was five years old in 1967, continuing my father’s fascination with aircraft from his childhood during WWII. He and I built balsa airplanes together since I was six. I flew my first U-line plane when I was a teenager and was fascinated, even back in the middle 1970s, at the fun both adults and children had flying model helicopters, even though back then they were expensive and hard to fly.

Today, the hobby is still the same. Model builders and flyers still go out with their family to enjoy the hobby together and, thanks to lower costs, children can, under the supervision of adults, learn to build and fly their own aircraft.

Please do not remove the joy of building AND flying model aircraft for this generation and generations to come. We need today’s children to learn to become scientists and engineers through the fun of applying math and science principles through indoor/outdoor hobbies like model aircraft.

Controversy at the local hobbyist club level… [received via email]

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image

Rocket City RC Newsletter Editor Resignation
June 27th, 2014

Bill,

I’m tired of being sniped at by the selective enforcement of the RCRC rules by my “fellow” club officers.  This last incident today by one of my “fellow” club officers is the last straw. I thought we had this situation fixed, but I was apparently wrong.

I have tried to bring a different tone to the club but at this point it has become obvious that in the words of the immortal Ron White:  “You can’t fix stupid!”.

Speaking of immortal…  I request that you immediately remove the “Chuck Facemire” Memorial sign until such time that it is appropriate and then bring the subject of its replacement to the club for a vote.    If you look at the definition of “memorial” I think you’ll find that a “memorial”  is primarily meant to be a “tribute to the dead” or “to serve to preserve the memory of the dead.”  Since Chuck Facemire is still among the living it is inappropriate and improper to display this signage.  If this is not done in a reasonable time frame I will bring this to the attention of the City Parks and Recreation Director.

Enforcement of rules/laws:  While we are in the process of strictly enforcing rules let me also bring it to your attention that the City of Huntsville has a codified leash law “Section 5-44 Duty to Restrain”.  This law clearly states that any dog must be on a leash and under control unless said dog is on the owners property.  This law applies to the Capt.Trey Wilbourn Flying Park.

This city leash law has been, and continues to be ignored by the current and past RCRC Club officers.  I’d also like give notice to the RCRC membership to call Huntsville Animal Control at 256-883-3788 should they see this law being violated.  From the city parks and recreation director: “We recommend that you report these violations to our department dispatch, 256-883-3788. We will dispatch an Animal Service officer to talk with the pet owner.”

I would like my Newletter Editor successor to place the contents of this email, IN TOTO,  as notice to the membership of my resignation and reason therefore.

I wish you and RCRC all the best in the future.

Sincerely,

Fred H.

PS:  Please have the next newsletter editor give me a call and make an appointment with me to handover the newsletter materials in my possession.

The Universe compels the soul to look upward, and leads us from this world to another.
—
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