There's a delicious scandal rocking the Miss Fiji pageant

I don't want to ruin any of the twists and turns, but the purpose of a system is what it does:

Miss Universe is a multi-million-dollar business which operates like a franchise - you need to buy a licence which enables you to use the brand and sell tickets for the event.

Those licences are expensive and in small countries it’s hard to find anyone willing to fund a national pageant - which is why Fiji hasn’t entered a contestant since 1981.

But this year, one organisation was willing to buy the licence: [a] property development firm

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Apart from a voting scandal at the Miss America contest in 2022, recent controversies have tended to be in less developed parts of the world.

This is probably because they tend to be non-profit affairs in many Western countries . . . while pageants elsewhere have become more popular and more lucrative than ever.

“Historically, beauty pageants have been an amazing tool for social mobility for women,” . . . .

“Apart from the prestige and the glory, it gives you a platform to attract followers and sponsorships. When there’s money involved, the stakes are higher.”

Drama at the "Mrs. Sri Lanka World" event when the 2020 winner yanked the crown from the 2021 winner's head, claiming she was actually divorced and thus ineligible

The 2020 winner and the woman who aided her (and then raised a triumphant fist) have been arrested.

Fun story about an annual scavenger hunt in Rhode Island

From an article about the Glass Float Project:

Hundreds of beautiful handblown glass fishing floats are scattered across the wilderness of Block Island each year, attracting an underground society of fanatics who will stop at nothing to find them.

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Mr. Horton, a 46-year-old glass artist, started the Glass Float Project in 2012 as a whimsical scavenger hunt, just for fun.

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Block Island swells from under 1,000 year-round residents to roughly 20,000 visitors per day at the height of summer. People come for the beaches and restaurants, but most never explore the deceptively wild and desolate natural areas. The scavenger hunt became a gateway to a different world.

Now in its eighth year, the Glass Float Project has worked its way into the daily flow of Mr. Horton’s gallery. While waiting for the furnace to get hot each morning, he, his wife, Jennifer Nauck, and their two assistants fill in time gaps by making floats.

The four-person crew makes 550 highly coveted floats each year. They etch the year and a number onto each with a Dremel bit. Most are clear glass. The annual No. 1 typically has gilding.

A certain amount (corresponding with the current year) are colored. Found floats are registered on the island’s website to keep track of what’s still at large. Orbivores are held to an honor system: only one float per person per year, to keep things fair.

For 2020, Mr. Horton felt inspired to create something beautiful and lighthearted in a year that has been anything but. This year’s No. 1 is a colorful coronavirus particle, which he calls “the Rona.” A typical glass float takes 10 minutes to make, but the Rona took Mr. Horton several hours.

The orbivores went wild, asking whether he would make more available for purchase. As a compromise, Mr. Horton created a second Rona to be raffled off, with proceeds helping to fund future floats.

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A post shared by the glass float project (@theglassfloatproject) on Jul 20, 2020 at 8:37am PDT

"7 Days With the Most Talented Theater Teens in the Country: Inside the Jimmy Awards"

Vulture:

Participating students are flown to New York for a week; they stay in the dorms at New York University, and rehearse every day in the Tisch building. The show itself takes place at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre, where the nominees perform in group numbers throughout the first act — half of them in featured medleys, half of them in a larger production number. During the intermission, a judging panel of respected theater artists select eight finalists to present solos. From these solo performances two winners — one male-identifying actor and one female-identifying actor — are determined.

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Each group performs a ten-minute medley, with everyone dressed in their costumes from their respective award-winning roles, during which the nominees get to re-create their performances for about a minute or so. Here’s the kicker, though: Throughout each section of the medleys, the other nominees dance and sing backup for each other. This means you are getting Dolly Gallagher Levi doing Fosse isolations to “All That Jazz.” This means you are getting the Phantom of the Opera gleefully bouncing with his hands on his knees for “Luck Be a Lady.” The Jimmys medleys are musical-theater crossover heaven

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I received the golden ticket to a week of Jimmys glory, and kept a diary of the experience.

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She muses, “I have to sing it powerful. My vibrato, I just let it run, because that’s where the vulnerability comes in — when I let my vibrato run free.” No quote has ever meant enough to me to tattoo on my body until I heard “I let my vibrato run free.”

"Around the world, how far can you get with $10?"

CNN:

Yes, the economy's down, but $10 can still buy you quite a bit -- if you know where to look.

This was our challenge to CNN iReporters last weekend: Go to the ATM, get $10, and see how far it can take you. That's it. It was the ultimate in thrift and simplicity, and iReporters from around the world found endlessly creative ways to get the most out of their tenner.

"MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest"

CNN:

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won $40,000 in a high-tech scavenger hunt on Saturday by discovering the location of 10 red weather balloons.

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This contest was designed to test the way social networking and lesser-known Web-based techniques can help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task.

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"We're giving $2,000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that's not all -- we're also giving $1,000 to the person who invited them. Then we're giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on..." it said.

The Reds are hosting a contest that's impossible to win

The Cincinnati Reds are hosting a promotion this year that will award one lucky fan with a brand new truck if any particular Red happens to hit the truck with a home run. The truck is perched in center field, 500 feet away. It's a neat promotion. Except that it's physically impossible for anyone to hit the truck.

Link.