A 26-year-old entrepreneur from Texas was named Miss USA on Friday, besting 50 other beauty queens for the coveted crown. Crystle Stewart completed her degree in Consumer Science and Merchandising at the University of Houston. She won the Miss Texas USA 2008 title in a state pageant held in Laredo, Texas on July 1, 2007, after competing against 121 contestants.

She founded and runs her business “Inside/Out” which aids young women in building self-esteem and volunteers with many organizations in the community

Details in the official Miss USA 2008 site.

Tags: missUSA

A tattoo, or dermal pigmentation, is a mark made by inserting pigment into the skin for decorative or other reasons. Tattoos on humans are a type of decorative body modification, while tattoos on animals are most commonly used for identification or branding.

That is what wikipedia has to say about tattoos. Looks like the defination needs to be modified soon. A recent study suggest that injecting DNA-containing vaccines with a tattoo gun is far more effective than the way human vaccines are now delivered. Visit Yahoo Health for further details. (photo: Dennis Mojado)

The use of tattoo injections, coupled with the ability to rapidly produce large quantities of a vaccine, might prove extraordinarily valuable in a situation such as a threatened terrorist attack, where a sudden need arises for large amounts of an effective vaccine.

As an example on how scared people are these days, a drunken man’s threat to blow up half a city with his television remote control forced Australian police to declare a state of emergency at a luxury golf resort.

Geoffrey Martin Fryatt, 57, a resident of the Fairways Golf and Lifestyle Retreat in Brisbane, was arrested by elite paramilitary police after terrifying neighbors with a knife and threatening to detonate a store of chemicals with the TV remote.

“One push of the button will blow up half of Brisbane,” Fryatt shouted in the standoff last May before police in the Queensland state capital opened fire with rubber bullets.

Fryatt’s lawyer told the Brisbane District Court that his client lost control after losing much of his life savings in a fraud carried out by his finance broker, local media said.

“People are genuinely scared of sudden explosions,” the judge said, sentencing Fryatt to a year’s probation. “Frightening members of the public with threats of bombs and bomb hoaxes has a much greater impact than it once did,” she said.

Fryatt accepted probation, but said he was concerned it could interrupt plans to travel overseas to do humanitarian aid work, the Brisbane Times newspaper reported.

“Let’s get you right before we send you off to a third world country,” the judge said.(Reuters)

The United States, Sweden and Japan topped a new ranking that measures how well countries use telecommunications technologies; networks, cell phones and computers; to boost their social and economic prosperity.

The ratings for “innovation driven economies” measured in the study, scale 1-10 are:

UNITED STATES 6.97

SWEDEN 6.83

JAPAN 6.80

CANADA 6.50

FINLAND 6.10

BRITAIN 6.10

AUSTRALIA 5.93

GERMANY 5.52

FRANCE 5.07

SOUTH KOREA 4.78

HONG KONG 4.46

ITALY 3.85

SPAIN 3.56

HUNGARY 3.18

CZECH REPUBLIC 3.11

POLAND 2.18

Following are indexes for “efficiency and resource driven economies”, scale 1-10, but not comparable with indexes for innovation-driven economies.

RUSSIA 6.11

MALAYSIA 5.82

MEXICO 4.37

BRAZIL 4.28

SOUTH AFRICA 4.11

CHINA 3.42

PHILIPPINES 2.38

INDIA 1.68

NIGERIA 1.01

Source: Reuters

Looks like a couple of suburban St. Louis purse snatchers picked the wrong women to attack. The victims fought back with a snow shovel to leave the suspect requiring staples to close the gash in his head (see photo).

One of the women grabbed a shovel from the suspects’ pickup and smacked one of the men upside the head. The other woman jumped into the cab and attacked the other suspect, then grabbed the keys so he couldn’t drive away.

Brave women!

Police tell News 4 that they still remain stunned about the heroics two tiny women used to battle back.

Authorities say they do not want to see victims putting themselves into danger like this case, but fortunately it worked out for the two women. (news 4)

Well well !

Screen shot of TV news shows suspects John Murray and Corey Brown in the picture below.

The photo of Air Canada Airbus A319, flight 190 at Calgary International Airport on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008 was taken after it suddenly jolted and suddenly dropped 4,000 feet mid-flight. Ten people were injured when the Airbus A319 lunged from side to side, sending passengers not buckled into their seat flying, and then plunged from its cruising altitude at 35,000 feet to 31,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains. The Rocky Mountains are visible in the background of the plane. The pilot was able to re-gain control after about 10 or 15 seconds, but passengers had the scare of a lifetime.

Air Canada has plans to compensate passengers aboard the terrifying flight in which a jet plunged thousands of feet before making an emergency landing in Calgary. The response of emergency crews in calgary was praised as a “Textbook response”. You can dig through the plane turbulence incident in this Google News collection.

Panasonic has stolen the show at CES 2008, day one, with a gigantic 150-inch plasma.

Looks like movie theater is shifting in people’s living room (Well, it is another story that one might need to build a custom made home just to install it).

Photos of many new hi-tech displays in CES 2008 can be seen in ytechblogs’ flickr photostream. I copied the photo of the world’s largest plasma TV below.

It has nearly been a year since I started writing in this blog. You people have loved it and I am impressed and excited by the traffic it is getting.

Thank you and have a great year!

The Britain’s Got Talent fame sweet little girl Connie Talbot has released a sweet little music album. It would be a nice gift to your little ones as it is easy to sing along with. You would surely love the sweet, untouched, untainted, talent in it’s purest form.

Connie Talbots “Over The Rainbow” cd is so touching and she sings like an angel. I believe someday she will become a loved star and bring happiness to others with her beautiful voice, smile and personality. Her cd can be for everyday listening as well as for the holidays. Any little 6 year old girl who can “WOW” Simon Cowell has to be pretty impressive. I posted the videos and pictures of hers in my previous posts. You can go back to the post to listen her singing in :

Connie Talbot stunned the Final and Semi-final of Britain’s Got Talent

and Britain’s Got Talent - 6 year-old Connie Sings Great

I wish the amazon price were a bit low.

Children helped to collect pennies surround the ‘Penny Harvest Field’ which includes an estimated 100 million pennies — plus a few nickels, dimes and quarters that slipped in by mistake.

Photo in left shows the unveiling ceremony Monday, Dec. 10, 2007 in New York. The approximately one hundred million pennies, gathered by school children across all five boroughs of New York City, filled a 165×30 foot ‘Penny Harvest Field’ in Rockefeller Center.

The funds will be donated to various charities.

The exhibit was designed by architect James Polshek and will be on display in Rockefeller Center, near the famous Christmas tree, through the end of the year. (commoncents.org)