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Everything flows in an eternal present -- Day 5224
1.) Fall if you will, but rise you must.
2.) They lived and laughed and loved and left.
3.) As I am. As I am. All or not at all.
---

This edition of WHPR is edited by Pfenix Quinn, with contributions from MaryamQ, Paul Proteus and James Joyce.



Fall if you will, but rise you must





Eh, reader! And here's the groceries sure enough! You've often heard me speak of the groceries, didn't you. Many's the time we went down there when our names had been marked, a crowd of us, T.J. Scott, MollyMock, Anna Nzinga and little Ray Gunn and Seriousface and Franklin Stone, the Italians, and PimpDollaz and Santiagoguerra that I told you of this morning and good ol' Salty and poor little good hearted Chutley of the average cavemen.

The leaves of the trees along the boulevard of broken e-dreams were astir and whispering on the sunlight. A team of baseball players passed, agile youngsters in colorful uniforms, one of them carrying the heavy bag full of bats and balls and gloves. In a quiet alley a band from Austin of five players in faded and torn denim and with three battered guitars, a beat-up cojon, and an electric fiddle was playing to an audience of street urchins, homeless folks and leisurely bike messengers.

A gardener in blue jeans and a t-shirt boasting the Antifa logo was watering a box of plants on a sill which shone like a slab of limestone in the warm glare. From another window open to the e-air came the sound of a piano, scale after scale, modulating through the keys, rising like a reverse cascade, into the treble.






They lived and laughed and loved and left.




In the waning days of The Kody Administration, Part One, in order to stave off mass e-death by boredom due to lack of "real wars" (due to the Armistice that had been agreed to in the face of a disastrous real war), A Writing Olympics was conducted.

The rules for the first competition were simple: tag an article with [Olympics], then sit back and wait for the prize money to roll in.


The competition was fierce and spell-checked. Sentences were punctuated with verbs, nouns and various non-sequiters. Among many exciting constructions, some compund phrases had to be separated with Oxford commas. And there were unchecked cases of participles left to dangle, right there at the end.


Now that all the doping tests have been completed, the prizes have been awarded.



And the winners are...

THE GOLD MEDAL, for engaging with the prompt and providing insight and self reflection, has gone to self-declared "asshole", Harvey R Specter for Winter Writing Olympiad - Why am I here?, Citizen Harvey tore at every reader's heartstring when he wrote "the more I look into it, the more I realize I’d rather have friends than make people my enemies." So true. We love you man!


THE SILVER MEDAL, in recognition of a major public service and pretty graphs, has gone to relentless statistician and maplotlib guru, Mister Y for eUSA population - Feburary 2022. The regular installments from the Department of Statistics are enormously popular and keep us abreast of the rise and fall of the nation's population, its active voter base, and our relative size in the New World. (Currently, it's 3 percent). Grazie, amico!


THE BRONZE MEDAL, for showcasing the ability of a medium to tell and share stories and create community, even if Paul Proteus doesn't understand half the words, was awarded to none other than your faithful Minister of Propagandas, White House Gardener, and aspriring fiction writer, me, Pfenix Quinn, for Massachawa's Tale, a fragment from a work-in-progress sci-fi story that has nothing whatsoever to do with eRepublik but has left everybody wondering: which way to the dance?






As I am. As I am. All or not at all.




But that's not all!

The previous Presidential term brought us not one, but two, Olympic-sized literary events. And again, 'cuz this here is Murica cuz, there were cash prizes for the winners!

Let me repeat that for those who are scrolling by too damn quickly.


These writing contests not only help to promote a lively media, bring attention to some of the many quality folks publishing in the US media, provide a bit of fun during a time of e-doldrums, they are also backed up by (fake erep style) real cash money! Boo-yah!


The second contest was a Haiku and Tanka Contest organzied by MaryamQ.


The winners are....

Sharing the 150k First-Place Prize, with 3 votes each, are Tiamati and Mister-Y.

Sharing the 100k Second-Place Prize, with 2 votes each, plus extra entries with 1 vote each, are Dio Eraclea and Party Officer Jake Sea.

Sharing the 50k Third-Place Prize, with 2 votes each for a single entry, are dmjohnston, Arrden, and Tito Magnus.



The first place entries are reproduced here for your reading pleasure:





The full set of winning entries can be seen in the comment section of the article.


Congratulations to all the winners and keep on writing!



xio, PQ