Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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NEWS OF THE WEIRD by CHUCK SHEPPARD An option for suicide "with elegance and euphoria" is how Lithuanian-born Ph.D. candidate Julijonas Urbonas (London's Royal College of Art) described his "Euthanasia (Roller) Coaster," currently on the drawing board. Urbonas' model of "gravitational aesthetics" would be a third-mile-long, 1,600-foot-high thrill ride engineered to supply 10 Gs of centrifugal force (a spin at about 220 mph) to induce cerebral hypoxia, forcing blood away from the head and denying oxygen to the brain. Euphoria (and disorientation and anxiety, but not pain) are likely states to precede the brain's shutdown. Urbonas insisted that users would have the option through the first two minutes of the three-minute ride to rethink their decision and bail out (or else to push the final "FALL" button). (Suicide is legal in four European countries and Oregon and Washington.) [Discovery News, 9-19-2011] Government in Action! An open-government advocacy Chuck Sheppard group's survey of federal agencies, released in July, revealed that eight of them have unresolved Freedom of Information Act requests that are more than a decade old, including one pending for more than 20 years. (The 1976 FOIA law requires resolution within 20 business days, with a 10-day extension under "unusual circumstances.") [National Security Archive, 7- 4-2011] Also, regarding the FOIA, a June 2011 request by the city of Sioux City, Iowa, for background documents regarding the recent Postal Service decision to move jobs from Sioux City to Sioux Falls, S.D., was met promptly — by the Postal Service's forecast that the likely fee for the documents would be $831,000, even though under the law the first two search hours and the first 100 documents are free. [Sioux City Journal, 7-27-2011] In August, the Securities and Exchange Commission's inspector general revealed that a $1,200 cash award was paid by the agency in 2010 to one of the very employees who had been specifically singled out for allowing Bernard Madoff to talk his way out of SEC inquiries in 2005 and 2006, before his epic Ponzi scheme was exposed in 2008. (The IG helpfully recommended that, in the future, awards not be given to employees who have recently been facing potential disciplinary action for poor performance.) [Legal Times, 8-4-2011] COPYRIGHT 2011 CHUCK SHEPHERD 20 UCW OCTOBER 19-25, 2011 WEEKLY HOROSCOPES BY HOLIDAY ARIES (March 21-April 19) You will add to a collection of sorts this week. If you're not sure what to collect, make a point of collecting beauty, and beauty is what you will fi nd. TAURUS (April 20-May 20) You meet new people all of the time, though sometimes you fail to remember the encounter. You don't want this to be the case when people are meeting you for the fi rst time. You have that intangible something that people will recall favorably for a long while after you're gone. GEMINI (May 21-June 21) You understand the benefi t of not taking things too person- ally. As you work on building your inner core of self-appreciation, you become increasingly bolder. You risk rejection and come out on top. CANCER (June 22-July 22) You'll thrive on teamwork games and the social aspect of sports and play. You won't be in a very competi- tive mood, though, and you'll shy away from activities that clearly provide outlets for the hostilities of others. LEO (July 23-Aug. 22) There's a change you want to see in the world, and this week you'll be rallying others to take a stand with you. You can deliver a fl ashy presentation with the best of them, and yet you will mostly rely on an honest and gutsy portrayal of the situation at hand. By week's end, dozens will have joined your side. VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22) You feel that you have a score to settle with another party. You will hang on until one of two things happens: Either you become satisfi ed that things are fi n- ished fair and square as they should be, or you note that it's never going to happen and decide that moving on is the only logical thing to do. LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 23) You like surprises as much as the next guy, and yet there are times when you really would prefer life to greet you with a predictable outcome. Get ready for strange twists and turns. SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 21) You feel ready to open your life to fresh infl uences and will reach out to connect with different types of people. New relationships can be quite stiff and awkward, but after the getting-to-know- you phase, you'll be quite pleased with the ease in which things develop. So give it time. SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21) You'll set off bravely for new adventures with the past fi rmly in the past. Over the course of the week, the atmosphere will change before your eyes. The new scene is something quite different from what you have been accustomed to, and yet you adjust quickly. Adaptation is in your nature. CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19) Your sign mate Ben Franklin was a pioneer of electrical theory. It's true. Did you know that he also in- vented swim fi ns and the rocking chair? You'll be emboldened to experiment. AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) Your initial ea- gerness to make a deal happen will be tempered with reason. By midweek, you may feel it's time to get another opinion, preferably that of a to- tally disinterested person as far as the deal itself goes. All of your research will come in handy. PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) Floating from project to project can sometimes work to keep a lighthearted perspective on things. But by Wednesday, you'll realize that if you really want to have results by the end of the week, you'll have to hunker down and get seriously focused. The longer you stick with one thing the more productive you become. By Holiday Mathis FREE Community Papers Because sometimes the world is... ...right where you live. ADVICE GODDESS All Work and No Foreplay My husband and I are entrepreneurs, developing a new product. We're both working long hours. He's miserable because he has no time for his art (painting), and our sex life is in shambles. There isn't a lot of blame or anger. We simply go about our entire days with little or no fl irting and fall into bed completely exhausted at night. Even if we crave sex, we're too tired. We kiss goodnight and promise it'll be different tomorrow or on the weekend, but it never is, and I see no reason to believe things will change. We used to race home from work to have wild sex and then do silly things together in the evenings. People always called us "the Amy Alkon sensual couple" because we couldn't keep our hands off each other. How can we get the zing back? — Accidental Celibate Former Harvard psychology professor Shawn Achor writes in The Happiness Advantage that we're taught that we have to sacrifi ce happiness for success and told that only when we're successful will we be happy. Achor counters that happiness isn't something that falls in your lap when you attain some level of accomplishment; it's "a work ethic." He cites a decade of research suggesting that happiness "raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent, as well as (leading to myriad) health and quality of life improvements." Free Paper Advertising and Editorial Content." "74.4% of Community Paper Readers Make Their Buying Decisions from p www.upandcomingweekly.com 910.484.6200 Paper Name Address Phone Connecting a Community Connecting a Community CSCSG Remember, people called you "the sensual couple" because you couldn't keep your hands off each other, not because you couldn't take your eyes off the clock. Ditching the clock for at least some of the day is essential. It's activities that make you lose track of time that make you happy — activities like sex (and painting) that also make you forget yourself and that package your husband neglected to bring to the post offi ce. To put this in entrepreneurial terms, you need to relaunch your sex life and take it as seriously as you would a business launch. Look at sex as a mandatory meeting you need to have naked. Make an effort to leave work well before the cows not only come home but start watching Seinfeld reruns. And replace any motivational posters decorating your offi ce with ones that refl ect your newfound knowledge of trickle-down happy-nomics, for example: "As you climb the ladder of success, be sure to stop every now and then to let your husband look up your dress" and "Behind every successful woman is a man with his pants down." Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM