Attaining misery can take a lot of work, but don’t worry, the following five strategies will definitely get you there.

1. Cling to Entitlement

Expect unfailing attention, respect and subservience

from others. Compromise, patience and responsibility are relevant only to the “other guy.” Live with the

awareness that life owes you and you were put on this planet to collect.

2. It’s All Personal

Malicious intent is always there if you just look carefully enough, especially when it comes to family members. Spouse forgot to call? View this as conclusive evidence that you don’t re-ally matter to them and probably never have. Children acting up at bedtime? See them as viciously spiteful and yourself as a sorry excuse for a parent. It’s very simple. Ignore nothing and always assume evil intent. After all, if you don’t take things personally, who will?

3. Focus on Problems

What’s the point of having problems if you don’t focus on them? Keep track of all your problems and constantly review them. Nurture the attitude that you can’t move on to anything else unless all your problems are resolved first. Have a leaky faucet? Sales not what they should be? Crying over spilled milk? These are all substantial and life-threatening problems! You can’t move forward until all of these issues are resolved. Remember, there is no solution without a problem.

4. Magnify

People often cheat themselves out of misery by maintaining perspective. Why think of yourself as “just human” when “fatally flawed” and “irredeem-ably warped” are available? When thinking about past mistakes, why stop at constructive regret when paralyz-ing guilt is within reach? Focus on the negative and blow it out of proportion. Magnify your greatest fears until they

by Dr. Sol Herzig

consume you! Trust that all your nega-tivity can become reality if you only believe in it hard enough.

5. Say No Thanks to Gratitude

All the hard work you’ve invested in misery will go to waste if you start messing around with gratitude. Start by discounting all the good in your life as a given. Are you healthy? Do you have family who cares about you? Are you able to eat? None of that matters when there are so many other prob-lems! Focus your mind on all the ways life continually disappoints you. In time, you’ll even begin to see the bad in the good.

All joking aside, if you haven’t figured it out these are all strategies NOT TO DO because they really will result in misery. The quickest way to achieve happiness is to avoid these five steps to misery.

by Dr. Sol Herzig

by Karen Brown

1) Approximately how many gla-ciers are there in Alaska?

(a) 1,000 (b) 10,000 (c) 100,000

2) Which Alaskan city is the largest (in land area) in North America?

(a) Sitka(b) Juneau(c) Anchorage

3) Who was Juneau’s most notori-ous outlaw?

(a) Jefferson R. “Soapy” Smith(b) Robert Stroud(c) Vincent “The Chin” Gigante

4) What is the southernmost state and what is the westernmost state?

(a) Hawaii, Alaska(b) Alaska, Alaska(c) Alaska, Hawaii

5) Which state of the U.S. has the longest shoreline?

(a) Texas(b) California(c) Alaska

6) How far is Little Diomede Island, off Alaska’s coast, from Russia?

(a) 1,234 miles(b) 2.5 miles(c) 88 miles

7) The nation’s two largest National Forests are located where?

(a) Alaska and California(b) Alaska and Wyoming(c) Alaska and Alaska

8) Every state has its state symbols. What are Alaska’s?

(a) The Big Dipper(b) The North Star(c) Both

9) Where did the name “Alaska” come from?

(a) Aleut word meaning “Great Land”(b) Named by the Thomas S. Gates Jr.(c) An old childrens song

10) Where can you find the largest number of American bald eagles?

(a) California(b) Alaska(c) Maine

11) In which port city will you find Alaska’s oldest building?

(a) Sitka(b) Juneau(c) Kodiak

12) Which is the tallest mountain in North America?

(a) Mt. McKinley, aka Denali(b) Mount Logan(c) Mount Saint Elias

by Karen Brown

Answers: 1. (c) There are an estimated 100,000 glaciers in Alaska, taking up 29,000 square miles of the 49th State’s surface. 2. (a) Sitka is 4,710 square miles. Juneau is second at 3,108 square miles. 3. (b) If you answered Jefferson R. “Soapy” Smith you’re wrong. Soapy did his nefarious thing in Skagway. Robert Stroud, “the Birdman of Alcatraz” committed the 1909 Juneau murder that sent him to prison. 4. (a) You can probably win a bar bet with this one: Ha-waii, the 50th State of the Union is the southernmost state of the U.S. Alaska is the farthest west. 5. (c) Alaska has more shoreline than all the rest of the nation’s coastal states combined - an impressive 6,640 miles of mainland coastal shores and a mind-blowing 33,904 miles if you count the shores around islands. 6. (b) Big Diomede Island is only two and a half miles distant. On a clear day Alaskan Eskimo residents on Little Diomede can see their Russian cousins’ island. 7. (c) Tongass National Forest, the largest at 17 million acres, is located in Southeast Alaska panhandle. Second largest is Chugach National Park, no slouch at 5.6 million acres. 8. (c) Alaska’s flag contains eight gold stars - the Big Dipper and the North Star, on a field of blue. 9. (a) It’s derived from an Aleut word mean-ing “Great Land.” 10. (b) Up to 3,000 American bald eagles flock to the Chilkat River near Haines in Southeast Alaska in late fall and winter, seeking late-run salmon who migrate annually to the ice-free waters. 11. (c) Erskine House, in Kodiak, was built by the Russians, probably between 1793 and 1796. 12. (a) Mt. McKinley, or Denali, as Alaskans know it, rises to a height of 20,320 feet.

Ready for a spooky Halloween? Ready for a safe Halloween? I know what you might be thinking - you can’t have both. But contrary to popular belief, the two aren’t mutually exclu-sive. Here are some tips to stay safe on Halloween and have fun doing it! 1. Young children should always have an adult escorting them when trick-or-treating. This is true whether it is daytime or dark. The last thing kids want to be haunted by is a bored (and boring) adult on Halloween. But the presence of an adult doesn’t need to get in the way of fun. It’s an opportu-nity for the adult to recapture some of that old youthful Halloween glee. 2. More mature children can go trick-or-treating without adult supervi-sion as long as they stick to a familiar,

trusted route that’s not completely abandoned. And a curfew on Hal-loween shouldn’t be a matter of debate. 3. As a general rule, you shouldn’t let your children eat their candy before you’ve had a chance to see that it hasn’t been tampered with. There’s nothing wrong with telling your unescorted children that they can’t eat their candy until they’re home (give them some candy before they leave, if it helps). In fact, if you

encourage this restraint when the kids are very young, this Halloween safety technique

can become a beloved ritual even for older kids. Promote the anticipation of waiting, and then have your kids show

you their bounty when they return. Be impressed and look through the candy haul. 4. If your neighborhood has few or no trick-or-treaters, or if it just isn’t normally safe, you can always drive a carload of children to a nearby neigh-borhood that’s safer on Halloween. Not only that, but there are Halloween carnivals and haunted houses in just about every community. Local news-papers and radio stations typically have information about them leading up to Halloween, and you can always visit their websites to learn more as well. These events provide safe activi-ties in a festive environment where kids can hang out with friends and meet new ones, too. 5. Costumes should also be safe on Halloween. Don’t let your children use knives and extremely sharp objects as props. Have your kids carry glow sticks when they trick-or-treat, so that cars can see something at least. Make sure kids can see through their masks. And remind children not to walk on the road at night. 6. If you plan on using candles for a Jack O’ Lantern, don’t leave the Jack O’ Lantern unattended and burning for a long period of time. To do so would be a recipe for a Halloween disaster. 7. When you add the bone-chilling decorations around your house for Halloween, make sure that the trick-or-treaters aren’t likely to trip over them or otherwise hurt themselves. The same is true for Halloween party decorations.

by Brian McDonald

United Financial would like to congratulate Chad and Cyndi Daniel on having their second child, Mason Daniel. Mason was born October 15th with a weight of 8.6 lbs. Many of you know Chad as the go-to supplies guy. He handles the graphic design and distribution of all support materials: Q&A Guides, brochures, business cards, presentation books, applica-tions... everything you need to succeed in the field. Feel free to congratulate Chad the next time you see or talk to him on the new addition to his family.

by Andrea Edmundsedited by Adam Sturm

You may think your cell phone charging on its own is a ghost in the machine, and although it may sound like science fiction, that’s the exact technology Nokia has in development right now. The Nokia Research Center in Cambridge, England is working on technology that would allow cell phones to draw juice from ambi-ent radio waves, meaning that you’ll never again be without a charge. The ambient electromagnetic radiation that’s already being transmitted from TV, radio and cell phone towers can be converted into electrical current easily enough. It wouldn’t be enough to charge a dead battery quickly, but it would be enough to keep your phone’s battery topped off. If the concept sounds familiar to science geeks, it’s because Nikola

Tesla had the same idea in 1893. It wasn’t aimed at cell phones, of course, but he was convinced that he could transmit power wirelessly all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Tesla built an experimental sta-tion in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1899, to experiment with high voltage, high frequency electricity and other phenomena. When the Colorado Springs Tesla Coil magnifying transmitter was ener-gized, it created sparks 30 feet long. From the outside antenna, these sparks could be seen from a distance of ten miles. From this laboratory, Tesla generated and sent out wireless waves which transmitted energy, without wires for miles. This is the foundation in science that makes Nokia’s self-charging cell phones possible.

The biggest difference between Nokia and Tesla is that Nokia isn’t building any new equipment. They are simply harnessing the energy that’s already flowing all around us to supply data for our radios, cell phones, TVs and Wi-Fi. Thinking about our mobile life-styles and how more and more often our phones are becoming our personal life assistants, it’s almost laughably archaic to think that we still need to be tethered to a power outlet and cord every 24 hours or so to juice up our devices again. Nokia is going to change that, if they have their way. Again, their new system would collect energy from the radio waves emit-ted by just about everything we use (TVs, antennas, Wi-Fi things and so forth). Essentially the Nokia phones

would catch these radio waves floating around in the air and harness them for energy. There are several obstacles to overcome in the development of the new cell phone charging technology. First of all is making the whole system small enough to fit into a cell phone – especially the tiny cell phones we’ve gotten used to. And then there’s mak-ing sure that the circuits use less power than they receive so that the overflow can charge the battery. Nokia doesn’t seem too worried about the work involved, though; they expect phones

with the electromagnetic charging feature to be available in about 2012. They’ve also hinted that the technol-ogy may be used in conjunction with solar cells embedded in the phone’s casing, making it even easier to keep your phone charged. Currently the prototype can gener-ate about 5 milliwatts of energy, appar-ently enough to keep a phone on stand-by charged indefinitely. They want to get it up to 50 milliwatts, which won’t keep the phone charged when a person is spending inordinate amounts of time watching video clips on Facebook, but

it will be able to slowly recharge the battery when not in use. The applications of this new technology are nearly infinite. Once developed and tested, this technology can be incorporated in any number of electronic devices. Cell phones, laptops, e-Books, GPS units... any-thing that requires power has the potential to incorprate this technology and charge itself. Pretty soon, power chords will be a thing of the past. A ghost in the machine? No, it’s simply the future.

Anonymous

An old grandfather, whose grand-son came to him with anger at a schoolmate who had done him an in-justice, said, “Let me tell you a story.” “I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do. But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your en-emy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times.” The boy looked at his grandfather and asked, “What did you do with these feelings?” His grandfather continued, “It is as if there are two wolves inside me; one is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when

it is right to do so, and in the right way. He is a good wolf.” “And the other wolf?” the young boy asked. “But...the other wolf... ah! The littlest thing will send him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all of the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing. He is a bad wolf.” “Sometimes it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit,” the grandfather exclaimed. The boy looked intently into his grandfather’s eye and asked, “Which one wins, Grandfather?” The grandfather smiled and quietly said, “The one I feed.”