We welcome the tapering measures introduced by the chancellor to smooth the cliff-edge effect for higher earners in the withdrawal of child benefit.
The smooth, sloping cliffs of Fredhällsbadet are tucked away on the south-western tip of Kungsholmen, one of the 14 islands that make up Stockholm.
"It has a wide variety of terrains, almost like Earth," says Eberhard Gruen, a mission scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany: apparently smooth plains, cliffs, and mountains.
But their ascent has not been smooth: original bassist Cliff Burton died in a 1986 coach crash; they scored a spectacular PR own-goal when they sued file-sharing company Napster in 2000; and frontman and notorious bear shooter James Hetfield sustained severe burns after accidentally wandering into the band's pyro display in 1992.
Cannonville is surrounded by huge smooth mounds and cliffs of dark reddish brown slickrock, indicating a time of high temperatures and dry conditions during the Jurassic period, when nature laid down this layer of earth.
These joints form smooth nearly vertical cliffs, and the intersecting joint planes form projecting corners in the rock faces.
As many big mainline pharmaceuticals companies face their own patent problems and the prospect of cheap generic competitors to their best-selling drugs, the Wyeth deal will help Pfizer smooth a potential patent "cliff" into a mere bump in the road, says Barbara Ryan, a Deutsche Bank analyst.
"Had a dream about falling, falling to my death off of something dusty and smooth and crumbling like cliffs in Utah, but I kept holding on," she says.
Whoever wins the election on Tuesday might even inherit an accelerating economy in 2013, if (and that is a big if) Congress is able to smooth over that pesky fiscal cliff in the few weeks after the election.
Hundreds of feet above the river stands a granite cliff sculptured and smoothed by centuries of running water.
