At 27, Sutton Bacon has been a consultant for Coca-Cola and Holiday Inn. Now he’s CEO and president of Nantahala Outdoor Center Inc. He took over the Bryson City business’ top job Jan. 1 from Payson Kennedy, one of its founders 35 years ago.

Some call quail a gentleman’s bird. There’s no need to be in the field at break of day, so a hunt at The Webb Farm usually doesn’t begin until about 9, after a hearty breakfast for overnight guests. Then it’s back to the lodge at noon for lunch, the kind that, if this place didn’t draw such serious hunters, would have them thinking about naps rather than the afternoon’s shooting, which runs to around 5. That is, unless the dogs keep pointing up birds.

If you want to stash your boat at Creekside Yacht Club in Wrightsville Beach, you’d better act fast and bring some serious green. Prices for a slip run from $90,000 to $159,000, General Manager Tommy Vann says.

It takes a lot of effort and not a little artifice to maintain a sense of reality at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences.

Michael Walden has monitored changes in North Carolina’s economy since joining N.C. State University’s faculty in 1978. A professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, he prepares The North Carolina Economic Outlook, a semiannual forecast. In 2008, the University of North Carolina Press will publish The Modern North Carolina Economy: Origins and Prospects, his analysis of how it has evolved over the last 30 years.

During its first four years, Charlotte’s college-football bowl has been a success off the field, with average attendance of 64,000, but usually a snoozer on it. Just once has the final margin been fewer than 13 points.

Nantahala Outdoor Center is one place business sends individuals to train them to work as teams.

That’s how Corky Powers won the State Fair midway contract. But will his fortune be tolled?

It’s bigger, more established and has the better name. So why do some of the state’s leading winemakers want to put a cork in the North Carolina Wine Festival in favor of a new event that attracted only about a third as many people?

As it rises from the dewy earth at dawn, a hot-air balloon slips the bonds of science to become poetry. But first, in a birth that melds art, craftsmanship and technology, it must rise from fiber, fabric and wood on a factory floor. That’s the role of FireFly Balloons Inc. in Statesville.

Mark Singleton is the first to admit that he’s become “an office stiff.” Shuffling papers and sitting at a desk might draw no such self-deprecation from many other 49-year-olds.

The story sounds familiar: Farmers find mailboxes stuffed with notices from banks and other financial institutions. But for about 70,000 tobacco growers and allotment holders, the letters aren’t duns. They’re from businesses wanting a piece of the $3.8 billion that Tar Heel farmers will start getting this month as part of the federal allotment buyout.

Bar-S-Ranch is not your average country club, but it has the bare essentials. Play the nine-hole golf course or pingpong, go for a swim, fish in the 7-acre stocked lake, roam the nature trails on its 400 acres 10 miles west of Reidsville. Then get dressed and go home.

Anybody who says it’s easy to be a kid these days isn’t paying attention. Sure, kids a century ago were more likely to spend summers working on family farms tending crops and animals — often under a blazing sun. But kids in the 21st century have a summertime duty to the economy, too.