Today's museums include plenty of high culture, but you can still find shrines（圣地）to the extraordinary. Here's a look at five curious museum stops across Canada.

Vancouver Police Museum

    The setting, terrible enough, is the old Coroner's（验尸官）Court and forensics lab, including the morgue(room where dead bodies are kept). Artifacts, from the 1870s on, include badges, uniforms, police equipment, items from criminals, and even preserved organs—all in all an arresting experience.

Vulcan Tourism & Trek Station

    Designed to resemble a spacecraft, the Treck Station celebrates Vulcan's coincidental relationship to Mr. Spock's planet, Go to a building that features an 800-piece collection of Star Trek memorabilia — including Spock's ears and floor-to-ceiling space paintings. If you want to know more about it, click here: http//www. Vulcantourism. com

Accordion（手风琴）Museum

    Through instruments, photos and recordings, the museum traces the history of the accordion and its influence on Quebec culture. They've even acquired Asian instruments that show the use of the free reed— call them ancient ancestors of the accordion—that date back 4000 years.

Chocolate Museum

    It's chocoholic heaven — whole museum featuring displays on how chocolate is made, hands-on exhibits, collections of historic chocolate boxes, and antique candy- making equipment and, of course, lots of chocolate treats ,located in an old candy factory building. Click below to learn all about their hours and admission rates. http:// www. Chocolate museum .com

Potato museum

    A 14--foot high potato greets you at what's billed as the world's largest exhibit of potato artifacts. Explore the humble potato's role in the economy, a collection of farm tools related to growing and harvesting potatoes, Hall of Fame.

What Will Be Done-With All This Denim?

    All the denim (牛仔布) will be donated to Cotton From Blue to Green, which recycles jeans into UltraTouch Natural Cotton Fiber Insulation (纤维隔热材料), which is used to help build houses in places that have been damaged by hurricanes and other natural disasters. Your jeans will help keep clothes out of landfills (垃圾场), and build houses for families to live in! UltraTouch is made of 85% recycled fibers and is an environmentally safe, natural cotton fiber insulation.

It's a Fact

    It takes about 500 pairs of jeans to recycle enough denim to insulate one average-size U.S house.

Here's How You Can Get Involved!

1). Get a parent's permission and select as many denim jeans as you like. (Any denim clothing is OK)

2). The denim must be used.

3). The denim can be any brand.

4). The denim can be any color or size but must have been worn by a human (no doll clothes!).

5). Jeans must be received by June 30, 2017.

    By donating denim, you can give it a “new life” by converting it into UltraTouch Natural Cotton Fiber Insulation. Click here for more information about the denim drive.

    UltraTouch is composed of 85% recycled fibers and is an environmentally safe, non- itch natural cotton fiber insulation. For more information about UltraTouch, click here.

    Sparrow is a fast-food chain with 200 restaurants. Some years ago, the group to which Sparrow belonged was taken over by another company. Although Sparrow showed no sign of declining, the chain was generally in an unhealthy state. With more and more fast-food concepts reaching the market, the Sparrow menu had to struggle for attention. And to make matters worse, its new owner had no plans to give it the funds it required.

    Sparrow failed to grow for another two years. Until a new CEO, Carl Pearson, decided to build up its market share. He did a survey, which showed that consumers who already used Sparrow restaurants were extremely positive about the chain, while customers of other fast-food chains were unwilling to turn away from them. Sparrow had to develop a new promotional campaign.

Pearson faced a battle over the future of the Sparrow brand. The chain's owner now favored rebranding Sparrow as Marcy's restaurants. Pearson resisted, arguing for an advertising campaign designed to convince customers that visits to Sparrow restaurants were fun. Such an attempt to establish a positive relationship between a company and the general public was unusual for that time. Pearson strongly believed that numbers were the key to success, rather than customers' speeding power. Finally, the owner accepted his idea.

The campaign itself changed the traditional advertising style of the fast-food industry. The TV ads of Sparrow focused on entertainment and featured original songs performed by a variety of stars. Instead of showing the superiority of a specific product, the intention was to put Sparrow in the hearts of potential customers.

    Pearson also made other decisions which he believed would contribute to the new Sparrow image. For example, he offered to lower the rent of any restaurants which achieved a certain increase in their turnover (营业额) .

    These efforts paid off, and Sparrow soon became one of the most successful fast-food chains in the regions where it operated.

    Mothers and daughters go through so much—yet when was the last time a mother and daughter sat down to write a book together about it all? Perri Klass and her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass, both gifted professional writers, prove to be ideal co-writers as they examine their decades of motherhood, daughterhood, and the wonderful ways their lives have overlapped (重叠).

    Perri notes with amazement how closely her own life has mirrored her mother's: both have full-time careers； both have published books, articles, and stories； each has three children； they both love to read. They also love to travel—in fact, they often take trips together. But in truth, the harder they look at their lives, the more they acknowledge their big differences in circumstance and basic nature.

    A child of the Depression (大萧条), Sheila was raised in Brooklyn by parents who considered education a luxury for girls. Starting with her college education, she has fought for everything she's ever accomplished. Perri, on the other hand, grew up privileged in the New Jersey suburbs of the 1960s and 1970s. For Sheila, wasting time or money is a crime, and luxury is unthinkable while Perri enjoys the occasional small luxury, but has not been successful at trying to persuade her mother into enjoying even the tiniest thing she likes.

    Each writing in her own unmistakable voice, Perri and Sheila take turns exploring the joys and pains, the love and bitterness, the minor troubles and lasting respect that have always bonded them together. Sheila describes the adventure of giving birth to Perri in a tiny town in Trinidad where her husband was doing research fieldwork. Perri admits that she can't sort out all the mess in the households, even though she knows it drives her mother crazy. Together they compare thoughts on bringing up children and working, admit long-hidden sorrows, and enjoy precious memories.

    Looking deep into the lives they have lived separately and together, Perri and Sheila tell their mother-daughter story with honesty, humor, enthusiasm, and admiration for each other. A written account in two voices, Every Mother Is a Daughter is a duet (二重奏) that produces a deep, strong sound with the experiences that all mothers and daughters will recognize.

    I am a strong believer that if a child is raised with approval, he will learn to love himself and will be successful in his own way.

    Several weeks ago, I was doing homework with my son in the third grade and he kept standing up from his chair to go over the math lines. I kept asking him to sit down, telling him that he should concentrate better. He sat but seconds later, as if he didn't even notice he was doing it, he got up again. I was getting frustrated, but then it hit me. I started noticing his answers were much quicker and accurate when he stood up. Could he be more intent while standing up?

    This made me start questioning myself and what I had been raised to believe. I was raised to believe that a quiet, calm child was a sure way to success. This child would have the discipline to study hard, get good grades and become someone important in life.

    Now those same people perhaps come to realize that their kids are born with their own sets of DNA and personality traits, and all you can do is loving and accepting them. As parents, throughout their growing years and beyond that, we need to be our kids' best cheerleaders, guiding them and helping them find their way.

    I have stopped asking my son to sit down and concentrate. Obviously, he is concentrating just in his own way and not mine. We need to learn to accept our kids' ways of doing things. Some way may have worked for me but doesn't mean we need to carry it through generations. There is nothing sweeter than being individual and unique. It makes us free and happy and that's just the way I want my kids to live their own life.

    Being forgiving to yourself and others can protect against stress and the harm it does to mental health, according to a new study in the Journal of Health Psychology.

    Researchers looked at the effects of lifetime stress on a person's mental health, and how more forgiving people got along compared with people who weren't so forgiving. To do this, they asked 148 young adults to fill out questionnaires that assessed their levels of lifetime stress, their tendency to forgive and their mental and physical health.

    No surprise, people with greater exposure to stress had worse mental and physical health. But the researchers also discovered that if people were highly forgiving of both themselves and others, that characteristic alone almost removed the connection between stress and mental illness.

    "It's almost entirely erased—it's zero," says study author Toussaint. "If you don't have forgiving tendencies, you feel the immediate effects of stress in a severe way. You don't have anything to cushion you against that stress."

    How a forgiving personality protects a person from the influence of severe stress is hard to determine. The researchers infer that people who are more forgiving may adopt better skills to deal with stress, or their reaction to major stressors(压力源)may be slow.

    Though more research is needed to fully understand the benefits of being more forgiving, Toussaint believes"100％"that forgiveness can be learned. His own previous research has shown that saying a short prayer on forgiveness can help people take the edge off. "I think most people want to feel good and forgiveness offers you the opportunity to do that," he says.