Coca-Cola has created a publicity stunt (作秀) in Singapore — a vending machine (自动售货机) which gives out free cans of Coke in return for (作为对…回报) hugs. The whacky idea is part of the company's Open Haziness campaign (运动) designed to attract young people in Singapore.

    Students at the National University of Singapore were surprised to find that the soft drinks company had placed the machine in the schoolyard. But instead of the drinks brand's logo (标志), the words “Hug Me” are written across its red-and-white logo. Instead of paying money, customers have to hug the drinks machine to receive a free can of Coke.

    Public displays of affection are uncommon and have long been discouraged in Singapore, but are on the rise among young people. The move is part of a campaign created by advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, intended to let the youth to see the brand as a non-threatening (无威胁的) friend.

    Leonardo O'Grady, leader of the campaign, said, “Happiness is contagious (传染的). The Coca-Cola Hug Machine is a single idea to spread some happiness. We want to spread happiness in an unexpected, creative way to attract not only the people present, but the audience at large.”

    He hopes that it will encourage consumers to bring positivity, optimism (乐观) and fun into their lives and to open a Coke, sharing a little happiness.

    The machines haw been such a success that there are plans to roll them out across Asia. Mr. O'Grady added, “The reaction was amazing — at one point we had four to five people hugging the machine at the same time as well as each other! In fact, there was a long line of people looking to give hugs.”

A few years ago, I read about an eight-year-old girl who studied elephant poaching in school and made a poster for her local grocery store. The slogan read, "Save the elephants. Don't buy Ivory Soap, or they will die out." What the girl had done taught me a lesson. Since then, I have looked at eight-year-olds in a different way. As an environmental educator, I used to teach eight-year-olds about the harm of elephant poaching, rainforest destruction, and global warming. I had a degree in natural science—but not in child development. What did I think I was accomplishing by putting my environmental concerns on the shoulders of kids who still believe in fairy tales?

Kids develop the fear of nature when their primary contact with the natural world is hearing bad news about the environment. If I wanted to inspire conservation action, I needed to change my ways, but now? I came across a research by psychologist Louise Chawla. She wanted to know what had gone on in the childhoods of adults who are good environmental citizens. She found two things most common. They had free time to explore the rivers or woods down the street, and they had an adult in their lives who was enthusiastic about the natural world. I understand now that what turned me into a good person today was a childhood spent playing in the field and having a dad who knew that finding a lobster under a rock was better than finding treasure.

    So that's what I was doing when I was eight years old—looking under rocks, climbing trees, and picking wild .flowers. I didn't know a thing about the Clean Air Act that was being debated in congress at that time. I didn't hear a lot of environmental problems. But I built a relationship with nature and I grew up to care. Now I treat my own kids like the child I was. My kids turn off the water when they brush their teeth and turn off the lights when they leave a room.

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Chanukah Festival

    Activities for kids of all ages

    Sunday, December 17   9: 00 a. m.-4: 00 p. m.

    Join us on December 17th, 2017 (2nd day of Hanukkah) for our annual Hanukkah Family Fun Fest for an exciting day of fun activities for the whole family. The Hazimir Choir will provide holiday musical entertainment. Drum Tales will present "The Hearty Story of Hanukkah" show. There will be ceramic (陶瓷) painting of dreidels. Menorahs (烛台), and other Hanukkah items for the kids. And fun foods, crafts and activities will be happening throughout the day. Bring the whole family and enjoy a fun—filled day!

    11: 30-Jolly Follies puppet show Ages 2-12

    A fun Muppet (提线木偶) style musical holiday story followed by a Hanukkah sing a song featuring the "Chipmunks" and other favorite characters. Adult: $7 Child $5

    1: 30-Hazamir Teen Choir

    Sponsored by the Berman and Lerner families in memory of Cantor Moses L. Snyder

    3: 15-Drum Tales presents The Hearty Story of Hanukkah

    Drum Tales is fun, interactive percussive (打击乐) and musical. It is much like the traditional drum circle concept. It combines story telling, musical instrumentation and song. Each participant is given a percussive instrument which becomes their media of transportation to far away lands and exotic (异国情调的) places, to ride the waves of mystery of an unfolding plot, and into the deep realm of imagination and the colorful beyond. Drumming, rhyming, rapping, clinking, shaking and clapping, this performance will leave you feeling refreshed after having returned from a journey through these stories! Adult $7 Child $5

    Plus food and fun for the entire family

    Crafts with BBYO and Young Judea

    Ceramic painting with Jack and Jill

    T-Shirt fun with Computer Adventures

    Fun with Cyber—Connection

    Vendors

    Special visit by "Chanukah Bubby"

    I'M Pei, the Chinese-American, who was regarded as one of the last great modernist architects, has died at the age of 102.

    Although he worked mostly in the United States, Pei will always be remembered for a European project: His redevelopment of the Louvre Museum in Paris in the 1980s. He gave us the glass and metal pyramid in the main courtyard, along with three smaller pyramids and a vast subterranean (地下的) addition to the museum entrance.

    Pei was the first foreign architect to work on the Louvre in its long history, and initially his designs were fiercely opposed. But in the end, the French — and everyone else — were won over. Winning the fifth Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1983, he was thought as giving the 20th century "some of its most beautiful inside spaces and outside forms … His talent and skill in the use of materials approach the level of poetry."

    After studying architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, Pei set up his own architectural practice in New York in 1955.

    Designing the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in 1964 established him as a name. His East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1978 changed people's ideas of a museum. The site was an odd trapezoid (梯形) shape. Pei's solution was to cut it in two. The resulting building was dramatic, light and elegant — one of the first crowd-pleasing cathedrals of modern art.

    Though known as a modernist, and notable for his forms based on arrangements of simple geometric (几何的) shapes, he once urged Chinese architects to look more to their architectural tradition rather than designing in a western style.

    In person, I.M. Pei was good-humored, charming and unusually modest. His working process was evolutionary, but innovation (创新) was never an intended goal.

    "Stylistic originality is not my purpose," he said. "I want to find the originality in the time, the place and the problem."