What's on?

Electric Underground

7.30pm－1.00am   Free at the Cyclops Theatre

    Do you know who's playing in your area? We're bringing you an evening of live rock and pop music from the best local bands. Are you interested in becoming a musician and getting a recording contract(合同)? If so, come early to the talk at 7.30pm by Jules Skye, a successful record producer. He's going to talk about how you can find the right person to produce you music.

Gee Whizz

8.30pm-10.30pm   Comedy at Kaleidoscope

    Come and see Gee Whizz perform. He's the funniest stand-up comedian on the comedy scene. This joyful show will please everyone, from the youngest to the oldest. Gee Whizz really knows how to make you laugh! Our bar is open from 7.00pm for drinks and snacks(快餐).

Simon's Workshop

5.00pm-7.30pm    Wednesdays at Victoria Stage

    This is a good chance for anyone who wants to learn how to do comedy. The workshop looks at every kind of comedy, and practices many different ways of making people laugh. Simon is a comedian and actor who has 10 years' experience of teaching comedy. His workshops are exciting and fun. An evening with Simon will give you the confidence to be funny.

Charlotte Stone

8.00pm-11.00pm     Pizza World

    Fine food with beautiful jazz music; this is a great evening out. Charlotte Stone will perform songs from her new best-selling CD, with James Pickering on the piano. The menu is Italian, with excellent meat and fresh fish, pizzas and pasta (面食). Book early to get a table. Our bar is open all day, and serves cocktails, coffee, beer, and white wine.

    The fence was long and high. He put the brush into the whitewash and moved it along the top of the fence. He repeated the operation. He felt he could not continue and sat down.

    He knew that his friends would arrive soon with all kinds of interesting plans for the day.

    They would walk past him and laugh. They would make jokes about his having to work on a beautiful summer Saturday. The thought burned him like fire.

    He put his hand into his pockets and took out all that he owned. Perhaps he could find some way to pay someone to do the whitewashing for him. But there was nothing of value in his pockets—nothing that could buy even half an hour of freedom. So he put the bits of toys back into his pockets and gave up the idea.

    At this dark and hopeless moment, a wonderful idea came to him. It filled his mind with a great, bright light. Calmly he picked up the brush and started again to whitewash.

    While Tom was working, Ben Rogers appeared. Ben was eating an apple as he walked along the street. As he walked along it, he was making noises like the sound of a riverboat. First he shouted loudly, like a boat captain. Then he said “Ding－Dong－Dong”,“Ding－Dong－Dong” again and again, like the bell of a riverboat. And he made other strange noises. When he came close to Tom, he stopped.

    Tom went on whitewashing. He did not look at Ben. Ben stared a moment and then said: “Hello! I'm going swimming, but you can't go, can you？”

    No answer. Tom moved his brush carefully along the fence and looked at the result with the eye of an artist. Ben came nearer. Tom's mouth watered for the apple, but he kept on working.

    Ben said, “Hello, old fellow, you've got to work, hey？”

    Tom turned suddenly and said, “Why, it's you, Ben! I wasn't noticing.”

     “Say—I'm going swimming. Don't you wish you could? But of course you'd rather work—wouldn't you? Of course you would.”

    Tom looked at the boy a bit, and said, “What do you call work？”

     “Why, isn't that work？”

    Tom went back to his whitewashing, and answered carelessly.

     “Well, maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. All I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”

     “Oh come, now, you don't mean to say that you like it？”

    The brush continued to move.

     “Like it? Well, I don't see why I shouldn't like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day？”

    Ben stopped eating his apple. Tom moved his brush back and forth, stepped back to look at the result, added a touch here and there, and stepped back again. Ben watched every move and got more and more interested. Soon he said，“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”

    Tom thought for a moment, and was about to agree, but he changed his mind.

     “No—no—it won't do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly wants this fence to be perfect. It has got to be done very carefully. I don't think there is one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it well enough.”

     “No—is that so? Oh come, now—let me just try. Only just a little.”

“Ben, I'd like to, but if it isn't done right, I'm afraid Aunt Polly ”

     “Oh, I'll be careful. Now let me try. Say—I'll give you the core of my apple.”

     “Well, here—No, Ben, now don't. I'm afraid …”

     “I'll give you all of it.”

    Tom gave up the brush with unwillingness on his face, but joy in his heart. And while Ben worked at the fence in the hot sun, Tom sat under a tree, eating the apple, and planning how to get more help. There were enough boys. Each one came to laugh, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was tired, Tom sold the next chance to Billy for a kite; and when Billy was tired, Johnny bought it for a dead rat—and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, Tom had won many treasures.

    And he had not worked. He had had a nice idle time all the time, with plenty of company, and the fence had been whitewashed three times. If he hadn't run out of whitewash, Tom would have owned everything belonging to his friends.

    He had discovered a great law of human action, namely, that in order to make a man or a boy want a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to get.

    Getting rid of dirt, in the opinion of most people, is a good thing. However, there is nothing fixed about attitudes to dirt.

    In the early 16th century, people thought that dirt on the skin was a means to block out disease, as medical opinion had it that washing off dirt with hot water could open up the skin and let ills in. A particular danger was thought to lie in public baths. By 1538, the French king had closed the bath houses in his kingdom. So did the king of England in 1546. Thus began a long time when the rich and the poor in Europe lived with dirt in a friendly way. Henry IV, King of France, was famously dirty. Upon learning that a nobleman had taken a bath, the king ordered that, to avoid the attack of disease, the nobleman should not go out.

    Though the belief in the merit of dirt was long-lived, dirt has no longer been regarded as a nice neighbor ever since the 18th century. Scientifically speaking, cleaning away dirt is good to health. Clean water supply and hand washing are practical means of preventing disease. Yet, it seems that standards of cleanliness have moved beyond science since World War II. Advertisements repeatedly sell the idea; clothes need to be whiter than white, cloths ever softer, surfaces to shine. Has the hate for dirt, however, gone too far?

    Attitudes to dirt still differ hugely nowadays. Many first-time parents nervously try to warn their children off touching dirt, which might be responsible for the spread of disease. On the contrary, Mary Ruebush, an American immunologist (免疫学家), encourages children to play in the dirt to build up a strong immune system. And the latter position is gaining some ground.

    Karen, one of my co-workers, complained about her apartment every day. One day I asked her why she didn't look for another apartment. It seemed like an easy solution to me. Karen's reply to this was, "I will look for another apartment when I come back from vacation."

    Sam hated his job. He had a love for photography and was currently taking a two-year course to obtain his certificate. Every night he complained about his work. I asked him why he didn't finish his course and start a small business doing photography on the weekends. His reply was, "If only I had more time to finish my course. When I finish my course I will start a business."

    Harry worked for a company that allowed early retirement. He had both the years of service and his age, which allowed him to retire, but at a reduced pension. He was having difficulty coping with all the changes that were being made in his work. I was worried about the stress of his job and the effects it was having on his health. "Why don't you retire, Harry? Do something that you have always wanted to do?" I asked. Harry's reply to my question was, "If only I was older then I would get my full pension." "But Harry, you have your house paid off. You have no bills, and the kids are grown up. You can sell your house and get a smaller one. It's really not worth your health, is it? Harry then said, "When the summer comes, maybe I will."

    Now a year later, Karen is still living in the apartment she hates! Sam is still complaining about his job! Harry is still working and his health is not what it used to be! These people had a lot of stress in their lives that they could have taken action to reduce. But all of them defeated themselves by thinking "if" or "when". Life is too short for "if's and when's". The next time you are in a stressful situation and you find yourself saying or thinking "if or when", remember the saying, "If and when were planted and nothing grew!" Change your thinking and take action so that you can reduce your stress right now.

    In most people's opinion, the tiger is not an animal that we would ordinarily think of as being chicken. However, one tiger, which lives in an English zoo, turned out to be more cowardly (胆小的) than his keepers could ever have imagined.

    Tanvir, a two-year-old Bengal tiger, got stuck at the top of a new 5m-high activity tower in the zoo, after climbing it for the first time.

    The wooden tower had been designed to provide mental exercise for Tanvir by testing his ability of dealing with troublesome situations, but after climbing it in just a few seconds, he lost his courage when it came to coming back down. Tanvir went on to spend nearly two days at the top of the tower trying to collect the courage to attempt to get down.

    A spokesperson for the zoo said that several days before Tanvir had taken half an hour to get down a lower tower only 1.5m high, and the taller tower had clearly been too much challenging for him.

    "Every time he got to the edge, he looked out, put a paw over, and thought, 'no, I cannot make it!" 'laughed Samantha Cordrey, Tanvir's keeper. In the end Tanvir's hunger defeated his fear, and after almost 48 hours he made his way down. Burying himself in a big meal just like a hungry pig, Tanvir seemed to forget such a shameful experience for a while.

    It appears that his experience would not be the worst in Tanvir's life if he continued to act like a chicken. It is not known whether he will take courage to go back up his exercise tower again.

    The whole episode (插曲) only serves to show the difficulties faced by zoo staff in creating environments that will improve animals' living ability in enclosed space.

When your boss calls and tells you to send $100,000 to a supplier, be on your toes. It could be a fake call. As if fake emails weren't enough, on the rise now is the deep fake audio (虚假音频) that can be cloned to sound almost real and perfect and is easy to create. "It's on the rise, and something to watch out for," says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, the CEO of a company called Pindrop.

Balasubramaniyan stated during a safety meeting how easy it is to use machine to create sentences that a person probably never said from recorded words. "All you need is five minutes of audio, and you can create fake audio," says Balasubramaniyan. Then, he showed a database (数据库) of voices, typed a sentence, and connected it to a famous people's name on the list. A few seconds later, he clicked "play", and it sounded quite real.

More costly are fake phone calls, where cheaters are able to fake the phone number of real contacts and make calls that result in workers sending off lots of money. He mentioned the example of a United Kingdom energy company in 2019 that got attacked by deep fake audio in a call that asked a worker to send $243,000 to a supplier. Reported by the Wall Street Journal, the worker was directed to pay it within an hour.

Balasubramaniyan says if you were to get that kind of call from a "boss" be doubtful and ask to call back right away to prove authenticity (真实性). Besides this, in his opinion, companies need to use more safety measures for keeping up with deep fake artificial intelligence (AI) that produces phone calls and software to check authenticity versus fake calls. "This is a threat that's waiting to happen," he says. "It's a very small number now, but it's very real."