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    One night in March 1999, a man was driving from California to Oregon, US, to visit some friends. He had stopped his car to have some food when he started to hear strange noises. Turning on the headlights, he saw an 8-foot-tall creature covered in thick, dark hair. The creature stared at him for a minute, turned in the road and walked off slowly into the woods.

    In the past 50 years alone, there have been thousands of reported sightings of similar creatures in the US, Canada, the Himalayas(喜马拉雅山地区)and even Hubei Province in China. The creature is known as bigfoot.

    Bigfoot is said to be a very tall(between 2 and 4. 5 metres), ape-like(类人猿似的)creature that is covered in hair and walks upright on two legs. It is very wary(警惕的)of human beings.

    Believers think bigfoot is a direct descendent(后代)of ancient gigantopithecus(巨猿). But it remains one of the planet's undiscovered secrets. There is a little evidence(证据)to support the believers' theory: traces of hair, footprints and body prints as well as the reported sightings. Some people have even showed what they say with photos or films of bigfoot.

    But so far, no one has found bones or any other definite proof that the giant creature exists.

    As a result many people believe the evidence is just part of a big trick.

    The footprints are easy to make and they say: all you need to do is to make two large feet out of plaster(石膏), attach them to the bottom of your shoes and walk with big steps. As for the photos and films, they are just people dressed in ape suits.

    They also say the sightings are not real, just people making mistakes. For example, bigfoot could be a bear living in the wild that sometimes stands up on its back legs.

    In 1947 a group of famous people from the art world headed by an Austrian conductor decided to hold an international festival of music, dance and theatre in Edinburgh. The idea was to reunite Europe after the Second World War.

    It quickly attracted famous names such as Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Marlene Dietrich as well as the big symphony orchestras(交响乐团). It became a fixed event every August and now attracts 400,000 people yearly.

    At the same time, the "Fringe" appeared as a challenge to the official festival. Eight theatre groups turned up uninvited in 1947, in the belief that everyone should have the right to perform, and they did so in a public house disused for years.

    Soon, groups of students firstly from Edinburgh University, and later from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham were making the journey to the Scottish capital each summer to perform theatre by little-known writers of plays in small church halls to the people of Edinburgh.

    Today the "Fringe", once less recognized, has far outgrown the festival with around 1,500 performances of theatre, music and dance on every one of the 21 days it lasts. And yet as early as 1959, with only 19 theatre groups performing, some said it was getting too big.

    A paid administrator(管理人员) was first employed only in 1971, and today there are eight administrators working all year round and the number rises to 150 during August itself. In 2004 there were 200 places housing 1,695 shows by over 600 different groups from 50 different countries. More than 1.25 million tickets were sold.

    Mid-afternoon on a particularly busy Tuesday, I took leave of my desk at work and walked into a local Starbucks only to find a space where neither my clients nor my children would ask me to do something.

    Inside, I ran into Kate, a co-worker of mine. The topic of parenthood came up. I complained about how packed my schedule was. From the minute I woke up to the minute I fell asleep, I was constantly in demand and always had someone knocking at the door. But a bit of sadness seemed to come over Kate's face.

    "Well, my daughter's in San Francisco and she doesn't seem to need me at all these days," Kate said. It was in that moment that I realized although I might often feel in high demand, there will come a day when I will actually miss that same stress I then complained about.

    And as our conversation continued, it turned to our children's younger years, with Kate smiling proudly, thinking of the little boy and girl she raised who are now a man and a woman. But I noticed her smile was marked with regret. She explained that she often wondered about what she could have done differently when her children were in their earlier years.

    This got me thinking. Is regret an unfortunate footnote (注脚) to parenthood? With that in mind, I asked six older parents one question: What is your biggest regret from your early days as a parent?

    It turned out that all of them thought they could have done it better. But, each of them also has a strong, healthy relationship with their kids. Whatever regrets their parents might have had about their upbringing, one thing is clear —— it didn't affect them in a meaningful way.

    The bottom line is, we all feel like we could be doing this parenting thing better. And quite clearly, years later, we're still going to look back and wish we tried things differently. But the past can't be changed, and neither should it.

    They're in restaurants, hotels and homes all over the world. The saltwater aquarium, with its colour fish, bring a piece of the wild into your living room.

    But do you really know where those saltwater fish come from? A full 97 percent, yes, almost all kinds of saltwater fish can't be bred in captivity (人工养殖). They must instead be taken from the ocean. And how is that done?

    Most of the time, with sodium cyanide, it is a harmful chemical compound that many fish collectors in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia use to catch fish. They mix it with water and use it on the fish. Stunned, the fish can then be easily caught.

    What does cyanide do to the fish? There is a scientific study on cyanide's effects. When there is cyanide in water, fish lose their balance and have difficulty breathing. Some fish simply die then and there. Many, many more die on the way to captivity.

    Although cyanide fishing in the Philippines, Sir Lanka, and Indonesia is not allowed, it still happens too often. According to the World wildlife Fund, up to 90 percent of the saltwater fish that enter the US each year are caught this way. The Center for Biological Diversity is calling on the US government to avoid these imports.

    “Compared to many environmental problems now facing the world's oceans, this is one that can easily be solved,” said Nicholas Whipps of the Center. “Because the US is such a powerful market player in this industry, the responsibility to stop this practice falls largely on the United State' shoulders.”

    In the Philippines, private planes bring in cyanide to the fisherman and then take away the live fish. Live fish give the fisherman a better life than dead ones, so more and more fishermen have turned from supplying the fish-for-food trade to the fish-for-aquariums trade.

    The Center for Biological Diversity hopes the government will use the law to turn away cyanide-caught fish and persuade people to buy those only raised in captivity.

    Recently, as the British doctor Robert Winston took a train from London to Manchester, he found himself becoming steadily angry. A woman had picked up her phone and begun a loud conversation, which would last an unbelievable hour. Furious, Winston began to tweet about the woman. He took her picture and sent it to his more than 40,000 followers.

    When the train arrived at its destination, Winston rushed out. He'd had enough of the woman's rudeness. But the press were now waiting for her on the platform. And when they showed her Winston's messages, she used just one word to describe Winston's actions: rude.

    Winston's tale is something of a microcosm(缩影) of our age of increasing rudeness, fueled by social media. What can we do to fix this?

    Studies have shown that rudeness spreads quickly, almost like the common cold. Just witnessing rudeness makes it far more likely that we, in turn, will be rude later on. The only way to avoid it is to deal with it face to face. We must say, "Just stop." For Winston, that would have meant approaching the woman, telling her that her conversation was frustrating other passengers and politely asking her to speak more quietly or make the call at another time.

    The rage and injustice we feel at the rude behavior of a stranger can drive us to do odd things. In my own research, surveying 2,000 adults, I discovered that the acts of revenge people had taken ranged from the ridiculous to the disturbing. Winston did shine a spotlight on the woman's behavior — but from afar, in a way that shamed her.

    We must instead combat rudeness head on. When we see it occur in a store, we must step up and say something. If it happens to a colleague, we must point it out. We must defend strangers in the same way we'd defend our best friends. But we can do it with grace, by handling it without a trace of aggression and without being rude ourselves. Because once rude people can see their actions through the eyes of others, they are far more likely to end that strain themselves. As this tide of rudeness rises, civilization needs civility.