On one of her trips to New York several years ago, Eudora Welty decided to take a couple of New York friends out to dinner. They settled in at a comfortable East Side cafe and within minutes, another customer was approaching their table.

      “Hey, aren't you from Mississippi?” the elegant, white-haired writer remembered being asked by the stranger. “I'm from Mississippi too.”

      Without a second thought, the woman joined the Welty party. When her dinner partner showed up, she also pulled up a chair

      “They began telling me all the news of Mississippi,” Welty said. “I didn't know what my New York friends were thinking.”

Taxis on a rainy New York night are rarer than sunshine. By the time the group got up to leave, it was pouring outside. Welty's new friends immediately sent a waiter to find a cab. Heading back downtown toward her hotel, her big-city friends were amazed at the turn of events that had changed their Big Apple dinner into a Mississippi.

      “My friends said: 'Now we believe your stories,'” Welty added. “And I said: 'Now you know. These are the people that make me write them.'”

      Sitting on a sofa in her room, Welty, a slim figure in a simple gray dress, looked pleased with this explanation.

      “I don't make them up,” she said of the characters in her fiction these last 50 or so years. “I don't have to.”

Beauticians, bartenders, piano players and people with purple hats, Welty's people come from afternoons spent visiting with old friends, from walks through the streets of her native Jackson, Miss., from conversations overheard on a bus. It annoys Welty that, at 78, her left ear has now given out. Sometimes, sitting on a bus or a train, she hears only a fragment(片段) of a particularly interesting story.

    The associates I hired in my bicycle and lawn mower shop like myself were never perfect; however, they were excellent. Working with them as they improved taught me new ways to show forgiveness, understanding, and patience.

    One day the placement officer asked me to interview a young man who was having trouble finding a job. He told me that David was a little shy, did not talk much and was afraid to go on with interviews. He requested that I give David an interview just for practice. He plainly told David that I had no positions open at the time and the interview was just for practice.

    When David came in for the interview, he hardly said a word. I told him what we did at the bicycle shop and showed him around. I told David to keep showing up because the number one thing an employer wanted in an associate was dependability.

    David was very quiet (he was evaluated as a slow learner in school). Every ten days or so, for weeks after the interview, David walked into the bicycle shop and stood by the front door. He never said a word, just stood by the door.

    One day, shortly before Christmas, a large truck came to the shop, packed with 250 new bicycles. It had to be unloaded right away or the driver would leave.

    It was raining. Some of my workers (without physical limitations) chose not to brave the weather to get into work, so I was short-handed. It seemed everything was going wrong and on top of it, David came in the front door and just stood there. I looked at him and shouted, “Well, all right! Fill out a time card and help me unload this truck!”

    David worked for my bicycle shop for eighteen years. He came to work every day thirty minutes early. He could talk; however, he rarely chose to. He drove my truck and made deliveries. The customers would praise David, saying, “He doesn't talk, but he really shows you how to operate a lawn mower!”

    Will it matter if you don't take your breakfast? A short time ago, a test was given in the United States. People of different ages, from 12 to 83, were asked to have a test. During the test, these people were given all kinds of breakfast, and sometimes they got no breakfast at all. Scientists wanted to see how well their bodies worked when they had eaten different kinds of breakfast.

    The results show that if a person eats a right breakfast, he or she will work better than if he or she has no breakfast. If a student has fruit, eggs, bread and milk before going to school, he or she will learn more quickly and listen more carefully in class. The result is opposite to what some people think. Having no breakfast will not help you lose weight. This is because people become so hungry at noon that they eat too much for lunch. They will gain weight instead of losing it. You will lose more weight if you reduce your other meals.

    I will absolutely be the first person to romanticize libraries. I come from a home with thirty-two bookcases, a count that does not include the several dozen boxes of books in the attic labeled "work" and "extra." All these books are courtesy of my parents, both of whom were English majors in their day and in whose footsteps I never hesitated to follow. My childhood dream was of a house with a claw-foot bathtub, stained glass, and (most importantly) an enormous library made of built-in shelves, a sliding ladder, and window seats in every window. As a high school girl, I began working at the county library near my house, following up on two summers of volunteering with their summer reading program. I was all starry eyes and romantic visions of alphabetizing the classics and discovering gems among the new arrivals. What I found instead was that the life of a library was nothing like my daydreams, but far more important than I could have imagined.

    There is no library that is only a library anymore. Modern libraries can't afford and don't try to be only a receptacle for free books. They offer classes, book groups, Internet access, resume and tax help, tutoring, and multimedia resources for anyone who might wander in. Librarians are equipped to help with research and give recommendations. Most libraries have access to interlibrary loans, making the acquisition of nearly any piece of material merely a matter of time. What makes libraries so unique and important, however, is none of the diversity of resources and opportunities for community that they most certainly provide.

    ____________________________________. Every building one enters today comes with some expectation of spending money. Restaurants require paying for service. Shops require the intention of purchasing something. Houses require rent. Anyone who has lived near the poverty line, whether or not they have actually been homeless, has felt the threatening pressure toward expenditure that permeates the public spaces of modern Western culture. Even a free restroom is becoming difficult to find, especially as growing cities experience ever-increasing space restrictions.

    In a library, no one is asked to pay anything simply to sit. For those with few resources besides time, this is a godsend. Libraries are unofficial playgrounds for low-income families on rainy days, homeless shelters in cold months, reprieves from broken homes for grade-school-age children. They are the last bastions of quiet and calm where nothing is asked of one but to exist. Many arguments have been made about how the library is an outdated institution offering outdated services—that in the twenty-first-century how-to books on building sheds and daily newspaper copies are obsolete and the funding used for libraries ought to be reallocated to other programs. I can only assume that those who make such arguments are people who have always been comfortable with the expenditures it takes to move through the world. For those people, libraries can be about books. But not everyone has the luxury of seeing past the space.

    Libraries, as they exist in the twenty-first century, are the only remaining public domain. In a library, anyone of any walk of life can come and go as they choose, and so long as they remain respectful of the space they can remain as long as they wish. Libraries welcome everyone, offering a place to be and easily accessible resources to the most vulnerable populations, whether in downtown Chicago or small-town Oklahoma. My childhood romantic vision of the library is still close to my heart, but the very real work that public libraries do today is so much more critical than a leather-bound edition of Homer or a graphic novel fresh off the press. Those are the things the library gives me, but libraries are for everyone.

    These days, it seems that almost all of us are too serious. My older daughter often says to me, "Daddy, you've got that serious look again." Even those of us who are committed to non-seriousness are probably too serious. People are frustrated and anxious about almost everything—being five minutes late, witnessing someone look at us wrong or say the wrong thing, paying bills, waiting in line, overcooking a meal, making an honest mistake -- you name it, and we all lose perspective（理性判断）over it.

    The root of being anxious is our unwillingness to accept life as being different, in any way, from our expectation. Very simply, we want things to be a certain way but they're not a certain way. Life is simply as it is. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin said it best: "Our limited perspective, our hopes and fears become our measure of life, and when circumstances don't fit our ideas, they become our difficulties." We spend our lives wanting things, people, and events to be just as we want them to be—and when they're not, we fight and we suffer.

    The first step in recovering from over-seriousness is to admit that you have a problem. You have to want to change, to become more easygoing. You have to see that your own anxiety is largely of your own creation—it's made up of the way you have set up your life and the way you react to it.

    The next step is to understand the link between your expectations and your frustration level. Whenever you expect something to be a certain way and it isn't, you're upset and you suffer. On the other hand, when you let go of your expectations, when you accept life as it is, you're free.

    A good exercise is to try to approach a single day without expectation. Don't expect people to be friendly. When they're not, you won't be surprised or bothered; if they are, you'll be delighted. Don't expect your day to be problem-free. Instead, as problems come up, say to yourself, "Ah, another barrier to overcome." As you approach your day in this manner you'll notice how elegant life can be. Rather than fighting against life, you'll be dancing with it. Pretty soon, with practice, you'll lighten up your entire life. And when you lighten up, life is a lot more fun.

    On Saturday evening, CCTV showed a computer-generated image of the Chang'e 3 lander's path as it approached the surface of the moon, saying that during the landing period it needed to have no contact with Earth. As it was just hundreds of meters away the lander's camera broadcast images of the moon's surface.

    The Chang'e 3's solar panels, which are used to absorb sunlight to generate power, opened soon after the landing. The mission blasted off (发射) from southwest China on Dec. 2 on a Long March-3B carrier rocket. It is named after a mythical Chinese goddess of the moon and the “Yutu” rover vehicle, or “Jade Rabbit” in English, afternoon the goddess' pet.

    China's military-backed space program has made much progress in a relatively short time, although it is behind the United States and Russia in technology and experience. China sent its first astronaut into space in 2003, becoming the third nation after Russia and the United States to achieve manned space travel independently. In 2006, it sent its first probe (探测器) to the moon. China plans to open a space station around 2020 and send an astronaut to the moon after that.

    “They are taking their time with getting to know about how to fly humans into space, how to build space stations, how to explore the solar system, especially the moon and Mars. They are making big advancements, and I think over the next 10-20 years they'll certainly be matching Russia and America in this area and maybe overtaking them in some areas.”