A Baby born in Iran six months ago, currently weighs an enormous 20 kilos (44 pounds)! The parents say the baby was born a normal weight close to 8 pounds when he was born, but he keeps eating every hour. The Iranian doctors do not know what this eating disorder is or where it came from. (Maybe the doctors should come to the U.S. for Med school, instead of trying to get WMD’S!)

A Chinese couple tried to name their baby “@”, claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.

The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.

“The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means ‘love him’,” the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.

While the “@” simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word “at” to sound it out — which with a drawn out “T” sounds something like “ai ta”, or “love him”, to Mandarin speakers.

Li told a news conference on the state of the language that the name was an extreme example of people’s increasingly adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialisation and the Internet break down conventions.

Another couple tried to give their child a name that rendered into English sounds like “King Osrina.”

Li did not say if officials accepted the “@” name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages.

Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers were left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government Web site (www.gov.cn).

One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name had a rare “rong” character that gave newspaper editors headaches.

It is often referred to informally as the at symbol, the at sign, or just at. In other languages, the symbol may have a different name (see below). It has the official name commercial at in the ANSI/CCITT/Unicode character encoding standards. However, no formal English term has been officially assigned to this character.

-Reuters

If you haven’t read part I yet, you can go here to check it out.

In the Jewish religion when a really close person passes away there has to be a period of mourning for that person. That is called the Shiva literally meaning “seven”. This only applies to family and it is only on a mother or father, brother or sister, son and daughter and of course a person’s wife or husband. For anyone else you are not supposed to put yourself in this state of mourning.

Right after a person passes away the mourning period begins. It lasts seven days. Since the body has to be buried within 24 hours, everyone is really rushed on the first day. During the seven days of mourning, a person is supposed to sit on the floor (no chair or beds or anything else that is elevated) . A person is not allowed to cut their nails, or shave. It is also better for someone to stay at one place during the period, and not to go out a lot.

After the initial seven days of mourning, there is also a period of mourning for 30 full days. That also starts at the time the person passed away, and lasts exactly thirty days. On the night of the thirtieth day, the night where the thirty days of mourning end, you are supposed to make a meal in honor of the deceased memory.

So it was the night of the thirtieth day since my friend Adi passed away. Obviously his friends were also invited to this. There were a lot of Rabbis and other leaders of the community that were they to give honor to the deceased. I remember Adi’s father went up there and gave the most heartfelt speech ever. His little brother who was eight at the time also got up and started breaking into tears over his brother. On that night all of Adi’s friends made a promise to his family not to ever lose touch. We promised each other to go to each others occasions and to always come over.

Saturday after Saturday we would make the hour and half walk to my deceased friends parents house. We used to read Psalms in his honor, play board games, eat a lot, and just have the most relaxing and great time.