Our Times: January-February 2005
January 1, 2005
Wordsmith
A Macedonian teenager who created his own language has won a scholarship to the US. The boy says he came up with the language after becoming bored with conventional languages. He calls this language Sinioier, meaning “the light.” Along with his native Macedonian, he also speaks English, Italian, Japanese, French, German and Spanish. He also made up one for Lord of the Rings author J R R Tolkien.
Optical Dentistry
After losing her sight at age 15, a British woman has seen her children and grandchildren for the first time, thanks to her teeth! The 42-year-old had a tiny shard of tooth implanted in her eye during a seven-and-a-half-hour operation. The root of the tooth was used to reinforce a damaged optical tube, so that within hours she was able to perceive light and shade, colour and shape.
Origin Of Species
Anthropologists have formed a contentious theory that the original inhabitants of America may, in fact, have come from down-under. They support their claim with DNA recovered from skeletons of original populations. Anthropologists hope DNA will give a completely new and accurate concept of how the world was peopled.
In-coming!
Plans to scatter a US man’s ashes from a plane went awry when the urn containing the ashes did not scatter, but instead crashed through a roof of an Oregon home. “I feel for those people,” the owner commented, “but I think some of their relative is still in our attic.”
Fundraising
Lloyd Scott, 42, a fundraiser for leukaemia research, wearing tweeds and a deerstalker, rides out of Perth, WA, on a 4400-km (2700 mile) journey on a penny-farthing to Sydney, in October 2004. Scott holds the record for the world’s slowest marathon in his wacky fundraising antics for the Children With Leukaemia charity.
— AFP/BBC News
Immigration
The Muslim Council of Britain is backing the new rules that imams and other foreign ministers of religion will have to sit an English test before settling in England. From September they will need to prove they have a “basic” grasp of spoken English before coming to the UK. Home Office officials claim the policy is “not just to facilitate their integration but also to help them connect with a new generation of British-born Muslims.”
Trade Centres
Rebuilding confidence in the world economy after September 11, the number of “World Trade Centres” under development worldwide has increased to 26, with three scheduled for construction in Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama bin Laden.
Digital Stalker
A Californian man has been arrested for remote stalking. The man attached a mobile phone and activating motion switch to a woman’s car. When the car moved, it transmitted a signal to a satellite, then web site, which allowed the man to monitor the woman’s location.
50 Years Ago in Signs
“In the Australian Christian World dated January 12, a clain is made, neither subtantiated nor proven, that Sunday as a day of rest is sanctioned by the Scriptures,” beings an article by A G Stewart then editor of the SIGNS OF THE TIMES.
The article in the February 12, 1945, issue asked, “Is Sunday Sanctioned by the Scriptures?” In answering, Steward quotes highly respected churchmen and authorities of various denominations who say no, it does’t.
What does the Bible say? “The scriptures cannot contradict themselves. They myst either declare the sanctity of either the seventh-day day of the week or the first day,” Stewart argues.
It’s an argument that Marvin Moore takes up in “Sabbath and Sunday in the Ealry Church“. It’s an ussue that SIGNS editors have presented since the first ussyes of the Bible Echo and Signs of the Times, as it was then known, were published 120 years ago.
