biggles

How about a shaolin monk doing it standing upside down using one finger of each hand? I had a better picture than this one of one monk training this while other two hold his legs vertically but I lost it...

Alienware has some really cool machines. But I guess it's just the eye candy that's impressive.

Heinlein's Stranger in a strange land. And some of Asimov's books.

I don't quite agree on this. My net addiction over the years as actually improved my social life and behaviour very much. It made me go to lots of social events and meeting lots of people I wouldn't otherwise. So it actualy had a very positive effect.

30 well done with the elbows close to the torso and bending until the chest is near the floor. If you want to try some tough ones try doing with the tip of your fingers or closed fists.

Xemacs is a fork of emacs, not a graphical version of emacs. Emacs can be built with a complete graphical user interface too.

I've never called anyone stupid, I used gentoo for quite some time, but having to wait two days and a half for KDE to compile wasn't very amusing. I've allways prefered pre-compiled packages where I just have to wait for the download to complete to use them. Besides having played arround with all the optimizations and pre-linking stuff on gentoo stage 3 and LFS I've never really saw any worthy gain in terms of speed or memory usage. But that's just my experience...

No, I agree that some use the name change to identify whether they teach the martial application or not altough there's only one art. I've never eard of Ng Mui martial art, but since the topic was related to Wing Chun, Ng Mui was also the name of the Shaolin nun who first taught the style to Yim Wing Chun. More on the history can be found here.

Kung Fu acctualy means hard work, or skill gained through hard work. But it's acctually used in the same terms as wushu to refer to the chinese martial arts.

Actually it was an Indian by the name of Bodhidharma or Da Mo who brought the martial arts to China. He taught the shaolin monks a set of movements and exercises, copied from the animal movements to permit them to stay healthy and to defend themselves. When he got to the temple the monks were soo weak they could not go though medidation without falling asleep, they were phisycally week but very strong mentally. This set of movements was the base for the chinese boxing or kung fu shaolin as it's how it's better known. And it's from were all the other martial arts have descended.

Actually it came from Brasil although there is also Angola's capoeira. It appeared in 1500 in Brasil when it was still occupied by Portugal. It was the slave's that created it as a mean to defend themselves and it was masked as a dance because no fighting skills were allowed for them.

Maybe he was talking about Okinawa island and it's occupation by Japan. After they took military control over the territory, all of the weapons were banned and confiscated as a mean to prevent insurrections. As it was a violent occupation, people were forced to seek up other means to defend them, like using farming tools like the nunchaku as a weapon against the samurais.

Actually from here you can read: