A man was leaving a cafe with his morning coffee when he noticed a most
unusual funeral procession approaching the nearby cemetery. A funeral
coffin was followed by a second one about 50 feet behind the first.
Behind the second coffin was a solitary man walking with a black dog.
Behind him was a queue of 200 men walking in single file. The man
couldn’t stand his curiosity ..

He respectfully approached the man walking the dog, “I am so sorry for
your loss, and I know now is a bad time to disturb you, but I’ve never
seen a funeral like this with so many of you walking in single file. Whose
funeral is it?”

The man replied, “Well, that first coffin is for my wife.”

What happened to her?”

The man replied, “My dog attacked and killed her.”

He inquired further, “Well, who is in the second coffin?”

The man answered, “My mother-in-law. She was trying to help my wife when the dog attacked and killed her also.”


A poignant and thoughtful moment of silence passes between the two men.


Then the first one asks in excitement “Can I borrow the dog?”


The man replied “Join the queue.”

This was a private, only two participants and the second one showing up late. No bowing in was necessary.

As a private lesson, student requests determined what was practiced, and here is what your correspondent retained as lessons:

hook kicks

practiced next to the wall, just hitting the thigh of the partner. Due to the wall, the leg has to come up straight, but when veering into the target, the trajectory is nearly parrallel to the floor. It is important to twist the hips before the rear foot lands, this is what creates the correct trajectory at the end of the kick.

rear leg round house kicks

to practive pivoting and rotating on the front leg, the kicking shield as held at about 45 degrees to the left of the regular position, plus a few steps to the left as well. to hit the pad, the kick has to be exaggerated in its rotation. After practicing this, the regular kick was done. A small tip was to rotate the right arm in a slight circle to improve rotation

side kick

worked on the water and whip principle. The water principle involves kicking through and with power. The whip principle makes you barely touch the shield and retract. Retraction has to be horizontal and in a snap. Then it was a combination of the two in the actual kick. Retraction has to be very swift inorder to snap the kick and make it more of hit rather than the push which is the water principle.

worked on the straight lead, I asked to work on the twist of the hips. Sifu said that the twist has to happen in mid air, before the lead foot lands. At the point of hitting, the shoulders and lead arm all have to be in a straight line.

Sifu stressed that body movements have to be quick inorder to get power, pointing to the fact that force is mass multiplied by acceleration. Acceleration is increased with those quick movements. He suggested skipping rope very fast as an exercise for this.
 

Warm ups:
20 regular pushups
20 wide pushups
10 reverse negative pushups. go down and dont touch floor, go up half way and hold there till told to come down
35 crunches legs up
35 bicycles
1 minute legs raised 6 inches. after 20 sec, go from straight legs to legs wide apart
70 jumping jacks
95 squats
20 squat thrusts

some footwork exercises, usual combinations.

Exercises with gloves on:

avoidance drill: partner comes with a jab, avoid by snap away, catch, slip, cork screw

drill to practive bob and weave: partner stands with arms stretched out and at your ear level, just bob and weave between the arms, taking care to do the footwork correctly and to come back to stance. Partner remains standing.

avoidance drill with bob and weave and partner coming with left or right hooks. Sifu noted that the footwork with bob and weave allows one to get out of the way of the punch, and if stepping out, at the same time get a positional advantage over opponent since now we are out of the line of attach and in a good position to attack.

avoidance drill + attack: bob and weave a left hook then back fist + cross; slip the jab and go high hook to cross

interception drill: partner comes with hook, this time take the opening and straight lee punch to the face, keep left hand up in case the hook comes through

 

New 7 for 7 — without gloves
Hook Kick
HK + Straight Lee
HK + SL + Cross
HK + SL + C + Hook
HK + SL + C + H + Back Fist
HK + SL + C + H + BF + Cross
HK + SL + C + H + BF + C + Hook

7 times. Sifu Derek emphasized getting the body mechanics correct instead of the speed. I found the transition from Hook to Back Fist difficult, since I was doing the cross and stepping forward a little bit.

90 J Jacks
20 Reg push ups
20 wide
20 diamond
30 crunches legs raised
30 L over R
30 R over L
90 Knee bends

live round:
straight lead, back fist, low straight lead, hook

combinations:
2 sl, bf sl, sl hk, lsl sl

avoidance drills, switch with partner
slip on jab
catch jab parry cross (can also snap away)
catch parry cover

10 hk (hook kick)
10 hk + sl
10 fk (front kick)
10 fk + sl
20 rear leg roundhouse

10 squat thrusts with 3 pushups
30 crunches legs up
30 bicycles
25 leg raises
80 or so jumping jacks
80 or so knee bends
20 regular pushups
20 diamond pushups
20 wide push ups
25 squat jumps !

—-

footwork drills

slide forward, slide back
slide back, slide forward
slide back, push shovel

(2 or 3 more, cant remember)

—-

single straight lead standing, count of 20 (?)
—be careful not to jam the hand, should connect with vertical fist and straight elbow
straight lead with a push shovel
opp comes in with hook kick, slide back and push shovel in with straight lead
opp comes steps forward with hook kick hand position, standing hook kick
opp comes in with hook kick, slide back and come back with hook kick
opp comes in with hook kick, slide back and hook kick and push shovel straight lead

(each of above on 15 count, I think)

——-

regular pak sao drill
pak sao, opp crosses center line, retract quickly and straight lead in, making sure that the opp arm from the trap is kept down

——-

straight blasts, 5 punches, wrist over wrist, count of ten

straight blasts with partner step and sliding back, three lengths of the room

Here is some fun reading:

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13650

This is the story of a company started by two men who wanted to sell condoms via catalog in the US. When they began in the 1970's, sending condoms via mail was illegal since condoms were classified as obscene under the Comstock Law. As a result, business boomed. As it turned out,

“
“We tried to get our customers to buy leisure wear, shipbuilding kits, belt buckles, model airplanes,” Harvey recalls. “But they just yawned at that stuff. Every time we put something with erotic appeal in the catalog, the bells would ring.”
”

Their intent remains to send free contraception to the third world from the company’s profits, and the contributions are plentiful: nearly 350 million odd condoms and over 23 million pills were generated from the profits of Adam & Eve, the nation’s largest adult-oriented mail-order company.

I just read “True Cause of World Hunger”, an interview with Anuradha Mittal of Food First. http://www.foodfirst.org/media/interviews/2002/amittalsun.html

Why do people go hungry? Because they don’t have food. Why don’t they have food? Because they cant afford it. “Hunger is a social disease linked to poverty, and thus any discussion of hunger is incomplete without a discussion of economics.” It is estimated that 830 million go hungry. Yet, the world food supply produces an adundant and more than sufficient 4.3 pounds of food per person per day.

Famines are commonly blamed on extended droughts or bad harvests. Parched rivers and shifting global weather are prominent in media explanations. Historically, there have been periods of drastically reduced production of food, but rarely did this result in a famine. This is because surpluses from previous harvests were stored and allowed communities to more than survive the odd bad year. Mass hunger began with the advent of colonization, when subsistence crops were replaced with cash crops. When the colonizers showed up, and claimed the country for their respective Empire, they told the natives that as subjects they owed taxes. Since the natives had no money for the taxes, they were told to raise cash crops which were then sold in foreign markets. In addition, money earned from the sale was then cycled back as taxes. The colonized farmer was left with no subsistence crops to feed himself and nor was there any money to buy food. Droughts are just the final, killer blow and they are not even required when the world market price fluctuates.

Development aid meted out so generously in contemporary times follows a similar cycle in the transfer of wealth and the flow of capital. Huge projects such as dams financed by the World Bank produce business for Western consultants and companies. Arguably they have value for the recipient country, but that country basically gets a massive amount of debt to be serviced. Mittal mentions the state of affairs in India, which illustrates these factors:

“Of the 830 million hungry people worldwide, a third of them live in India. Yet in 1999, the Indian government had 10 million tons of surplus food grains: rice, wheat, and so on. In the year 2000, that surplus increased to almost 60 million tons − most of it left in the granaries to rot. Instead of giving the surplus food to the hungry, the Indian government was hoping to export the grain to make money. It also stopped buying grain from its own farmers, leaving them destitute. The farmers, who had gone into debt to purchase expensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides on the advice of the government, were now forced to burn their crops in their fields.

At the same time, the government of India was buying grain from Cargill and other American corporations, because the aid India receives from the World Bank stipulates that the government must do so. This means that today India is the largest importer of the same grain it exports. It doesn’t make sense − economic or otherwise. “ (from the interview quoted above)

A sad irony in the excerpt above is that the very people who produce the food, the farmers, are the ones who go hungry. This has plenty of precedence, for example during the Irish famine of late 19th century, when 2 million Irish perished, Ireland was exporting food to Britain. During the Ethiopian famine of 1980s, green beans were exported.

Farmers in the West, particulary in the US, enjoy huge food subsidies. Mostly this is thinly disguised protectionism in global trade. Here is an excerpt from the Economist:

“Rich countries protect their farmers with subsidies, high tariffs, import quotas and a tangle of other barriers masquerading as health and safety standards. This makes it hard for farmers in poor countries to sell their produce in rich countries. The World Bank says that ending northern protection would boost poor countries’ annual GDP by $30 billion, which would buy quite a few lunches. Unlike aid, freer trade does not foster dependence. And whereas aid costs money, cutting farm subsidies would save rich-country taxpayers a billion dollars a day, as well as letting those who eat do so more cheaply. Some northern farmers might suffer, but supporting them while they look for other work would be far cheaper than the current system. Besides, most of the rich world’s subsidies go to the richest farmers, many of them millionaires. They certainly won’t starve.” (Economist, June 15 2002)

Browsing through the various literature, land reform, better governance, less war (particularly in woeful Africa) are all placed central to any lasting solution to tackle hunger in the stricken Third World. These solutions place the burden squarely on the bewitched countries to sort out their mess. To be sure if defense budgets in the sub continent are realigned with the actual needs of the people, it would make a tremendous difference. So would giving the landless property. However, as some of the discussion on the causes of hunger above should suggest, efforts in developing countries to sort out their mess are largely peripheral to lasting solutions. The real changes need to happen elsewhere.

Some references:

Food for Beginners (available at amazon)
This well illustrated comic format book is very clear in its explanations. It is a little old (1982 edition), but highly recommended.

12 Myths about World Hunger
http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/1998/s98v5n3.html

http://www.wfp.org
http://www.foodfirst.org/
http://www.foodfirst.org/media/interviews/2002/amittalsun.html
http://www.oxfam.org
 

The Washington Post reports on the problems related to retracting textbook lessons long in circulation in Afghanistan.

While the stated policy (ie. the constitution) is to keep religion and education separated, this is of course not applied to propoganda material. Textbooks which taught counting with tanks and bullets and were filled with Islamic tenets extolling the glory of holy war against the Soviet invaders, were specially made in the US at the University of Omaha. While the aid package is being used to get rid of these, the militarized books are being replaced by researched material from the same university that made them in the first place. The article fails to point out this irony.

Apparently, these revised editions will teach how to be a good Muslim — and more than likely they will skip fomenting action against invaders.