Great Lakes tournment

[Drunk mantis]

This past week end was the Great Lakes kung fu tournment in Cleveland Ohio, and it was great. I highly suggest if you do mantis you should deffinetly attend next years event. It is a great gathering of good people and even better skill. Some of the people who attended were Sifu Cotrell, Sifu Armstrong, and Sifu Grant. I must say Sifu Cotrell is the premiere source of anything mantis. He has a lot of things comming up that are really cool. You should also check out his mantis quarterly publication, it has tons of great info that most people never even known. He is also one of the coolest guys I have ever met. Hangin out with Sifu Grant and Armstrong was also a blast, "thats what she said" lol.
All in all its a great tournment and more people need to come out and touch some hands.

[SaMantis]

Sounds like you had a good time. :) I haven't been to any tournaments this year, I kinda miss hanging out and meeting MAs from different styles. Did you compete or just support your school?

[MantisifuFW]

Drunk Mantis,

Thank you for your kind words. It was great to meet everyone and share ideas on Tanglang. Sifus Grant, Wicker and Armstrong were, as always, insightful and all are working on promoting and enabling others to study this art that we are all crazy about. In particular, I was very impressed at the translation work being done by Sifu Grant on the WHF books. But more that that they are quality people of integrity and a lot of fun to be around. I am happy to say that this quality is reflected in their students even as their technique is being passed on.

There are projects under way. Some, like the Mantis Quarterly are already out there. By the way the response has been heartening as schools from many different styles of Tanglang have subscribed and are submitting articles. I hope that more will become interested though as we want to give instructors help in educating their students on the vast family that is Tanglang. With people like Tainan Mantis and Mantis 108, as well as Shifu Tunks and many others submitting articles we can't go wrong!

Hopefully by this December I will have an instructional book on how to read the Chinese in WHF's Sup Bat Sao book completed. It will be the first of its kind, teaching martial artists to read Chinese through reading martial arts books. I have given draft copies of the book to my students and they have been able to begin reading the Kune Po within a couple of weeks and the movement discriptions within a month or so. The idea is that because WHF uses the same vocabulary for most of his books on the forms, it really is not a difficult task to learn that vocabulary and be able to read them for oneself. It shortcuts the usual route of learning to speak Chinese, learning common vocabulary for conversation and then finally learning martial Chinese on one's own. This cuts right to what we want from our studies for the most part.

Anyway, as usual, I have blabbed too much. But it was a great time and I look forward to seeing you again!

Sincerely,

Steve Cottrell

[ninjaboy]

hey all,

yes, it was a great weekend. my students and i enjoyed it immensely. personally, i found it educational and inspirational...it is indeed a wonderful experience to get together with talented and respectful people. a great big kung fu salute to all!!

sincerely,
neil armstrong