Overseers of the 1500-year-old Shaolin Monastery in China's Henan province, where Buddhist practice and martial arts have long been one, are demanding a public apology from some internet dude who claimed online that a Japanese ninja once whupped the asses of the kung fu monks of Shaolin in a showdown.
Oh snap, Grasshopper! The affront is said to have taken place in the "Iron Blood Bulletin Board Community."
If the ninja propagandist refuses to apologize, the wushu masters say they may sue him. OR WORSE. And that's what I call real ultimate power.
Snip from Reuters item:
"The so-called defeat is purely fabricated, and we demand the Internet user to apologise to the whole nation for the wrongs he or she did," the Beijing News said, citing a notice announced by a lawyer for the Shaolin monks.Link.Relations between Chinese and Japanese are sensitive at the best of times, with emotions still running high over Japan's invasion and occupation of parts of China in the first half of the 20th Century.
The Internet user, calling themselves "Five Minutes Every Day", said on an online forum last week that a Japanese ninja came to Shaolin, asked for a fight and many monks failed to beat him, the newspaper said.
"The facts that the monks could not defeat a Japanese ninja showed that they were named as kung fu masters in vain," the Internet user was quoted as saying in the post. The Shaolin temple "strongly condemned the horrible deeds" of the user, the newspaper said.
Update: Boing Boing readers have been analyzing this news in the comments forum, but none nails it quite so well as BB reader J L Borghead:
And BB reader Evan says, that's what I call..The Shaolin monks knew there was only one thing that could defeat a ninja in single combat: A Lawyer!
Let's look at the facts:
1. Lawyers are mammals
2. Lawyers are in the court room ALL the time
3. The purpose of the lawyer is to flip out and sue people.What do they do when they're not suing people?
Most of their free time is spent flying, but sometime they subpoena.
Real Ultimate Power of Attorney!(LOLshaolin pic: BB reader Darrell)
Today I was arrested by the Brooklyn, Ohio police department. It all started when I refused to show my receipt to the loss prevention employee at Circuit City, and it ended when a police officer arrested me for refusing to provide my driver's license.
DMZ is a special kind of angry comic, the kind of angry war comic that tells the story of the other side in the war. Non-combatants aren't just cannon fodder or collateral damage. We've got every bit as much agency, as much control over our destinies, as the guys with the guns and the satellite photos. But you wouldn't know it from how we're depicted in the press -- instead, we're the bodies blown apart on street-corners, the shoeless sheep having our hemorrhoid cream confiscated at the airport.
What's better than a lumpy, cozy, hand-knit sweater? A lumpy, cozy, hand-knit sweater with Space Invaders! Etsy seller n2Imaginations has one for $60.
John Kanzius, a retired TV station owner, believes he's come up with a way to "burn" saltwater, by bombarding it with microwaves.
Here's a short article on how to make a simple "snoot" -- a lightproof tube that tightly directs the light from your camera flash. It produces a nice effect, as shown here. 
This eBay seller is parting with a first-generation Soviet mouse,a marvel of bad industrial design, plastic, and brutalism. Perfect! Someone should manufacture these.
Headhoods sells striking hoodies with faces silkscreened on the sides of the hoods: Elvis, Audrey Hepburn, playing cards, the David, a monkey, etc.
Vale of Glamorgan Council in South Wales is the first in the UK to use visual signs warning drivers not to believe sat-nav advice after once peaceful villages were reduced to bedlam when heavy-goods lorries got stuck in tiny country lanes.
Last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, I sat down for an interview with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the editor who runs the largest science fiction line in the world for Tor Books. Patrick is my editor and a friend, and we had a rollicking, quick discussion about copyright, technology and the future of science fiction. It's live now on the Tor podcast, for your listening pleasure.
Loving these anatomically correct knee-socks -- they remind me of Grade Six Hallowe'en skeleton costumes.
The UN Refugee Agency and the World Food Program will initially distribute enough rations to feed 33,000 Iraqis in Syria and about 50,000 by the end of the year, the UN said today in a statement. The UN agencies have pledged about $4.14 million to provide food for the next four months.
Many people are very upset about 
Things started getting freaky early in 1969, when Baker opened his third restaurant â the Source â and became a devotee of Sikh kundalini master Yogi Bhajan. Baker began speaking and directing meditation sessions in the restaurant, and â though still a follower of the yogi â channeling a new synthesis of traditional and original esoteric teachings. Attendance soared, and soon Baker and his growing group of followers were dressing in white cotton robes and turbans, living communally in the Chandler mansion (a.k.a. the Mother House) and following a rigorous program of spiritual practices involving elaborate breathing techniques (beginning with a single six-second hit of sacred herb at 3 a.m.), cold showers, radical shifts in gender roles, yoga, chanting the Tetragrammaton, natural home birth, magickal visualizations, Aleister Crowleyian ego-suppressing rituals and tantric sex.
Cory Silverberg, 
A system called Echelon screens the flood of information for targeted phrases, names, phone numbers, and addresses, and alerts agents to any matches. In 2003, the NSA had flagged 10 different cell phones used by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. When his voice matched with one of the numbers, the agency used satellites to triangulate his position and grab him. Ninety-five percent of the raw material collected by the NSA is never translated into intelligible language. But raw data can also be useful. The NSA practices âdata miningâ: analyzing communications for patternsâsuch as phone numbers being frequently connected with other numbersâthat can be revealing even if the content of conversations is not known. Information from the NSA makes up about 75 percent of the presidentâs daily intelligence briefing. 
Their first experiment was published in 1989. To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense" -- their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religi- osity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger -- they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead." They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.
Each day he woke promptly at 5AM, to the calling of a hundred thousand birds. Nowhere else on the planet do these creatures gather in such numbers. After fixing himself a Palmyra Cocktail (1 part Rum, 1 part Red Wine, 1 part Tang), he called up his radio contacts in Tahiti and Honolulu. A shower on the beach in his makeshift bathing system and he was ready for the day. The bath and latrine systems Roger built are still used today by the current research teams that visit the atoll for brief expeditions.
Denver International Airport is in the middle of nowhere. It's been dubbed "
"It's something so simple. You can still see the flaps sticking out on some of them," he said. "Naturally the Post-it Note just sort of flaps out..."
The astonishingly handsome, road-weary man sitting beside me at the Howard Johnson's counter seemed larger than life but strangely unexcited about the forthcoming publication of his second novel, On the Road, years after he had composed it at white heat on a 120-foot-long, taped-together