Ninja (playground game)

Ninja is a common playground game, where the objective is to take turns swiping at the opponent's hands to eliminate them. The name originates from the feudal Japanese assassin. It is commonly played at meet-ups and conventions.

Rules and gameplay

The rules of ninja are simple, and have only a few pivotal rules for play. In a game, players will stand in a circle, and place their hands together, the player leading the game will say "Bow to your sensei". There, the countdown begins, and each player must strike a pose. Players take turns attacking their opponents by swiping at their hands , and must freeze in place once their attack is finished. Defending players may dodge if they think they will be hit, and must also freeze once the attack is finished. If a player is hit, the hand that is hit is out but the other hand is still in. If a player misses, they must stop moving immediately. When both hands have been hit, the player is out and must stand back until there is one player left. The only player left is the winner. However, there have been variations to how children play the game, some exercise optional rules such as, the area that is hit, timed attacks or however the players want to change the game.

Ninja (Six Flags Magic Mountain)

Ninja is an Arrow Dynamics steel suspended roller coaster located at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California. It is the fastest roller coaster of its kind in the world, joint with Vortex at Canada's Wonderland, both with top speeds of 55 mph (89 km/h).

Roller coaster

The coaster is located in the Samurai Summit area of Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia. Ninja was built in 1988 as the fifth of the ten original Arrow suspended coasters. It is somewhat unusual in that it uses two lift hills — one at the beginning of the run and a second one just before the end, to return the train to station elevation.

Ninja's station building previously served as the upper station for Magic Mountain's dragon tram. The tram carried passengers up and down the hillside until its closure in 1981, and its abandoned lower station can still be found near the Jetstream water ride and Ninja's final brake run.

Ninja is the only Arrow Dynamics suspended swinging coaster west of the Mississippi River. The other three suspended swinging coasters in North America (Vortex at Canada's Wonderland, Iron Dragon at Cedar Point, and The Bat at Kings Island) are all east of the Mississippi.

Ninja (British rapper)

Nkechi Ka Egenamba (first name pronounced n-kay-chee) known as Ninja is an English rapper and the female lead vocalist for the British indie band The Go! Team. Doing a mixture of rapping, chanting and singing, Ninja is well known for her energetic stage performances and dancing. In 2005, NME voted Ninja the 15th coolest person in music.

Early life and education

Born Nkechi Ka in 1983, Nkechi is short for Nkechinyere, and means "what God has given" or "gift of God" in Igbo, the language of the Igbo people, an ethnic group in West Africa, numbering in the tens of millions. Ninja is from London. Her father is a Nigerian lawyer, and her mother is half-Egyptian, half-Nigerian. Ninja is one of five children and was brought up in a very strict household. She had been studying at university before she joined The Go! Team.

The Go! Team

Ninja became lead singer for the The Go! Team after founder Ian Parton created the first The Go! Team album in the studio. With Ninja, the live band became a "separate entity" to the original studio vision, as the performances became radically different from the recordings, particularly due to Ninja's freestyled vocals contrary to the sampled vocals present on the album. Parton acknowledged that Ninja had become the "face of the band" in an interview with Erik Leijon in September 2007.

Gong (title)

Gong (公, p gōng) was the highest title of Chinese nobles during Zhou Dynasty and the second highest title, ranked below Wang, from Han Dynasty onwards. Gong is usually translated as "duke".

Examples

Guang (vessel)

A guang or gong (Chinese: 觥; pinyin: guāng or gōng; Wade–Giles: kung1) is a particular shape used in Chinese art for vessels, originally made as Chinese ritual bronzes in the Shang dynasty, and sometimes later in Chinese porcelain. They are a type of ewer which was used for pouring rice wine at ritual banquets, and often deposited as grave goods in high-status burial. Examples of the shape may be described as ewers, ritual wine vessels, wine pourers and similar terms, though all of these terms are also used of a number of other shapes, especially the smaller tripod jue and the larger zun.

The guang has a single thick foot, and a thick hollow body that represents one or more stylized animals (some have a head at both ends). Guangs have a vertical handle at one end and a spout at the other, both zoomorphic, and were often highly decorated with taotie. The handle of the guang is of often in the shape of the neck and head of an animal with stylized horns, and the spout of the vessel is in the form of the head of a creature whose mouth constitutes the end of the spout. The back and animal head at the pouring end usually are a removable lid, lifted off for pouring.

Gong (surname)

Gong is a Chinese surname. It is the English transcription of a number of different Chinese surnames: 宫, 龔, 共, 公, 鞏, 功, 貢, and 弓. Gong may also be a Korean surname, but this Korean Gong may be the English transcription of another surname Kong (孔).

Surname Gong 龔, 共

Gong (simplified Chinese: 龚; traditional Chinese: 龔, rank 192 in China), aka Kung or Kong in Cantonese (Hong Kong and Macao), is the 99th most prevalent Chinese surname listed in the ancient Song Dynasty classic text, "Hundred Family Surnames". In Chinese writing, the character "龚" is composed of the two characters 龙 (upper character, meaning dragon) and 共 (lower character, meaning altogether, common, general, shared, or together).

As of 2002, there are around 1.5 million people with the Gong 龚 surname in China, representing 0.2% of its population. They are most commonly found along the Yangtze River basin, especially in the province of Anhui.

Origin

According to one story, the surname Gong 龔 was derived from the other Gong (共). An ancestor of the Gong clan with the surname 共 had to flee from troubles, and change his surname from 共 to 龔 by adding the character for dragon (龍) on top. According to other legends, they are the descendants of a minister of the Huang Emperor named Gong Gu (共鼓), or the descendants of Gong Gong (共工), a minister of Emperor Yao.

Gustav Heinrich von Bongard

August Gustav Heinrich von Bongard (12 September 1786, Bonn – 1839) was a German botanist, who worked at Saint Petersburg, Russia.

He was among the first botanists to describe the new plants then being discovered in Alaska (under Russian ownership at the time), including species now of major commercial importance like Sitka Spruce and Red Alder. The specimens he described were mostly collected by Carl Mertens at Sitka, Alaska.

The plant genus Bongardia (family Berberidaceae) is named in his honor.

Selected writings