“Street-fighter” is a motorcycling term commonly used when referring to a race-replica styled motorcycle that has been customized by subtraction as opposed to addition. This style of motorcycle customization grew as a backlash against a perceived “dishonesty” in modern race replica motorcycles, which use a significant amount of bodywork, primarily for sake of improved aerodynamics and greater top speeds. Many riders, particularly in Europe, started removing body panels and fairings to expose the inner workings of these motorcycles for a more “honest” visual style that celebrated the mechanical substance behind the day-glow racer plastic panels. Exposing the motorcycle’s frame, engine, and other gritty internal workings was also, in many cases, seen as practicality. A minor tip-over in a parking lot can cause literally thousands of dollars to repair or replace relatively fragile fiberglass fairings; many riders who consider themselves to be “hard core” often anticipated the inevitability of dropping their vehicle, and decided that it was more sensible to remove the bodywork before it could be damaged.

Street-fighter motorcycles typically start out as “sport-bikes”, typically Japanese models with high-RPM inline four cylinder engines and aerodynamic bodywork. The first step in creating a “street-fighter” is to remove the fairings. Once inside this boundary, because modern motorcycles are relatively complex, there is often quite a bit of visual “clean up”, to hide any number of plastic wires, rubber hoses, and so forth. Most custom builders also replace the OEM headlight, which is normally integrated into the front fairing, with a headlight or set of lights designed for an un-faired motorcycle. Polishing the frame is another way to differentiate your street-fighter motorcycle, and can be done with relatively cheap buffing equipment and oven cleaner on most frames based on aluminum extrusions and castings. Additional changes can include everything from custom wheels, single-sided rear swing-arms, aftermarket exhaust, rear fenders called “huggers”, and custom paint, to name just a few.

The street-fighter phenomenon has gained enough momentum with enthusiasts in the past decade that most of the major manufacturers now offer models that pay homage to the category. Some of the more well-known “OEM” street-fighters include the Ducati Monster®, the Aprilia Tuono®, and the Triumph Speed Triple®.

Calgary was founded as a North-West mounted police outpost and linked to the East by rail in 1883, Calgary presently flourishes from proximity to the vast deposits in Canada’s Oil Patch.

Calgary is a city in the province of Alberta, Canada. It is situated towards the south of the province, in a region of hills and high plains east of the Rocky Mountains and sits at an elevation of about 1000 meters above sea level. As of 2002, the metropolitan population was 993,200. By 2005 the population is expected to reach over 1.2 million. It is the largest city in Alberta and the third largest in Canada.

Calgary’s high-rise banks and oil company skyscrapers, sandwiching the towers of investment and insurance companies, are home base for a flamboyant collection of Canadian millionaires. Calgary’s economy is largely centered on the petroleum industry,with agriculture and high-tech industries contributing to the city’s rapid economic growth. Calgary is Canada’s wealthiest city, and Alberta is also the wealthiest province (based on per capita income)

Geophysicists are the big high tech professionals of Calgary. A thousand or more are headquartered in glass-walled beehives downtown. They extrapolate the data from seismic explosions in the field. Their mission is to reveal the earth’s stratigraphy. Their computers and their analysts can detect locations for oil and gas that would otherwise never be suspected.

Calgary is world famous for its Calgary Stampede, a large festival and rodeo in July of each year and has quite a history. For the year 2000, the attendance to the 10-day rodeo and exhibition totaled 1,218,851 people. During Stampede Week, the city’s residents dress in western attire, and nearly all businesses decorate their stores and offices western style. The Calgary Stampede is often called “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth.”

Honolulu is the capital city of the state of Hawaii, the 50th state in the Union. The city is on the island of Oahu, one of the eight major islands in the chain. Of the roughly 1.2 million people in the state, about 875,000 reside on Oahu, and roughly 400,000 live inside the Honolulu city limits.

Locals are from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and mixed bloodlines, as a result of a series of immigration waves that have occurred since the island chain was first discovered by the Western world back in 1778. Over the past two centuries, the islands’ culture, weather, and lifestyle have drawn in, and refused to release, people from all over Asia, the Americas, and Europe, resulting in a true melting pot environment. Local culture, food, and the local pidgin dialect all reflect the many different groups of people who have come to call the islands home.

Along with a mixed ethnic heritage, local residents also lay claim to the concept of “Hawaiian Time”, which refers to an unerring ability to ignore the anxieties that come with paying too much attention to the exact time of day. Local business attire consists of nice Aloha-print short-sleeved shirts and slacks. Everyone is, in some way, a part of your extended family; titles like “Aunty” and “Uncle” are applied to all family friends and most acquaintances.

Honolulu proper is the primary center of business and government for the state, and houses the main shipping port as well as a significant military presence. The town of Waikiki is known worldwide for its beach and for its tourist-friendly atmosphere. Honolulu also is home to the University of Hawaii’s main campus.  There also are many volcanoes near Honolulu.

Some of the more popular tourist destinations for visitors to Honolulu include the Iolani Palace, Kawaiahao Church, Bishop Museum, the Pali lookout, Punchbowl (The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific), the Aloha Tower, Ala Moana Shopping Center, Diamond Head, Tantalus, the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, and Honolulu’s own Chinatown. Most visitors also make the short trek out to the North Shore of Oahu, home to a seemingly endless string of some of the most beautiful beaches and best surf spots on the globe.

If you ever get the opportunity for an extended stay, be careful: most people that visit find it hard to put both feet back at the airport once they have arrived.

Hunting success for the cheetah requires carefully stalking his prey. Then in a short burst, he can rev up to 70 miles an hour for the kill. This makes them the fastest mammal on earth. Forty mph is their normal speed. Speed is an important advantage for bringing down their favorite food antelopes.

A gazelle, which weighs about forty pounds, will sustain a cheetah for a day. Cheetahs must work in teams to bring down wildebeasts, hartebeasts and zebras. Cheetahs clench their jaws onto the victim’s windpipe which strangulates their victim.

Similar to most mammal species, it is the males that disperse. To new territories. Young female cheetahs occupy virtualy the same area as their mothers.

The females travel a range of 600 square miles, while the males’s established territory is 15 to 30 square miles. Females will travel as much as forty miles when following migratory herds of gazelles.

Normally females travel only with their cubs. Cheetah cubs rarely survive more than 3 months. Almost three-quarters of them become prey to other carnivores

When a female is in estrus she leaves urine marks at an unusually high rate— at least once every ten minutes. Studies of other mammals indicate that urine of females in estrus contains hormones that males can smell to indicate a fertile female is nearby. Males will pick up that scent and seek out the females. The male will break into a fast walk with alternate yelping and will make stacatto purrs as he follows her trail. When the animals meet often the female will lay in the grass. The male usually mates instantly by grasping the back of her neck to hold her still and prevent her from walking away and then does the deed. This is a short courtship. They will stay together for the night and mate again. The cats then go their separate ways.

This courtship ritual is different than with another cat the lion. They mate over a period of several days and as often as four times an hour sometimes.

In the Serengeti National Park, there are at least a thousand chetahs. They fare well in this preserve. In other areas the cheetah population is halved every ten years due to poaching, pelt hunting, and limited habitat because of man made developments and farms. Extermination of these cats and loss of their natural prey also contributes to their decline.

Cake pans are available in many different shapes. One of these shapes is a snowman. These pans are usually foil or another type of metal. The foil ones will not hold up as well as the metal type of pans, but either will work for this door hanger craft.

Turn the concave side of the pan down on a flat surface. Use paint colors of your choice to paint the eyes, mouth and red cheeks. Use a piece of fleece or other appropriate material to tie a scarf around the snowman’s “neck”. Tie in a knot at the front. You don’t have to go completely around the back of the cake pan; you can just glue the scarf, one end on one side of the neck area, the other end of the scarf on the other side of the neck area.

You can purchase a ski cap for the snowman, or you can make your own by shaping a piece of fleece or flannel into a cap. The cap can be shaped like a ski cap, or can be made like an old-fashioned sleeping cap, tossed to one side, and hanging down. You can put a pom-pom on the end of the cap, or even a bell.

You can now put pine branches behind the snowman, by gluing them to the back of the cake pan. Try putting some around the head of the snowman, sticking out, and to the sides of the snowman.

Hang a nail or picture hanger on the door for holding the snowman.

This same concept will work for a Christmas tree pan (try using glitter paint, gluing on strings of beads and gluing little presents under it). For the Christmas tree door hanger, you’ll want to forego the pine branches in the background.

For a Santa cake pan, use red, like strawberries and white, like porcelain veneers, felt to make a hat and glue on a fake beard and moustache.

Text Messaging, also called texting, SMS (Short Message Service), or wireless messaging, is the transmission of short text messages from cell phone to cell phone. Text messaging can be one-way, allowing the user only to receive messages, or two-way, allowing the user to both send and receive messages. Most phones and carriers also allow messages to be sent from a phone directly to an e-mail address. Messages will display the phone number or email address of the sender and are usually up to 160 characters. Upon the receipt of a text message, the cell phone will alert the user, and the message will will appear in the phone’s inbox. Most new cell phones offer the text message option, and so users often prefer text messaging to email because of its low cost, and easy use. Wireless providers also typically charge higher fees for mobile web service (the ability to surf the Internet via cell phone) than for text messaging. Furthermore, individuals may want to avoid carrying around additional and/or bulkier hand-held wireless email devices, such as a Blackberry or Treo. Text messages also may be sent to domestic and international phones at the same rate, making texting a cheaper alternative to international phone calls. In fact, text messaging is even popular in Asia, where cellular phone technology and service is more advanced than in the United States. Because text messages are must be short, a number of fun abbreviations have evolved, many of which were inspired by common email slang, such as “LOL” for “laughing out loud” or “L8R” for “later.” Websites with text abbreviation dictionaries or options for downloading pre-recorded messages have proliferated over the past few years.

All ant societies are composed entirely of females; males have only one purpose to fertilize the queen and then die. The queen which is a thousand times the body weight of the smallest worker is the only ant that is fertile. Every worker is her daughter. There can be hundreds of thousands of ants in a nest.

The Ants of Indonesia can have trunk trails that lead from the nest to be as long as 300 feet. If one scales the trunk to the size of a minor worker it would be 30 miles long. The traffic often runs heavy and the number of ants can reach a thousand. There are traffic rules as well. Ants returning to the nest travel near the middle and outbound ants keep to the sides.

This trail is the passage through which all food travels to the nest. The path is constantly maintained and cleared of any debris such as leaves and twigs that may make it less passable. About half the diet is mostly seeds from vegetables.

Thee are more than 15,000 ant species and they employ a variety of strategies to search and appropriate food. The ants of Indonesia hunt in groups but the workers of other species hunt alone. The Asian Jumping Ant can make startling leaps and travel as far as a hundred feet from its nest.

These ants of Indonesia when working together are able to capture prey thousands of times their own weight. Victims include spiders, cockroaches, crickets, and scorpions. To bring down an earthworm of four inches it may require as much as a hundred workers

Will power is a character builder that will allow one to accomplish goals such as improved health, wealth and success more than any other character trait.

If you have will power you have an inner strength to accomplish any task regardless of resistance from within or without and regardless of discomfort or difficulties.

Improving will power is many times exchanging a bad habit for a good habit. For example let’s assume that you decide that you no longer will eat jelly filled doughnuts because of the health risks. By finding a substitute for that habit of eating that jelly filled doughnut that you will enjoy you gradually replace that bad habit with a good habit. Once the decision is made than seek an alternative. Not an alternative that is displeasing but one you can accept. Perhaps it is a particular piece of fruit that you can exchange for that doughnut.

Small changes lead to big changes in time. Think of habits as part of the strands of a rope. Each strand is not strong in itself but when they are intertwined they make a rope with strength unequaled to each individual strand. So make those small strand like changes and you will be on the path of improving your will power.

If environment plays an effect on your will power then change the environment. For example perhaps keeping doughnuts in the home is too tempting for your will power. Change that environment and chuck them out and then refuse to buy them and substitute them with a better healthful snack.

Kendo is Japanese for “the way of the sword.” It is a martial art that concentrates on developing the use of the Japanese samurai sword under a controlled and safe manner. Kendo is often referred to as Japanese fencing. In Kendo, the deadly Japanese Samurai sword has been replaced by a relatively harmless “shinai” made of bamboo staves bound together with leather strips, and special rules of attack have been imposed to insure that the particpants will be safe. Although the deadly aspect of traditional Japanese sword training has been reduced, the commitment to mental and physical discipline and dedication has not changed. Kendo teaches reverence to teachers, to traditions, to community, and to self.

Scientists exploring the atom’s have solved many age-old mysteries of matter and energy. This new knowledge has brought us lasers, computers, transistors, space travel, and nuclear energy for weapons and power.

Because everything in the cosmos has been composed of atoms since the primordial big bang scientist hope to learn the origin of the universe.

The inner world of the atom is where matter and energy are interchangeable, where gravity is overwhelmed by stronger forces that bind together matter.

The atom is infitesmal. Your very breath holds a trillion trillion atoms. Minute as atoms are, they consist of still tinier subatomic particles. Protons, carry a positive electric charge, and electrically neutral particles called neutrons cluster with the atoms’s central region which is called the nucleus. They are one hundred-thousandth the diameter of an atom. Whirling around the nucleus are the electrons which carry a negative charge.

E=Mc2
Where E is energy, M is mass and C is the varying speed of light. The equation states that mass and energy are merely different versions of the same thing. Eienstein’s relativity theory is routinely put to work in accelerators, where energy is transformed into sub atomic particles in a hint of how the universe came be.