branching and supporting a tagged kernel version

Hello,

I was trying to see if I can use git for a particular way of
supporting a kernel and was hoping for some feedback if this approach
would work.

Basically I wanted to branch off of 2.6.14 and support personal
patches.  However over time I would like to be able to merge in
hand-pick commits from upstream.

So my questions (for now) are:

1) what is the easiest way to branch off on a tagged version (in this
case 2.6.14)?  I didn't quite understand what <starting point>
referred to in the git-branch docs.

2) is there a way to get a list of commits from upstream that are not
in my branch and then selectively apply them?  Yes, I understand the
potential merge mess...

Thanks,
Don