Today is Thursday of WEEK 3 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 2 Storybook assignment yet, you have until noon today to turn that in for partial credit. For those of you in Myth-Folklore or World Lit, Thursday morning, until noon, is also the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday. (Indian Epics has no Wednesday assignments, so there is no Thursday morning grace period.)
My schedule today. Normally I do most of my work during regular business hours on Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday, while scheduling my out-of-office commitments on Wednesdays - but this week I've ended up having to schedule my out-of-office appointments on Thursday instead. So, that means I may be a bit more slow to respond to your emails today because I'll be out of the office for at least part of the day - but if you send me an email during the day on Thursday, I'll definitely get back to you by the end of the day.
Ning blogging tips. Many of you will be posting at the Ning tonight, Thursday. If you need reminders about images and links in blogs, just check in the Ning FAQs and Tips section on the main page of the Ning, left-hand column, and you should be able to find the information you need. You can also get extra credit for sprucing up your Ning Profile page by adding a YouTube video and/or an RSS feed. (In Week 5, people will start visiting your Profile page to add comments on your Storybook project - those comments will go into the Comment Wall, so it's a good excuse to start getting your Profile Page fixed up the way you want.)
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in this week. If you turned in a Week 2 Storybook assignment on or before Wednesday at 5PM, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned in an early Storybook assignment for Week 3 or 4 or 5, it may still be in the stack, waiting for me to get to it (you can check the contents of the stack to make sure I have received your assignment). If you want comments back on an assignment before the weekend, please make sure you get it turned in before noon on Friday; each week, I do my best to send back comments before the weekend to all Storybook assignments that are turned in before noon on Friday!
February 5: Inayat Khan. Today, February 5, marks the anniversary of the death of the great Indian Sufi, Inayat Khan, in the year 1927. Inayat Khan's teachings centered on Tawhid, or unity, as in the 10 pronouncements on unity which you can read about in this Wikipedia article; here are the first three principles of unity: There is One God, the Eternal, the Only Being; None exists save He. ... There is One Master, the Guiding Spirit of all souls, Who constantly leads all followers toward the Light. ... There is One Holy Book, the Sacred Manuscript of Nature, the only Scripture that can enlighten the reader. Inayat Khan was also trained as a music master, and in addition to sharing a knowledge of Sufism with the West, he also spread a knowledge of traditional Indian musical forms:
