Monday: Time to work ahead. You do not have any assignments due on Monday, which makes it the PERFECT chance to work ahead on the Week 2 assignments. Believe me: if you put off the assignments in this class until the day that they are due, you are going to be under a lot of stress. If you can work at your own pace just a day or two ahead of the deadlines, you will find the class much easier to manage!
Storybook stack. As always on Monday, I will have a huge bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack that were turned in over the weekend or on Monday morning - the Week 1 Storybook assignments from Myth-Folklore and World Lit., plus early Week 2 and Week 3 assignments from all three classes. The first thing I will do on Monday morning when I get to work is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. So, after 8 a.m. or so on Monday, you will be able to check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will then start reading the assignments in the order they were turned in. For those of you who are working ahead: please do not go on to the Week 3 Storybook assignment until you get Week 2 comments back from me. Thanks for your patience with that!
Myth-Folklore: Gilgamesh OR Egypt. Those of you who are in the Myth-Folklore class will have a choice of readings each week. This week, the choice is between Gilgamesh OR Egypt. You will do only one set of readings, and take the background quiz and reading quiz based on your choice of Gilgamesh OR Egypt. This means that will end up with some blank items in the Gradebook; please don't worry about that. Your goal is to get 30 points per week, and if you do the quizzes for just one of the reading selections, you will end up with the points you need.
August 31: Kinetoscope Patent. On this day in 1897, the American inventor Thomas Edison was issued a patent for the Kinetoscope, an early motion picture device. The image below shows an advertisement from the early 1900s promoting the use of a projecting version of the Kinetoscope for home viewing. We've come a long way in the past one hundred years, with technology like the DVD making movies as familiar in the home as books on a bookshelf! You can read more about the history of the Kinetoscope in this Wikipedia article. (Click here for a an larger view of the image.)
