Friday, September 18 - Sunday, September 20

HAPPY WEEKEND! You have reached the end of Week 4! The Week 4 Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now, and the remaining Week 4 assignments are due on Friday or on Saturday or Sunday - please make sure you get started on those assignments soon!

IMPORTANT NOTE: Sunday IT Maintenance. On the third Sunday of every month, IT does maintenance on its servers. There will be a maintenance window this Sunday, September 20. This often causes service outages, which may affect email, web publishing, and other OU IT services as well as any webpages on the ou.edu system. The maintenance window is in the morning, and the maintenance should be completed before noon on Sunday. For specific information and updates, see the IT Alerts page at alerts.ou.edu.

Font size in Composer. Many of you will be working on your Storybook coverpage this weekend. As you do that, please be careful with font size and read these Instructions for Larger Fonts in Composer. The best way to change the font to something larger is by designating it as a Heading. That way, you can be sure that you will get good results on every browser. Other methods of changing the font size can vary enormously from browser to browser and may not lead to the results you want. So, make sure if you want to make something a larger font size, you choose Heading 1 or Heading 2 or Heading 3 - depending on how large you want it to be.

Storybook comments. (repeat announcement) Please make sure you look for my comments in the emails I send back to you; my comments are marked with ==> which should make them easy to see as you scan down the text of the email. So, in addition to the top part of the email, the main comments are inserted into your assignment below. You should save these emails, too, since you will be working on the Storybook all semester and you might need to look back at a past email to get some information to help you with a later assignment.

Storybook Introduction ideas. I'm still working my way through the Storybook stack, and I hope to get comments back to you before the weekend for any assignment turned in before noon on Friday. For some ideas and inspiration about writing your Storybook Introduction (the Week 4 assignment), you can take a look at these Introductions that people have already published online: Celtic Chronicles: Inside Ireland,--- Where the Kosalas Roam: An Okie's Tour of Ramayana's and Mahabharata's India --- English Fairy Tales: What Jack Has To Say About It! --- Birth Stories: The Party of the Century and Where Are They Now? Classic Fairy Tale Villains. Congratulations to all of you who are working ahead on your Storybook like this - it's really exciting to see them starting to appear online!

September 18: Witkacy. Today, September 18, marks the date on which the Polish artist and writer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz ("Witkacy"), committed suicide, following the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939. For those of you who are anthropology majors, you might recognize the name of one of Witkacy's closest friends and colleagues, Bronisław Malinowski. Witkacy's life was marked by brilliant achievements in both his painting and in his writing, as well as by tragedy and absurdity, all of which you can read about in this Wikipedia article. The image below is a self-portrait which Witkacy painted on August 11, about one month before his death.