My Thursday schedule. I try to schedule my out-of-office commitments on Wednesday or Thursday. This week, I am going to be out of the office for part of the day on Thursday. That means I may be a bit more slow to respond to your emails today than on the other days of the week - but if you send me an email during the day today, I'll definitely get back to you by the end of the day.
Storybook Stack. There are still some items in the Storybook stack. If you turned your Week 9 Storybook in on Sunday, you should have comments back from me; if you turned something in on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, it is probably still in the stack. You can check to make sure you assignment is in the stack here. If you want comments back from me by the weekend, please get your Storybook assignment turned in by Friday at 8AM so that I can get comments back to you on Friday afternoon.
Finishing up the class: Storybooks. (repeat announcement) As I've mentioned before, there is no absolute requirement about the number of stories in a finished Storybook, and based on your strategy for getting your points in the class, you can finish your Storybook when it has two stories or three stories or four stories - it is up to you! The Week 14 and Week 15 Storybook assignments are final revisions, so if you are stopping with just three stories, for example, you can skip Week 12 and Week 13 (the fourth story assignments) and go straight to the final revision assignments for your Storybook. So, you would turn in Week 10 (third story), Week 11 (third story revisions), and then the Week 14 and Week 15 final revision assignments.
Week 10 Internet assignment: Extra credit option. (repeat announcement) The Week 10 Internet assignment is available now and, in addition to the usual assignment of reading three Storybooks and commenting on them, there is an additional "extra credit" option where you can read three more Storybooks and comment on them for an additional 6 points. I hope you will have fun with that - the extra credit option is something you can use to visit Storybooks from the other class and/or visit some Storybooks for Halloween! :-)
Thursday Events on Campus. John Abney will be performing in the Union Food Court at noon as part of the "Mid-Day Music" series (time/location/details). Find out more about this event and other events happening on Thursday at the Campus Calendar online.
October 27: Birthday of Erasmus. Today marks the birthday in the year 1466 of the Desiderius Erasmus, one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance (some sources give October 28 instead as his date of birth). You can read about Erasmus's remarkable life and career in this Wikipedia article. Of all the great thinkers and scholars in the history of the world, Erasmus is a personal hero of mine. One of his books in particular has been very important in my own life - a huge collection of thousands and thousands of Latin proverbs, with little essays about each one, called the Adagia. Erasmus is also one of the most important figures in the history of critical editions of the Bible in Greek and in Latin. Below is a famous portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger; along the edge of the book facing the viewer the letters read "The Labors of Heracles" in Greek (ΗΡΑΚΛΕΙΟΙ ΠΟΝΟΙ = HERAKLEIOI PONOI), alluding to the amazing feats which Erasmus accomplished in his life as a scholar.
