Saturday, September 7

Today is Saturday of Week 3. I hope you are having a nice weekend! If you did not finish up the end-of-week assignments on Friday, you need to do that today or tomorrow, Sunday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Stack. I don't update the Storybook stack as often on the weekends, but you can check there to make sure I received your assignment; I'll update it at least once or twice over the weekend. If you want comments back on your assignment sooner rather than later, turn your work in today or on Sunday morning. If you wait until Sunday evening, you will be farther down in the stack and will have to wait longer for my comments back to you.

Suggestion Box. You might have noticed the link in the right-hand sidebar of these announcements to the anonymous Suggestion Box. This is a way for you to share feedback with me about the class - what's going well, what I could improve, etc. Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can offer!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Resource: Sur La Lune Fairy Tales. This is a wonderful resource for the people in Myth-Folklore, and those of you in Indian Epics might enjoy looking at Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs or the Jataka Tales by Ellen Babbitt which can be found on the eBooks list.

Featured Storybook: World Parent Creation Myths. This story has a cosmic framework that is able to combine the creation stories of different ancient cultures into a new kind of story all its own.

FREE Kindle eBook: Legends of Florence by Charles Godfrey Leland. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book, which includes legends about one of Italy's most famous, and most beautiful, cities.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Beware of Greeks bearing gifts (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This English saying is inspired by the Latin words of the poet Vergil: Timeo danaos et dona ferentes, "I fear the Greeks even when they are bringing gifts." Vergil will be one of the reading options for Myth-Folklore coming up in Week 5!

Weekend Events. Check out Kate's KGOU OneSix8 blog post for area events, including the arrival of WICKED, showing at Civic Center Music Hall through September 22.

September 7: The Tasmanian Tiger. Today, September 7, marks the sad day in 1936 when the last of the Tasmanian tigers died in the Hobart Zoo on the island of Tasmania. You can read more about Tasmanian tigers in this Wikipedia article. The Tasmanian tigers were the largest carnivorous marsupials of modern times. In the 19th century, private companies and the Tasmanian government paid a bounty for dead tigers and their pups. As a result, the Tasmanian tiger was virtually extinct in the wild by the 1920s - although there are still rumors and reports of sightings of Tasmanian tigers even today. The date September 7 has been designated as National Threatened Species Day in Australia, commemorating the death of the last Tasmanian tiger in captivity. The YouTube video below below shows rare footage, filmed in 1933, of the last Tasmanian tiger; the painting below is from a 19th-century catalog of Australian wildlife:

Remember, you can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.