Tuesday, October 29

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 11, and I've re-arranged the Quiz area in Desire2Learn so the new week is on top. Also, the Internet assignment for this week is now available. This week's topic in the Myth-Folklore class is more European fairy tales, and in Indian Epics you will be starting Buck's version of the Mahabharata. I hope you will enjoy the readings! If you have not turned in your Week 10 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Final Grades. If you did not read the information about final grades in the Monday announcements, please take a minute to do that now.

Storybook stack. 
As often on Tuesday, there is still a huge bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack. If you turned in a Storybook assignment before noon on Sunday, you should have comments back from me and points recorded in the Gradebook. If you turned something in later on Sunday or on Monday, it is probably still in the stack. You can check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and replying to the assignments in the order they were turned in.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Tech Tip: Crocodocs. For those of you who use PDF documents either for school or work, you might find the Crocodocs service to be very useful as a way to access PDFs via your browser. It works great even with VERY long documents!


Featured Storybook: Tales of Gothic Creatures. Continuing the Halloween countdown, here is a Storybook from last year... one with a truly surprising - and scary - ending!


FREE Kindle eBook: Russian Fairy Tales by W.R.S. Ralston. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book, including tales of Baba Yaga.


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Don’t stand by the water and long for fish; go home and weave a net (a Chinese proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is a proverb very much in the DIY spirit, something I admire!


Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who wrote down the Mahabharata as Vyasa dictated it to him. Note that Ganesha is not an elephant, but he does have an elephant's head!


Tuesday Event on Campus: The Neustadt Festival honoring the Palestinian-American writer Naomi Shihab Nye opens with a public reception including a Poetry Out Loud competition for Norman high school students, beginning at 6:30 PM in the Sandy Bell Gallery of the Art Museum (details at the OU Daily). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

October 29: Bill Mauldin. Today marks the birthday in the year 1921 of the American cartoonist William Henry "Bill" Mauldin who is best known for his World War II cartoons featuring "Willie and Joe" (Mauldin died in 2003). General George Patton once tried to get Mauldin thrown in jail for his satirical cartoons. Mauldin himself had his own thoughts about Patton: "I always admired Patton. Oh, sure, the stupid bastard was crazy. He was insane. He thought he was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude, but I certainly respected his theories and the techniques he used to get his men out of their foxholes." For more on Mauldin, see this Wikipedia article; below is a stamp issued by the U.S. Post Office honoring Mauldin:


Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.