Thursday, November 14

Today is Thursday of WEEK 13. If you have not turned in your Week 12 Storybook assignment yet, you have until noon today to turn that in for partial credit. Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook stack. If you turned in a Storybook assignment before 9AM on Monday, you should have comments back from me now and points recorded in the Gradebook. If you turned something in later on Monday, or on Tuesday or Wednesday, it is probably still in the stack. You can check the contents of the stack to make sure I have received your assignment.

Week 13 Internet assignment NOW AVAILABLE. (repeat announcement) The Week 13 Internet assignment is available now, and for that you will be nominating your favorite Storybook projects in various categories, and you will also leave some thank-yous for the people whose comments were most helpful to you this semester. Then, on Monday afternoon next week, after everybody has submitted their nominations, I will put up a ballot based on the most nominated Storybooks.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Resource: Lesser-Known Editing Symbols. Since I am typing the comments I send back to you, I don't use the symbols that are traditional in handwritten copyediting... but I would enjoy using some of the fun ones shown here! (full-size here):

Featured Storybook: Christmas with Andersen. Are you ready to start getting into the holiday spirit? Then try Sara's retelling of Andersen's "Snow Queen," one of the great fairy tales of all time.

FREE Kindle eBook: Tales from the Hindu Dramatists by R. N. Dutt. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. The book includes the most famous of the Sanskrit dramas, the story of Shakuntala.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is We never know the worth of water till the well is dry (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. There is a lot of ecological wisdom in the proverb tradition!

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Dhritarashtra and his son, Duryodhana. As you can see if you look closely, the characters are labeled with their names!

Thursday Event on Campus: There will be a workshop on "Overcoming Procrastination" at 5PM in Wagner Hall 245 (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online. And on that subject, here is a brilliant cartoon by Dan Piraro, a.k.a. Bizarro:

November 14: Karen Armstrong. Today is the birthday of the writer Karen Armstrong, born this day in 1944; she is one of my favorite authors on religious history. You can read more about her life and career in this Wikipedia article. She is extremely prolific and I have read almost all of her books; my personal favorite is The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Even though the book came out before the 9-11, I think you can learn more about 9-11 from that book than from any other single book. Happy birthday, Karen Armstrong!



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