Tuesday, November 5

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 12, 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 English fairy tales or English ballads, and in Indian Epics it is time for the gambling match that will send the Pandavas into exile. I hope you will enjoy the readings! If you have not turned in your Week 11 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Stack
. As usual on Tuesday, I am making my way through the big stack of Storybooks turned in over the weekend. If you turned something in before noon on Saturday, you should have comments back from me already. If you turned something in later on Saturday or on Sunday or on Monday, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. For those of you who want to have four stories in your Storybook, Week 11 is the last week to add the third story if you have not done that already.

Overview of Week 12 and Week 13 Internet assignments. The Week 12 Internet assignment is available now! Then, for the Week 13 Internet assignment (available a week from today, on November 12), you will be nominating your personal favorite Storybooks for the semester. After you turn in your nominations, I'll set up a ballot so everybody can vote for the best Storybooks - it's not for a grade or anything; it's just for fun, and it gives the folks who have done really excellent work on their Storybooks a chance to get some well earned recognition. 

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Tech Tip: Google Sites YouTube. One of the best things about YouTube videos is that you can embed them just about anywhere - including in the pages of a Google Site website!


Featured Storybook: Alexander the Great, Reborn!. In this fabulous Storybook from last year, you get to see Alexander the Great... in outer space!


FREE Kindle eBook: A Collection of Ballads by Andrew Lang. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. This book includes some of the same ballads from this week's unit in Myth-Folklore, along with many more!


Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is The proof of the pudding is in the eating (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. Just speaking for myself, I love English-style puddings and am always glad to prove them by eating, ha ha. Yummm!


Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is The Game of Dice. This detail shows the dice game as imagined by a 19th-century Indian artist.


Tuesday Event on Campus: At noon in the Sandy Bell Gallery there will be a concert by Dolores Leffingwell's voice studio (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

November 5: Guy Fawkes Night. In England, the night of November 5 is celebrated as Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes Night, commemorating the occasion when the so-called Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was prevented. So, even though the holiday is named after Guy Fawkes, the holiday is not in his honor: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, was involved in a plot to blow up the House of Parliament in England as a protest against the Protestant government's persecution of Catholics. The plot was discovered, and Guy Fawkes, along with the other conspirators, was condemned to death. In the celebrations of Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes is often burned in effigy; those of you who have read T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men may remember the line, "A penny for the old Guy" - and the origin of our English word "guy" actually goes back to this use of the word! The film V for Vendetta made the Guy Fawkes mask familiar to many of you, I am sure!



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