Thursday, December 5

Today is Thursday of WEEK 15. Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday, and I hope you will all finish up the class today instead of waiting until Friday morning!

Class Procedures and Reminders:

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT WEEK 15. Week 15 is different from other weeks. Instead of lasting over the weekend, Week 15 ends tomorrow, FRIDAY, December 6, AT NOON. So, if you will be doing some Week 15 assignments to finish up the class, please be aware that all Week 15 assignments - including the Storybook assignment, Internet assignment, and the Blog Responding assignment - must be done by Friday at noon. I would really really really urge you to finish up on Thursday instead of putting things off until Friday morning. ALL the assignments are available now, including the Blog Responding assignment, so there is no reason to wait until Friday!

Storybook stack. If you turned in a Storybook assignment by Wednesday at 10PM, you should have comments back from me and points recorded in the Gradebook. If you turned something in later than that, it may still in the stack. As always, you can check the contents of the stack to make sure I have received your assignment!

Scholarship for Working Students. Sorry for the late notice about this; I just now learned about it at Google+ of all places. For those of you working 25+ hours per week at your job, you are eligible for a special scholarship. The application deadline is THIS FRIDAY at 5PM. Details here: Spring Scholarship Opportunity for Working Students.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Resource: If Everyone Still Wrote Like They Did in College. I thought this article from CollegeHumor.com was really hilarious. The wedding invitation was my favorite! :-)

Featured Storybook: Post Secret Sanskrit. Victoria's project this semester combines ingenious graphics with some very heartfelt stories as told by the Panchakanya, the five young women of the Indian epic tradition.

FREE Kindle eBook: Mahabharata by Romesh Dutt. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book, which provides a condensed version of the Mahabharata in English verse. Here are the opening lines: Wrathful sons of Dhritarashtra, born of Kuru's royal race! Righteous sons of noble Pandu, god-born men of godlike grace! For those of you who now know the story of the Mahabharata, you might enjoy reading it in this very different form.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Different strokes for different folks (an American proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is a modern proverb (probably dating to the 1950s), echoing the classical Latin cuique suum, "to each his own."

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Arjuna and Krishna. Krishna here reveals himself in his cosmic form as the Vishvarupa.

Thursday Event on Campus: There will be a New Horizons Chamber Concert at 8PM in the Pitman Recital Hall, free and open the public (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

December 5: Krampus. In our "Santa Claus" tradition, there is the vague sense that naughty children might get punished, but in other countries, that part of the Christmas tradition is much more specific: Santa Claus may have a sinister companion whose job is to punish bad children. In Austria and other Alpine regions, that dark companion of Saint Nicholas is called Krampus, and he spends the first two weeks of December going around at night, rattling chains and ringing a bell to warn the naughty children of his presence. On December 5, it is traditional for people to dress up as the Krampus! You can see pictures of people dressed as the Krampus in this Wikipedia article, and below is a Krampus holiday postcard:

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