Class Procedures and Reminders:
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, your assignment is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.
New Responding groups. The blog responding groups have been shuffled around again this week so TOMORROW, Friday, that assignment will be available with new people in the groups. More information about that in tomorrow's announcements!
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Writing Resource: Conjunctive Adverbs. In addition to conjunctions like "and," "but," and "or," there are many adverbs and adverbial phrases that you can use to connect and control the flow of meaning from sentence to sentence in your writing, thus helping your readers to grasp your meaning.
Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is chakra, a Sanskrit term that people might know from yoga. For details, see this blog post.
Image Resources: As you no doubt know by now, I am fascinated by the ways that the same story can be interpreted in different image styles, and here's a great case study — Star Wars posters from around the world. Take a look, for example, at this Polish poster for Return of the Jedi:
Featured Storybook: Legendary Creatures Speak Up: A Human Encounters Convention. Here is one of the new Storybooks in Myth-Folklore this semester: it's a convention of supernatural creatures sharing their encounters with humans, and one of the creatures, as you can guess from the coverpage, is... Bigfoot.
FREE Kindle eBook: More Jataka Tales by Ellen Babbitt. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. These jataka tales are some of my very favorite folktales from India!
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Don’t put all your eggs in one basket (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. I'm guessing this is one of the proverbs that is familiar to everybody. A lot of proverbs have died out, but some are still going strong, like this one!
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is another depiction of The Battle of Lanka. You can see Rama conferring with his bear and monkey allies on the left, and the battle then takes place at the center of painting.
Thursday Event on Campus: The Native Crossroads Film Festival begins this evening, with a screening of The Lesser Blessed at 7:30PM and a screening of the short film Mohawk Midnight Runners at 9:00PM in the Kerr Auditorium of the Natural History Museum, with additional films on Friday and Saturday (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
February 27: Fat Thursday. You've probably all heard about the pre-Lenten festival of Mardi Gras ("Fat Tuesday"). In many countries, there is a similar festival celebrated on the last Thursday before Lent, and it is called "Fat Thursday" - Tłusty czwartek in Poland, Fetter Donnerstag in Germany. As I learned in Poland, this is a day for the eating of the marvelous Polish pączki, delicious jelly-filled donuts. Yummm! You can read more about the holiday in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for this delectable image of Polish pączki:
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
