Class Procedures and Reminders:
Week 4 Internet: Coverpages. For your Internet assignment in Week 4, you will be creating a new website for your Storybook, and the homepage for that new site will be your Storybook coverpage. I hope you will have fun creating the website for your Storybook! To see how the Storybooks for this semester are taking shape, here they are: Myth-Folklore Storybooks - Indian Epics Storybooks. There are already a few coverpages in each class so far!
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 by noon on Saturday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned in your assignment later on Saturday or on Sunday or Monday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it. If you want to check and make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. Remember: you need to wait on my comments back to you before going on to the next Storybook assignment.
Announcements by email. For those of you who want to get these daily announcements by email, it's easy to sign up at the announcements blog using the sign-up box in the right-hand sidebar. The only tricky part is that there is a confirmation email (otherwise, spammers could really abuse the system for their own evil purposes, subscribing people to unwanted lists), and OU's email is fond of sending that confirmation into the junk mail folder. So if you wanted to sign up and did not succeed, try signing up again and check your junk mail folder for that confirmation email.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Web Resource: I was absolutely delighted by this Map of the Internet which I saw popping up everywhere this weekend in the social media spaces I vist. Maybe some of you have also seen it already: it's amazing!
Writing Resource: Commas and Vocatives. Vocatives are something you use all the time you speak, and when you are writing, vocatives need commas! Yes, this is the writing error behind the marvelous "Let's eat Grandma!" meme. Visit this webpage for all the details: Commas and Vocatives.
Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is calico, which is a word that comes to use from India! For details, see this blog post. Here for your viewing enjoyment is a calico cat:
Featured Storybook: Delilah's Radio Hour. Who better to help the lovelorn couple Rama and Sita than the famous radio show host, Delilah?
FREE Kindle eBook: The Gulistan by Sa'di. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. In the same way that Aesop used short little stories to convey messages of wisdom to his audience, so too did the Persian poet Sa'di, and The Gulistan ("The Rose Garden") is one of his most important works.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is No one will bell the cat (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This proverb alludes to the Aesop's fable of the mice who want to put a bell on the cat... but no mouse is willing to do the deed!
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image shows Ravana defeated by Hundred-Handed Arjuna, also known as Kartavirya. This crucial event in Ravana's life was not included in Narayan's Ramayana, but Buck does include it, along with many other incidents from Ravana's early days.
Tuesday Event on Campus: CAC Film Series and NBC Universal present a free advanced screening of the film Endless Love before it hits theaters on Valentine's Day; the film is showing at 7:30PM in Meacham, with doors opening at 7 (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
February 4: Sri Lanka National Day. Today, February 4, is the holiday that celebrates the day - February 4, 1948 - when the island nation of Sri Lanka gained independence from British rule. (India had gained its independence about six months earlier, in August of 1947.) For those of you who are in the Indian Epics class, Sri Lanka is a place of special interest because it is the legendary home of Ravana the demon king. You can read more about Sri Lanka in this Wikipedia article, and the image below shows a mountain, Sri Pada, commonly called "Adam's Peak" in English, which supposedly holds the footprint of the Buddha (according to Buddhist tradition), the footprint of Shiva (in Hindu tradition) or the footprint of Adam (in Islamic tradition):
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
