Friday, March 7

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 8... and the semester is more than half over! The Read and Respond assignment is available now, and Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish the assignments that were due on Thursday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in this week. My goal is to read and reply to everything turned in as of Thursday before the weekend. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here. If you want comments back sooner rather than later, turn in your Storybook on Friday or Saturday; if you want until Sunday (or later), it might take me till the end of the week to return comments to you.

Alternate Storybook Schedule. There are all kinds of reasons why people might miss a week for the Storybook, and it is not a problem. You can even miss two or three weeks and still end up with a total of three stories in your Storybook, which is just fine! So if you don't have time to finish your second story for Week 8, don't worry - you can turn in the second story for Week 9 (and the third story in Week 11 and a fourth story in Week 13). For more information about how the alternate schedules work, see this page: Storybook Schedule FAQ.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Procrastination Humor: I thought you might enjoy this charming Field Guide to Procrastinators. I am a combination of Internet Researcher and Social Sharer. I wish I were the Cleaner or the List Maker instead!

Punctuation Humor: Stop Clubbing, Baby Seals. We all need some comma humor sometimes! :-)

Mythology Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is chaos, from Chaos, a primordial Greek god. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: Women in White: Legends of the Haunted Hitchhikers. Chris's Storybook for Myth-Folklore this semester introduces you to Dr. Dan, a parapsychologist in search of The Woman in White. Or rather, the Women in White, plural.

FREE Kindle eBook: South-African Folk-Tales by James A. Honey. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. Those of you who read the African stories this past week will not be surprised that the jackal appears as a character in several of these stories!

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A chain is only as strong as its weakest link (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is one of those proverbs that is really true, both literally and metaphorically.

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Lava and Kusha, the twin sons of Rama and Sita.

Friday Event on Campus: The Iranian Studies Program presents a two-day conference this Friday and Saturday, "After the Persianate: Cultural Heritage and National Transformation in Modern Iran and India" (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

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