Class Procedures and Reminders:
My schedule today. I have to be out of the office for part of the afternoon today, so I will be slower to respond to emails than usual. If I don't get back to you by the end of the day on Thursday, I'll be sure to get back to you on Friday!
Storybook Stack. If you turned in a Week 7 assignment on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now; if you turned something in after Sunday, it is probably still in the stack. If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.
Fall enrollment. (repeat announcement) Enrollment will be starting soon for Fall classes, and the online classes fill up really quickly. If any of you would like to enroll in MLLL-3043 Myth-Folklore or MLLL-4993 Indian Epics for Fall, please let me know by noon today so that I can save you a space in the class for Fall.
Internet Humor: I thought this video was seriously funny: What if Google was a guy? Poor Google!
Language Resource: English Words from Mythology. As I create the new blog posts for the English words that come from world mythology, I'm adding them to this Pinterest Board.
Foreign Words in English: Today's foreign word in English is guru, a Sanskrit word that we now use commonly in English. For details, see this blog post. The image below shows Parashurama ("Rama-with-an-Axe") who was the guru to the several heroes of the Mahabharata, including Bhishma, Drona, and Karna:
Featured Storybook: Dreaming of India: What is Real Anymore?. A young American student is on a journey to India, and already on the plane his surreal adventures begin: he sees a giant furry monkey with a golden name tag, Sugriva, walking down the aisle, serving beverages . . .
FREE Kindle eBook: Tales of the Punjab by Flora Annie Steel. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. You will find fairy tales and folktales of all kinds in here, along with the hero stories of Raja Rasalu.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Without curiosity, there is no wisdom (a Polish proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. The Polish rhymes! Bez ciekawości nie ma mądrości.
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is The Battle of Lanka as shown in a stone carving from Angkor in Cambodia.
Thursday Event on Campus: This is not an on-campus event exactly, but if you have dinner at Chili's in Norman on Thursday evening, they will donate 20% of the ticket to the International Advisory Committee at OU (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online. I'm not sure if you have to print the flyer out or not; here is the full-size version of the flyer.
March 6: Andrzej Wajda. Today marks the birthday of one of the world's great film directors: Andrzej Wajda, who was born in 1926 and who is still an active filmmaker. In fact, one of his recent films, Katyń, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2007. Katyń is the name of a forest near Smolensk in western Russia where over 20,000 Polish military officers and other Polish prisoners of war were executed. At first, the Nazis blamed the crime on Stalin, and then Stalin blamed the crime on the Nazis, and only recently has it become clear that the executions were in fact carried out by the Soviet NKVD on Stalin's orders. This was a very personal film for Wajda to make, as his father was one of the slain Polish officers. I highly recommend the film; you can read a review I wrote about it here to learn more.
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.
