Saturday, April 19

Today is Saturday of Week 13. I hope you are having a nice weekend! If you did not finish up the end-of-week assignments on Friday, you need to do that today or tomorrow, Sunday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Stack. On Friday, I almost got through the stack, and I'll finish up on Saturday morning responding to any Storybooks that came in before Friday. Meanwhile, if you turned in something on Friday itself, your assignment is at the top of the stack for Monday, and I will update the stack once or twice again over the weekend. You can check the contents of the stack here.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Resource: Oxford Comma. Okay, I do use the Oxford comma in cases of real ambiguity, but I am not what you would call a religious Oxford comma user . . . although there are such users out there!

Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is dum-dum (as in dum-dum bullet), a word which comes from the village of Dum Dum near Calcutta in India. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: Vishnu's Favorite Avatars. In Colton's Storybook for this semester, you can learn about the avatars Narasimha, Krishna, and Rama from Vishnu himself.

FREE Kindle eBook: The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan by William B. Laughead. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. This is the source I used for the Paul Bunyan legends coming up in Myth-Folklore next week!

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is All the buds upon a bush do not blossom (a proverb from India). Details at the Proverb Lab. As long as you get one flower, after all, that's fine!

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Arjuna at Kuruksetra, with the gods looking on.

April 19: Mae West. On this day in in 1927, the American actress Mae West was sentenced to ten days in jail on obscenity charges - "corrupting the morals of youth" - for her play Sex, which was a big hit on Broadway for a year until New York City officials raided the theater. She served eight days and got two days off for good behavior. You can read more about Mae West's successful and scandalous career in this Wikipedia article. The image below shows Mae West on her "Ev'rybody Shimmies Now" sheet music publication in 1918.



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