Class Procedures and Reminders
Moving on to Week 2. (repeat announcement) The Orientation Week activities introduced you you to blogging and the different kinds of writing you will be doing for this class. Now, starting in Week 2, the assignments will be the same every week: Myth-Folklore Weekly Assignments - Indian Epics Weekly Assignments. If you have any questions about that as you get started, let me know!
Assignments in the Stack. If you turned in a proofreading assignment (or an early Storybook assignment) on Friday or over the weekend, you should see it listed in the Stack. As I read and reply to those assignments, I'll update the stack. I do that in the order received, so those of you who turned in work on Friday are at the top of the stack; if you turned something in on Sunday, you may have to wait until near the end of the week to get my comments back.
Introductions. I hope you all enjoyed getting to comment on people's Introductions this weekend, and you'll be getting visitors to your Introduction all semester long as new people connect with you through the random blog groups each week. Meanwhile, I'll be responding to some Introductions every day so that by the end of the week I should have read everybody's Introduction post. My participation at the blogs is very random, but I definitely want to read all the Introductions!
My Schedule. Today, Monday, I'll be out of the office for most or even all of the afternoon, so I won't be as quick to respond to emails. So, please write me with any questions as you have, and I'll get back to you Monday evening if it's something urgent; otherwise, I'll get back to you first thing on Tuesday.
The following items are for fun and exploration:
OU Wallpapers. The OU Public Affairs department has some really nice OU computer desktop wallpapers for download.
Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is the Sanskrit word yoga. For details, see this blog post.
Featured Storybook: Rate My Rishi. If you've ever used RateMyProfessors.com, you'll feel right at home at Rate My Rishi, where the rishis' students, fans, and enemies sing their praises and dish the mythological dirt, too.
FREE Kindle eBook: Aesop's Fables by V. S. Vernon Jones. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. This edition of Aesop's fables is notable for the illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is The moon does not withhold the light even from the cottage of a chandala (a Sanskrit proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. In other words, the moon shines on everyone, even the chandala, which is a Hindu caste-term that refers to someone who deals with corpses.
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is The Birth of Rama; you can see baby Rama lying here beside his mother, Queen Kausalya.
August 25: Walt Kelly. The American cartoonist, Walt Kelly, most famous for his Pogo cartoons, was born on August 25 in 1913, which means he would have been 101 years old today (he died in 1973). You can read about Walt Kelly's life and career in this Wikipedia article. You might be interested to know, for example, that he worked at Disney and contributed to the classic animated films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, and Dumbo. The image below is from his Animal Mother Goose book in which Kelly illustrated the traditional Mother Goose nursery rhymes with animal characters (larger version of the image), as here, where "Little Johnny Green" is an alligator, and "Little Johnny Stout" is an elephant!
Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed, and you can check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.
