Class Procedures and Reminders
Email Outages. OU is again being blacklisted by various email services, so those of you who have your OU email forwarded to another address need to be aware of that problem, and you might consider un-forwarding your email this semester and logging on at exchange.ou.edu to check your mail since this problem seems to keep recurring. While OU is blacklisted, you run the risk of not receiving email from people who are writing to you from an OU address. For more information, you can check IT's alerts.ou.edu outage reports.
Reading Diary. I wanted to make sure to remind people again about not getting bogged down in summarizing plots in your Reading Diary posts. For more information about the Reading Diary posts in both Myth-Folklore and in Indian Epics, check the Monday announcements.
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 on Friday or Saturday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned in your assignment 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. I've also sent back comments on the practice websites that were turned in on Friday and Saturday; I'll be commenting on those in the order received also!
The following items are for fun and exploration:
Writing Humor: Who/Whom. The Oatmeal tackles many different language topics, including who kicks whom in the butt!
Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is CALICO, which comes from the city called "Calicut" (modern Kozhikode) on the Malabar coast of India. For details, see this blog post.
Featured Storybook: Ganesha's Enchanted Journals. You might not be surprised that the elephant-headed god Ganesha is the owner of a candy shop (he does love sweets!), and he also sells journals in his shop — enchanted journals that allow him to read the words written in those journals by their owners: Kooni, Ravana, Duryodhana, and Karna.
FREE Kindle eBook: Tales from the Hindu Dramatists by Rama Nath Dutt. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. There are plays here about Hanuman and about Rama, and there is also the famous Shakuntala, one of the most famous romances in the Indian tradition.
Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is No one will bell the cat (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is one of many English proverbs that allude to an Aesop's fable. Look closely and you will see the cat around the corner! Here is the fable: Belling the Cat.
Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Ravana and Hundred-Handed Arjuna, who is also known as Kartavirya. As you can see, Ravana is defeated in this confrontation!
Tuesday Event on Campus: The Tuesday Noon Concert series begins today in the Sandy Bell Gallery at noon (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
September 9: Pieter Bruegel. Today, September 9, marks the anniversary of the death of the great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who died in 1569. Bruegel is famous for his painting of the Tower of Babel — which may be of interest to those of you in the Myth-Folklore class who did the Noah unit earlier this semester. You can read more about Bruegel's life in this Wikipedia article, and you can also read an article there about his painting of the Tower of Babel (1563); click here for a larger view.
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.
