Friday, January 30

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 3! Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish Thursday's work, and the blog commenting assignment for this week is available now — and if you missed them, here's a link to Thursday's announcements.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. I'm still making my way through the stack of assignments: if you turned in your Storybook Topics on Sunday, you should have comments back from me, and my goal for today is to return comments for everything that was turned in before Friday. You can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment! If something comes in today, it will go to the top of the stack for Monday.

Week 3 Blog Comments. The blog commenting assignment is now available, with new random groups! There is also an extra credit responding option if you want to read and comment on some Famous Last Wordss posts. I hope you will enjoy that, and if you have not been doing the Famous Last Words option, this might inspire you to give it a try!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

So Many Books. I know I'm not the only person who has this feeling: "So many books, so little time."

Words to Watch: Today's words to watch out for are ROLE and ROLL. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: Adventures through the East. Travel to Thailand, Nepal and India, with Hanuman himself as your travel guide, along with some help from Jambavan and Sugriva.

FREE eBook: The Cat and the Mouse: A Book of Persian Fairy Tales by Hartwell James. This blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book; one of the stories, as you can guess from the image below, is "The Cat and the Mouse."

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A watched pot never boils (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is one of those proverbs that is not literally true... but it makes sense metaphorically.

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Rama's Army. As you can see, it is an army of monkeys and bears!

Friday Event on Campus: There will be a "Diversity in Music" performance with free food starting at 6:30PM in the Zarrow Hall Community Room: Arashi Taiko drummers, African dancers, Latin Dance Club dancers, and more (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

January 30: Assassination of Gandhi. On January 30 in 1948, Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated. The image below shows the memorial in New Delhi where Gandhi's body was cremated. If you look closely at the photograph, you will see some words written in Devanagari script, gold letters on the black stone, just behind the burning stick of incense: the words are "Hey Ram" (Oh Rama!), which were reportedly the words Gandhi uttered as he was shot. Gandhi's invocation of the god Rama will definitely mean something to the students in the Indian Epics class. Although it is a matter of some controversy as to whether those were Gandhi's last words, here is something he wrote in December 1947, just weeks before his assassination: "In the end it will be as Rama commands me. Thus I dance as He pulls the strings. I am in His hands and so I am experiencing ineffable peace."

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.