Friday, February 13

HAPPY FRIDAY... even if it is (eeek) Friday the 13th! You have reached the end of Week 5! 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 gotten comments back from me already, and my goal for today is to return comments for everything that was turned in between Monday and Friday... but the stack is still huge, so I might have to finish up on Saturday morning this week (that usually happens once or twice during the semester when the stack gets a little out of control). 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 5 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 extra Storytelling posts.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Humor: Emojis as Hieroglyphics. Here's a fun cartoon: What if our use of emojis gradually becomes so extensive that we actually circle back to writing in hieroglyphics?

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

Featured Storybook: The Fairy Tale World. Cinderella, Snow White, and other fairy tale heroines are kidnapped by modern-day TV show producers who compel them to participate in a reality TV show — but the heroines just want to go home!

FREE eBook: Deccan Nursery Tales by C. A. Kincaid. This blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. It includes stories about water-goddesses, snake-kings, and all sorts of supernatural characters.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Good books are true friends (a saying of Francis Bacon). Details at the Proverb Lab. The image is from a painting by the 15th-century artist Jan van Eyck.

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Jatayu, speaking his last words to Rama and Lakshmana.

Friday Event on Campus: There will be showings at 6PM, 9PM and midnight of the movie Birdman (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

February 13: Lupercalia. Today is the Ides of February in the Roman calendar, which means it is the first day of the festival of the Lupercalia. Lupercus was the god of shepherds and his festival was intended to insure fertility in the coming spring. At the beginning of the festival, there was an animal sacrifice, and thongs were then made out of the hides of the animals. The Luperci priests would then run through the streets, dressed in goatskins, and lash the women of the city with the thongs, a ritual which was meant both to promote fertility among the women, as well as an easy childbirth. William Shakespeare famously included the Lupercalia in his play Julius Caesar; you can see that reference here, and you can read more about Lupercalia in this Wikipedia article.

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.