Friday, March 6

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 8! Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish Thursday's blog check-up. 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. My goal for today is to return comments for everything that was turned in before Friday, but the stack is still huge, so I might have to finish up on Saturday morning this week (I'm still catching up from being out of town). 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 8 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 Review blog posts.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

No Limits. As you make your way through the second half of the semester, you can keep this motivational thought in mind: "There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits." :-)

Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is SWAMI, which comes to English from Sanskrit via Hindi. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: Norse Giant Perspectives. The giants are often the foes of the Norse gods such as Odin and Thor; in this Storybook you get to hear the stories told from the giants' point of view, with the giants as heroes of course.

FREE eBook: The Talking Thrush by W. Crooke and W. H. D. Rouse. This blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. There are some wonderful folktales from India here, and it is one of the books I am hoping to include in the Indian UnTextbook this summer.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is If I laugh not, how can I live? (a proverb from India). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is a saying of the Kashmiri people.

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Lava and Kusa, the twin sons of Rama.

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

March 6: Holi. The festival of Holi takes place on March 6 this year, and it is widely celebrated not just in India and Nepal but also by Hindus around the world. It is a spring festival, sometimes called the "festival of colors." You can read more about Holi in this Wikipedia article, which is also the source for the image below that shows Lord Krishna himself celebrating Holi together with his consort Radha:

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.