Saturday, March 21

Today is Saturday of Week 9. I hope you are enjoying the last days of Spring Break! If you did not finish up the end-of-week assignments for Week 9 yet, you can do that this weekend.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. I've been updating the stack of the Break and you can can check the stack to make sure I received your Projct assignment. To get comments back sooner rather than later, turn in your assignment today — if you wait until Sunday to do that, you'll have a longer wait for comments back from me. If you are not sure what you have due, check the D2L Gradebook "Progress" item.

Indian Epics UnTextbook. I've added lots more books for you to browse and review for the Indian Epics UnTextbook extra credit options — and that is available for both Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics students. I hope you can find some intriguing books to look at and review!

Working ahead on your Storybook. If you want to work ahead on your Storybook, please do so! You can actually write your remaining stories now, and that way you will have them all lined up and ready to go. You can only turn in one Storybook story at a time (otherwise, keeping track of the revisions gets really complicated), but if you want to get your stories written and ready to go, that's a great strategy for working ahead and dramatically reducing your work load in the final weeks of the semester.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Language Humor: German Proverbs Translated Literally. There are so many fun items on this Buzzfeed list. My favorite: Klappe zu. Affe tot. — Close the lid. The monkey is dead, which means "Let’s put an end to this."

Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is PAJAMAS, which comes to us from Urdu pajama, which is in turn from Persian pay-jamah, leg-clothing. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: Merlin's Mystery Men. In this game show modeled on The Dating Game, Merlin is your host, and Katy Perry is seeking love among the three mystery contestants, all heroes from world mythology — but who are they exactly? And whom will she choose in the end?

FREE eBook: Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists by Sister Nivedita. This blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book which includes versions of both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, along with chapters about Krishna and the Buddha.

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Without curiosity, there is no wisdom (a Polish proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. The Polish version rhymes: Bez ciekawości || nie ma mądrości.

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Draupadi and the Pandavas. You can see the twins standing in the back while Draupadi sits beside King Yudhishthira, with Bhima (and his mace) and Arjuna kneeling in front.

March 21: Nowruz. This is the beginning of the Persian New Year (Now-Ruz, New Year/Day), and the new year begins in spring. You can read about the traditional foods and rituals of this holiday at Wikipedia. The image below shows a Nowruz celebration in Tajikistan:

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.