Tuesday, March 10

Today is Tuesday of WEEK 9, and I've re-arranged the Declarations area in Desire2Learn so the new week is on top. Also, the Project commenting assignment for this week is now available! If you have not turned in your Week 8 Project assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit, and Tuesday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish the Reading Diary that was due on Monday — and if you missed them yesterday, here's a link to Monday's announcements.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. I'm still working my way through the HUGE stack of Project assignments that people have turned in over the weekend: the stack. If you turned in your assignment on Friday or on Saturday before 8PM, you should have comments back from me. If you turned in something on Saturday night, Sunday, or Monday, it is probably still in the stack.

Spring Break. (repeat announcement) For Spring Break, you have March 16-20 off as you can see on the Semester Calendar here. That means you will have your regular Week 9 assignments due this week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (March 10-11-12). Then, I would encourage everybody to finish up the final Week 9 assignments this Friday, March 13 (yes, I know: Friday the 13th! eeek!) — but if you want to wait and do those final Week 9 assignments on the weekend after Spring Break (March 21-22), that will work too. The grace period for wrapping up Week 9 will be on Monday morning, March 23, after Spring Break.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Life is a Daring Adventure. A wonderful quote from Helen Keller. This is actually a paraphrase; in context, here is what she wrote: Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

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

Featured Storybook: Hanuman and the Naked Philosophers: The Story of an Ancient Manuscript. Mark and his friends are in possession of an ancient Greek manuscript bearing the name Χάνουμαν — could this be a Greek account of Hanuman, the flying monkey god and most devoted follower of Rama?

FREE eBook: Mighty Mikko - Finnish Tales by Parker Fillmore. This blog post provides additional information about the fairy tales contained in this delightful book. For fans of foxes, the "Mighty Mikko" of the book's title is not a human hero, but a fox!

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is It is not economical to go to bed early to save the candles if the result is twins (a Chinese proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is a funny little proverb about unintended consequences!

Mahabharata Image: Today's Mahabharata image is Surya, the sun god.

Tuesday Event on Campus: There will be a discussion with Dr. Sherri Irvin about "Icons of False Hope: The Role of Images in Thinking about Racial Justice" at 5PM in the the Honors College, Room 180/181 (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

March 10: Mikhail Bulgakov. Today, March 10, marks the anniversary of the death in 1940 of one of the most extraordinarily talented writers of the 20th century, and a personal favorite of mine, Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita — I won't even try to summarize the plot of this fabulous book (you can read a synopsis here at Wikipedia); I'll just mention that some of the characters include the Devil himself, a black cat named Behemoth, various and sundry witches, as well as Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ. Below you can see a statue of the cat Behemoth in the city of Kiev (which is now the capital of Ukraine), where Bulgakov was born in 1891.



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.