Sunday, October 2

Today is Sunday of Week 6. Make sure you finish the end-of-week assignments today, and you might want to do some extra credit assignments also! Hopefully you can get started on next week too (especially if you will be out of town for OU-Texas). You can find all the assignments at the Class Calendar.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Week 6 Project. By now everybody is on their own schedule (doing Storybook or Portfolio, adding or revising, etc.), and if you have not turned in your Week 6 Project assignment yet, check the email I sent you on Friday to see what you have due today, and if you have any questions about that, just let me know. After you turn in your assignment (sending me the email with the checklist), you can look at the stack to make sure I received your email.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Editing. As you may have guessed by now, I am a fan of short-and-sweet writing strategies, a.k.a. Ruthless Editing.

Fairy Tales. Another genius cartoon from Tom Gauld: The Three Little Scientists and the Big Bad Wolf.

Spelling. Alas, the spellchecker cannot help you with this one: IDLE v. IDOL.

Featured Storybook. This project is from the Myth-Folklore class: Automaton: Robots of Legend. This story contains legends of mythological robots, beginning with the legendary Talos, guardian of the ancient Greek island of Crete, and the mechanical eagle that fed each day on the liver of the Titan Prometheus.

Free Book Online: Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists by Sister Nivedita. See the Freebookapalooza blog for links and the table of contents. The book also features beautiful artwork by Abanindro Nath Tagore, as you can see here: the Pandavas and Kunti escape the fire, with Bhima carrying Kunti on his shoulders.

Words of Wisdom: Today's saying is As the wind, so the sail (a French proverb). Find out more at the Proverb Lab. In other words: you must adapt to the circumstances in which you find yourself!

Today's Video: The Legend of Urashima Taro. Some of you may be reading this famous fairy tale in the Myth-Folklore class this week:

Growth Mindset: I did not make this cat; it's one that I found online, and I thought it was perfect for the Growth Mindset collection: If you only focus on the problem, you might miss the easy solution.

Event on Campus: There will be a matinee showing of "Let the Right One In" at 3PM in the Weitzenhoffer Theatre: "The only truly terrifying vampire story written in the last 120 years, Let the Right One In ushers Bram Stoker’s Victorian nightmare into the 21st century" (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

Rosh Hashanah. Tonight at sunset marks the start of the Jewish holiday of the New Year, Rosh-Ha-Shanah ("Head-of-Year"). Like many religious holidays, Rosh Hashanah is based on a lunar calendar, so it falls on a different day each year, depending on the cycle of moon. According to Jewish tradition, this is the day of the year on which God created man. One of the rituals on Rosh Hashanah is the blowing of the shofar, the ram's horn. You can read more about the holiday at Wikipedia, and below you can see the blowing of the shofar in an illuminated Hebrew manuscript:

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.