Monday, September 10

Today is Monday of Week 4. Here is a link to the Week 4 assignments (and for those of you who are using the grace period this morning, here is a link to Week 3). It's another week of Classical or Biblical readings in Myth-Folklore, and in Indian Epics, you will be finishing up your first reading of the Ramayana. I hope you will enjoy the readings!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Check your progress. The class is now 20% over, so you might want to use this Chart to see if you are on track for the grade you want. If you are not on track, start doing more of the assigned work, and you can make up past missing work with extra credit. Plus, you can work ahead if you want to take some time off in this class when you have midterms in your other classes.

Project Stack. As usual, the stack will be huge on Monday, and I'll start working through the assignments in the order they were turned in. Meanwhile, you can check the stack to make sure I received your email.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. Here's another fun Wikipedia Trail, this time from Hannah: From the Odyssey to Email Attachment.

Featured Storybook. This Storybook is a great example of how you can bring together stories from different cultures into a single project: Desperate Goddesses: Life on Mythological Lane. Izanami-no-Mikoto, the Japanese goddess of creation, has left the world of the living long behind, but she still watches over the desperate goddesses of Mythological Lane — Aphrodite, Pele, Ishtar, and Devi — and shares their stories with you.

Myth Video. From Epified, here is a short video on Creation Stories of the world, including India.

India Video. And here's a Crash Course video, this time about India: Indian Pantheons.

India Item. Here is a word from India that we use in English: CALICO, as in calico cat. English "calico" is from the name of the city of of "Calicut" on the Malabar coast of India in Kerala.

Writing. Typos: we all make them! Before You Hit Sned.

And some reading advice from Tyrion Lannister: Books are better.

Meanwhile, here is an inspiring talk from Peter Dinklage:

Growth Mindset Cats. Today's cat is a creative cat: I made a new thing.

Event on Campus. Rami Khouri will be giving a lecture tonight at 6PM in the Sam Noble Museum's Kerr Auditorium: Inside the Craft and Characdter of Anthony Shadid (details). Anthony Shadid was born in Oklahoma City, and he went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes as a foreign correspondent in Baghdad and Beirut; you can read more about his remarkable life and career at Wikipedia.

Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

September 10: Rosh Hashanah. Today marks the start of the Jewish holiday of the New Year, Rosh-Ha-Shanah ("Head-of-Year"). 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:

And here's a fun Rosh Hashanah video from The Fountainheads (lyrics at the YouTube page):

Check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day, or click here for past announcements.