Tuesday, October 2

Today is Tuesday of Week 7. Here is a link to the Week 7 assignments. It's African and Asian stories in Myth-Folklore this week, and finishing up the Mahabharata in Indian Epics. I hope you will enjoy this week's reading!

Class Procedures and Reminders

OU-Texas Weekend. (repeat announcement) For those of you who will be out of town this weekend, you might be trying to finish up all of Week 7 before you leave. If you know you are going to be out of town and need me to try to get your Week 6 project back sooner rather than later, let me know and I'll move you to the top of the stack. (I did a lot of those yesterday; thanks to everybody who sent me emails about that!)

Project Stack. As always, you can check the stack to make sure I received your email. If you turned in something on Thursday or Friday morning last week, you should have comments back from me, and I'll finish the Friday and Saturday assignments today for sure, plus any special requests that come in (see previous announcement).

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. This is not from the blog stream; instead, it's an example of a super-creative Google Site page; take a look at Lauren's project for Indian Epics: Mountains in Indian Mythology.

Featured Storybook. Since we are in the Asia weeks of Myth-Folklore, here's a Japanese project: Tokyo Underworld. Orimi works for the Urban Legend Department of the Tokyo police force, and she has a gruesome murder to solve. You'll have to pay close attention while she interrogates Teke-Teke, Tanuki, Kuchisake-Onna, Jinmenken, and The Professor if you want to find the murderer!

Myth Video. And here's a video about the Japanese raccoon-dog, or Tanuki.

India Video. For India, here's a TED talk by Shabaz Hussain The Art of Playing Tabla.

India Item. Did you ever play the game "Chutes and Ladders" when you were a kid? It's originally a game from India: Moksha Patam. Here's an example from around the year 1800:

Writing. As if normal punctuation were not weird enough, here are some Little Known Punctuation Marks.

And here are some thoughts about what you can learn from books.

Growth Mindset Cats. This cat knows knows that the process of discovery is often messy and non-linear.

And speaking of messy, here is a video about the weird mess that is English spelling.

Event on Campus. As part of Rape Awareness Week, there will be a Survivor Art Installation on the South Oval from 11AM to 3PM (details).

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

October 2: Gandhi Jayanti. Today is the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, celebrated as Gandhi Jayanti; he was born on this day in 1869. You can read more at Wikipedia about this holiday. Here is some sand-art from Sudarsan Pattnaik to celebrate, using his nickname Bapu ("papa") / Bapu-Ji... there's even an emoji: 

And you can follow the Gandhi Jayanti holiday at Twitter:

For Gandhi Jayanti, people often sing the devotional song called Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram in his memory. You can read the lyrics here, and you can listen to the song in this video; you can also read about Gandhi's devotion to Rama in a book that he wrote entitled Ramanama, "The Name of Rama."

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