Friday, January 25

HAPPY FRIDAY! Today is Friday of Week 2. Here is a link to the Week 2 assignments; you can decide if you want to finish the end-of-week items today or over the weekend. Either way works! And if you have time, do some extra credit; now if a good time to get ahead so that you can then miss some assignments in here when midterms get going in your other classes, etc.

Class Procedures and Reminders

And now... CONGRATULATIONS! I hope you all had a good time with the reading and storytelling this week. In Week 1, you became bloggers, and now in Week 2, you are storytellers. Yay! Thank you for being willing to try these new things; I really appreciate all the work you are doing so that we have this blog network full of stories now.

Announcements. At the end of the week it's a good idea to review the week's announcements to see if you missed anything important. There's even an extra credit option for doing that: Review and Back Up.

Introductions. I will keep commenting on the Introductions today and also next week. Meanwhile, I hope you have fun doing the Week 2 blog comment assignment, reading and commenting on the Introductions. (For the Week 3 blog comments, you'll be reading people's stories too!)

Project Stack. As people turn in their project assignments, I'll add them to the stack. Then, while you are waiting on feedback from me, you can check the stack to make sure I received your email. I'll be including a link to the stack every day in the announcements from now on.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. There are always some Texas-rivalry stories in these classes, and Matt has written the first UT story of the semester: The Monstrous City of UT.

Free Book Online. Today's free book is The Giant Crab, and Other Tales from Old India by W. H. D. Rouse. This is a collection of jataka tales with illustrations by W. Robinson.

Free Audiobook. Today's free audiobook is the Robert Burns 250th Anniversary poetry collection in honor of Burns Night (see below).

Featured Storybook. This Indian Epics Storybook has a college dimension: Hanuman and the Naked Philosophers. A college student 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?

India Video. Here is an Epified video about the Names of Hanuman.

Myth Video. This is a useful video for thinking about How the World's Religions Spread.

Myth Item. Here's a different kind of map: it's Monsters in America.

Writing. I shared a Yoda-language infographic yesterday, and here's a fun Yoda meme: In Yoda style, it's not YOLO, but OOYL.

And here's some mythology humor: Odysseus and Facebook. (Some of you in Myth-Folklore might be reading about Odysseus and the Sirens next week!)

Growth Mindset Cats. Meanwhile, this cat is exploring new things: find joy in learning.

And here's a video about Learning with Passion and Enthusiasm.

Event on Campus. Another new exhibit is opening today at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art: Testimony: The Life and Work of David Friedman (details): The exhibition includes portraits and landscapes as well as his notable series Because They Were Jews!, a visual diary of his time in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland and his internment at the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Testimony is both an indictment of the horrors of the Holocaust and an affirmation of survival.

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

January 25: Burns Night. Every year on this night, people all over the world celebrate the great Scottish poet Robert Burns. The tradition is known as "Burns Night" (or "Burns Supper"), and you can find the poetry of Robert Burns online at the RobertBurns.org website. For more about Robert Burns, see Wikipedia, which is also the source for his portrait shown here:

And here's a short animation about Burns:

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