Thursday, October 3

Today is Thursday of Week 7. Here is a link to the Week 7 assignments. I hope you will have fun getting back into the storytelling spirit this week again!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. If you turned in something by 10PM on Sunday, you should have comments back from me, and you can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I'll be sure to read and reply to all the projects turned in on Sunday by the end of the day today, and then I'll move on to the Monday assignments.

Week 2 and Week 3 Stories (repeat announcement). With the randomizer, I try to make sure every story gets at least two comments, but it's easy for me to miss something. Any stories you wrote back in Week 2 or Week 3 should have gotten those two comments by now, but if you have a story from one of those weeks in your blog that didn't get two comments, let me know, and I'll put it back in the randomizer. (Right now, the randomizer has stories from Weeks 4-7.)

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. I thought this image was so cool: for the story about Arjuna and the Apsarases who are in crocodile form, Ryeli found this picture of an Indian Gharial Crocodile to include in her reading notes post.  It looks like a crocodile... but with a very thin snout. The Gharial is on the critically endangered species list; you can find out more at Wikipedia.

Twitter Stream. I know there are plenty of Harry Potter fans in the class, so I wanted to share this fun bit of satirical writing from McSweeneys that I saw at Twitter; you can read it here: Professor Minerva McGonagall's Letter to the Tenure Committee.

Story of the Day. The origin story for today is a Cherokee legend about the origin of The Milky Way.

Indian Epics Today. The epic character for today is Gandhari, Queen of Hastinapura and mother of Duryodhana. More about Gandhari, and here is a short Epified video about how she gave birth to one hundred sons.

Storybooks. This Indian Epics Storybook is about the past lives of Ravana and his brother Kumbhakarna: Reverberations of Time.

Myth-Folklore Video. From the BBC, here is a short video on the Talking Drums of Africa.

Proverbs. And this is a proverb from Namibia: The cobra knows its length.

Writing. As you're writing, you might want to make use of this fantastic punctuation resource: 69 Rules of Punctuation.

Yep, that's the comma with the most rules of all:

Mindset Cats. The mindset cat is always curious and wants to know more.

HEART Video. Philosopher Jesse Prinz has some thoughts on what it means to wonder about the world: WONDER.

Event on Campus. OU's Center for Social Justice presents Eric Stover of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley who will be giving a talk, Witnesses from the Grave: International Justice and the Legacy of Clyde Snow, at 7PM in the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, Kerr Auditorium (details).

October 3: Gore Vidal. Friday, October 3, marks the birthday in the year 1925 of the American author, Gore Vidal. You can read more about Gore Vidal's life and career in this Wikipedia article. My favorite of his novels is his historical novel Julian, which is about the 4th-century emperor Julian, nicknamed "Julian the Apostate," the last of the pagan emperors of Rome.

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