Thursday, February 18

Today is Thursday of Week 4, and campus is still closed. OU has announced "remote classes" for today, although I know some of you are taking this week off because of the winter weather, and that's fine! Here is a link to Week 4 for those of you who do have power and Internet. Some of you will be writing a Story in your blog today, and some of you might be choosing the new Story Lab option; see details below. I hope you will have fun with that new option!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Week 4 Reading. If you missed some Week 4 Reading and want to get caught up today, there is a grace period this morning as usual for the Wednesday reading, plus there is Week 4 extra credit reading you can use for catch-up purposes anytime this week. If you have other questions about jumping back into class today, just let me know and I'll be glad to help.

Story OR Story Lab. This is the first week with a Story Lab option. That means if you who wrote a story back in Week 2 and a story in Week 3, you have a choice this week: you can write another story for Week 4 OR you can take a break from storytelling and do one of the Story Lab options. You'll see how that works when you get around to the Story item today for Week 4. For those of you doing Storybooks, be sure to consider the Storybook Research option there!

Project Stack. If you turned in a project on Sunday before 5PM, you should have comments back from me now; I'll keep working on the Sunday items today, and in the meantime you can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment. My goal is always to get through the stack by the end of the week, but it usually does take me all week to work my way through the whole stack.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog stream. I thought this image of Shiva and Kamadeva (Love-God) from Matea's blog post was so cool; find out more here: Topic Research: Kamadeva.

Twitter stream. I learned about this nifty service, radio.garden, at Twitter!

You can tune in to Indian radio stations, for example:

And for those of you who are into gaming, check out these ancient polyhedral dice!

And I thought this tweet was hilarious; I have this feeling about my writing all the time. I have a great idea and then... well...

Some of you might know Professor Gaddie at OU; he shared this adorable bulldog yoga photo at Twitter:

And in addition to bulldog-yoga, you can practice slow breathing:

Meanwhile, in terms of productivity, I can definitely relate to Dinoman here (larger view).

And for those of you who are writing today, some advice from Debbie Ridpath Ohi: Just write!

I hope those of you in Indian Epics will get a chance this semester to go to Bizzell and enjoy the Amar Chitra Katha comics collection; here's a graphic about Anant Pai, the founder of Amar Chitra Katha comics:

And also a video about him:

February 18: Nikos Kazantzakis. Today marks the birthday of the Greek poet and novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, who was born in 1883. You may know him as the author of the book The Last Temptation of Christ, and he also wrote a continuation of the Odyssey, a modern epic poem picking up where Homer left off: The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. You can read more about his life and career in this Wikipedia article. Here is a photograph of the inscription on Kazantzakis's tomb: Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα, δε φοβούμαι τίποτα, είμαι λέφτερος (I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.). 

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