Thursday, February 4

Today is Thursday of Week 2, and here is a link to Week 2. For many of you, this will be a day of storytelling! I hope you will have fun as you choose one of the stories from the Anthology to retell in your own way: Your First Story.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Story stream. A lot of people will be writing stories today, and there are also people who have written their stories already (plus there are some stories from future weeks, thanks to the people who are working ahead). It might give you a creative boost to browse and explore the stories so far, so take a look if you are curious: Stories (you'll see each class in its own column).

Project Stack. Thanks to everybody working ahead and turning in their Week 2 (and beyond) projects already! If you turned something in on Wednesday, I'll get comments back to you today for sure, and you can always check the stack to make sure I received your form.

Blog comments. The Week 2 blog comment assignment is ready to go, and you will be commenting on other people's Introductions. For those of you working ahead, the Week 3 blog comment assignment is also ready now where you will be commenting on people's stories.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog stream. There was a basilisk in the reading for Myth-Folklore yesterday, and Reid included this very cool medieval illustration of a basilisk, along with its legendary nemesis: the weasel. Here's Reid's post.


There is a whole medieval tradition of animal legend books called bestiaries, and there is a beautiful one online here: Aberdeen Bestiary. Here's the Aberdeen Bestiary phoenix:


Also, in addition to each person's blog posts, there's also our Check-in and Connect Padlet where people have been making some nice posts. You can find out about that here: Check-In and Connect (it's an extra credit thing).


Twitter stream. Here is some more beautiful animal art; this is an owl from ancient Egypt:


And from the Smithsonian, one of my favorite Twitter feeds: Antiquities Will Return to Cambodia. On the left is a statue of Ardhanarishvara, a composite male-female representation of the gods Shiva and Parvati, both of whom you will be reading about in the Indian Epics class.


Here's a depiction of Ardhanarishvara by an Indian painter, circa the year 1800, Shiva with his bull and Parvati with her tiger, unified as one:


And here's a helpful homework dog:


Of course there's a dog in the family of writers! And a cat...


And for a video today, here's Crash Course on the topic of Goddesses:


February 4: Sri Lanka National Day. Today, February 4, is the holiday that celebrates the day in 1948 when the island nation of Sri Lanka gained independence from British rule. (India had gained its independence about six months earlier, in August of 1947.) You can read more about Sri Lanka in this Wikipedia article, and the image below shows a mountain, Sri Pada, commonly called "Adam's Peak" in English, which supposedly holds the footprint of the Buddha (according to Buddhist tradition), the footprint of Shiva (in Hindu tradition) or the footprint of Adam (in Islamic tradition):


And here's a video you might enjoy: Ancient Sites in Sri Lanka.



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




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