Week 5 WEEKEND: Feb. 27-28

Yes, it's the weekend of WEEK 5 already. Some of you are taking a break this week, while some of you are doing some/all of Week 5, so here's that link: Week 5, and also a link to Week 6 if you are ready to get a head start on the week to come.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. I had a few items left in the stack on Friday afternoon, and those projects will be at the top of the stack on Monday. Meanwhile, I'll update the stack periodically over the weekend so you can check to make sure I received your project.

Week 5 break (repeat announcement). Because of the winter storm last week, the whole Week 4 / Week 5 break became a little more confusing than originally planned, but there's an easy way to check and see if you need to do any end-of-week assignments for Week 5: just go to Canvas and check your total points. If you have around 150, you're good: no need to do any Week 5 end-of-week assignments. If you have fewer than 150 points in Canvas, then do some Week 5 work now to fill that gap. I hope that makes sense, and if you have any questions about that, just let me know.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Stream. Carlee is doing Looney-Tunes-style stories for Indian Epics (yes, really!), and seeing this picture in her latest story got me hoping for summer: Gossip and the Swim Day.

Twitter stream. Here's a great cartoon from Grant Snider (see a larger view):

One of my favorite things about Twitter is seeing lovely works of art from India; here's a painting of Rama and his brothers arriving at the court of King Janaka:

And I thought this was hilarious: hypnotic llama!

And here's an idea for writing stories without words at all: Literojis!

And here is a super-fun word tool: the European Word Translator is a mash-up using Google Translate. You type a word into the "Translate it!" box, and then the translations show up on the map for the language of each country, and you can hover over each word to see what language it is.

Plus another language graphic, a linguistic family tree drawn by Minna Sundberg, and here is a larger version:

And here's a video about mythical languages from Crash Course:

For those of you who are doing some revising today, here's a thought from Robert Cormier:

And for those of you who are writing, just write; don't wait! Advice from Margaret Atwood:

And a writing video: Grammar Lessons with Food. Watch out for the man-eating chicken!

February 27: Leonard Nimoy. Today marks the anniversary of the death of Leonard Nimoy just four years ago in 2015 (he was born in 1931). Nimoy is most famous for having played Spock in the Star Trek original series. You can read more about his life and career at Wikipedia, and I highly recommend this documentary, made by his son, which you can watch streaming at Netflix: For the Love of Spock.

And yes, Spock was a Vulcan... so I made this Spock Cat meme: Be a Vulcan! Not a Vulcan't.

February 28: John Tenniel. Today marks the birthday in the year 1820 of the great English illustrator, John Tenniel, who is most famous for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. You can read about Tenniel's life and career in this Wikipedia article. Here is one of his Aesop's fable illustrations: the donkey in the lion's skin.

And here's a quick video showing his Alice illustrations:

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