Monday, November 18

Today is Monday of Week 14. I hope everybody had a great weekend! Here is a link to Week 14, plus a link to Week 13 if you are using the grace period this morning to finish up last week's work.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Last week of class! Yes, this is it: Week 14 is the last full week of class. Hopefully you'll be able to finish up this week. If you need to make up some missing assignments from earlier in the semester, there's also a week's worth of assignments available during Dead Week. You can find out how that works here at the class calendar. (As you'll see there, Week 14 also extends over Thanksgiving break.)

Project Stack. The stack is huge right now, and I'll be working through the assignments in the order that they were turned in, starting with assignments turned in last week. Meanwhile, you can check the stack to make sure I received your project.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. Hannah did the typing test tech tip, and she also found another typing test online that rates you with different animals based on your speed; more at Hannah's blog post.

Twitter Stream. Fascinating article about pronouns via Twitter; here's the New York Times article: What Quakers Can Teach Us About the Politics of Pronouns. (As an OU student you have free access to the NY Times.)

Myth-Folklore Video. Here's a Crash Course video about an African hero cycle: The Mwindo Epic.

Indian Epics Today. The epic character of the day today is Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandava brothers. You can learn more about Yudhishthira here; this painting shows a critical moment at the end of his life: Yudhishthira and the dog. The dog is really Yudhishthira's father, the god Yama (Dharma), testing him.

Words. Here's a word origin that might surprise you: CALICO is a word that comes to English from India, specifically, from the city of Kozhikode (Malayalam Kolikodu) in Kerala, India. Originally it referred to patterned cloth from that city, and then to cats with a calico color pattern; details here.

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

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:

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

Event on Campus. There will be a Peace Corps Info Workshop today at 11AM-1:30PM in Farzaneh Hall... with pizza too (details).

November 18: Caxton. On this day 1477, William Caxton produced the first printed book in England! You can read more about William Caxton's life and career in this Wikipedia article. The image below shows an image of Aesop from the Caxton edition of the fables; each of the objects around Aesop suggests an incident from Aesop's life:

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