Thursday, February 6

Today is Thursday of Week 4, and here is a link to Week 4. 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.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Story OR Story Lab. This is the first week with a Story Lab option instead of Storytelling. So, for those of you who wrote a story back in Week 2 and another story in Week 3, you have a choice this week: you can write another story for Week 4 (and writing a story is always good!), 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 to the Story assignment today.

Project Stack. If you turned in a project assignment on Sunday before 10PM, you should have comments back from me; I'll keep working on the Sunday assignments 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 until Friday to reply to them all. :-)

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. Personally I don't think we can have too many cute pet pictures, so I wanted to share this lovely dog-and-cat pair of pictures from Antonieta's Introduction. Meet Tapon and Milo:


Twitter Stream. I saw this graphic in the OU Twitter stream yesterday, a call for contributions to OU's FORUM magazine on a really important topic (I'm going to be writing up something to submit; they said faculty contributions are welcome too!).


100-Word Stories. Today's story is a Buddhist jataka from India: The Otters and the Jackal (click title for more info).


Proverbs. And here's a proverb from India about otters: It is vain to look for yesterday’s fish in the house of the otter.


Indian Epics Today. Todays character is RAVANA, the ten-headed king of the rakshasas in Lanka; more about Ravana. Here you can see Ravana fighting in the Battle of Lanka:


Storybooks. And speaking of rakshasas, here's a great Storybook with stories told as album reviews: Rakshasa Stone Magazine: Demon Music Reviews.


Myth-Folklore Video. This is another Crash Course video with Mike Rugnetta: Ma'ui, Oceania's Hero.


H.E.A.R.T.. Yes, it's that time of the semester: ask the coffee flowchart what to do!


Mindset Cats. Meanwhile, the mindset cat keeps on learning!


Mindset Video. The characters at Zootopia keep on learning too, with some help from Shakira: Try everything! (And did everybody notice she was wearing the gazelle's costume for the Superbowl?!)


Event on Campus. The OU International Pageant is tonight in Meacham at 7PM, with doors opening at 6:30 PM (details).


February 6: Manutius. Today marks the anniversary of the death of Aldus Pius Manutius in the year 1515. Manutius founded the Aldine Press of Venice in 1494, and he was an innovator in typography, too; most famously, he invented the use of printed italics. You can read more at Wikipedia about Aldus and about the Aldine Press. The image below shows a page from his 1501 edition of Horace; even though it is a printed book, it is designed to imitate the style and layout of a medieval manuscript:



And here's a fun animation of the press logo, a dolphin (graphic created by Laura Aydelotte):



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