Friday, April 3

At last....... FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 11 (although with the mega-grace period Week 10 is still available), and you can access future weeks on the class calendar if you are working ahead in order to finish this class early. It's all good! Congratulations on making it to Friday this week; just getting through each week is a major accomplishment these days. And we did it!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Stories for the randomizer. I was excited to see people writing stories in their blogs for Week 11! As usual, I'll update the randomizer to add in the new stories later today. I'm really grateful for the creative energy people have put into their storytelling experiments for this class, both in the projects and in your blogs too: thank you!

Project Stack. I replied to all the Week 9 projects in the stack yesterday, and today I will try to get to everything else that people have turned in for Weeks 10 and beyond. As always, you can check the stack to make sure I received your project. If I don't get to something in the stack today, you'll be at the top of the stack for Monday!

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog Stream. Some of you have been reading Raven stories in Myth-Folklore during the Native American weeks, and Rhys has written a raven story of his own, Heart and Mind, for which he found this beautiful graphic:

Twitter Stream. I shared some Norman street art yesterday, and then I saw this tweet from an OU physics professor, Eric Abraham; they made some "deck art" as you can see here:

And here's today's pandemic item: a #StayHome flowchart:

Indian Epics Today. Today's character is AGNI, the god of fire. His name is related to the Latin word ignis, which gives us the English word "ignite," i.e. to set on fire! More about Agni. Here is Agni in a scene from the Ramayana:

India Video. This is an Epified video about Swaha, Agni's wife:

Indian Music Video. This Maati Baani video might remind you about the Pygmalion story from Greek mythology where a man brings his beloved statue to life: Naina Bawre.

Proverbs. Here's a fun Latin proverb: The frog jumps back into the swamp even if you've placed him on a throne. (Latin here)

H.E.A.R.T.. This is some advice from Anne Lamott about unplugging at the end of the week... especially pandemic weeks...

Writing Video. Here's a video from John McWhorter, one of my favorite linguists, about languages not on that family tree: Are Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki and Na'vi real languages?

April 3. Today marks the birthday in 1781 of Swaminarayan, a holy man and religious leader in India; he died in 1830. You can read more about his life and his teachings at Wikipedia. He was an early advocate of women's rights, calling for girls and women to receive an education, and he still has devoted followers in India today as you can see at the Swaminarayan.faith website, where you can also find some of Swaminarayan's writings translated into different languages of India, including English.

(image source)

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