Monday, September 14

Today is Monday of Week 4. Here is a link to Week 4 (and for those of you who are using the grace period this morning, here is Week 3). It's another week of Classical or Biblical readings in Myth-Folklore, and in Indian Epics, you will be finishing up your first reading of the Ramayana. I hope you will enjoy the readings!

Class Procedures and Reminders

Check your progress. The class is now 20% over, and you can use this Progress Chart to see if you are on track for the grade you want. If you are not on track, you can start doing more of the regular work, plus you can make up past missing work with extra credit now or later in the semester when you have some available time. There's also a special option this semester to finish in Week 13, before Thanksgiving. Especially since there's no telling what the COVID situation will be as we get farther into the Fall, I hope a lot of you will be able to use the finish-before-Thanksgiving option. :-)

Project Stack. As usual, the stack is HUGE on Monday, and I'll start working through the projects in the order they were turned in, beginning with items left in the stack from Friday. Meanwhile, you can check the stack to make sure I received your project.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Blog stream. I'm always curious to see when people do a Wikipedia Trail, and here's a cool one from Rachel: From Language Acquisition to Lateralization of Brain Function.


Twitter stream. Sometimes I like to share something from Twitter just because it is lovely, so here is a lovely piece of ancient Egyptian jewelry: VERY ancient!


And here's something lovely Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist teacher and writer:

And as you ponder the week to come, you can think about what's really important and what's not: Importance and Urgency.

100-Word Stories. Today's story comes from a project I've just started recording, a book of Tiny Tales from the Sufis that I hope to publish in October. Sufi stories are mystical tales from the Islamic tradition; this one is a legend about Jesus: Jesus and the Name of God.



Some of you in Myth-Folklore are reading the Iliad, so I thought you might enjoy this video of a Homeric song: 


Storybook. This is an Iliad Storybook, told from Hades' perspective: Hades' Iliad.


And here's some Homeric humor: Odysseus and Facebook.


September 14: Typewriter Ribbon. Today marks the anniversary of the day in 1886 when George Anderson of Memphis, Tennessee patented the typewriter ribbon. Now, I'm not sure how many of you (...any of you...?) ever typed on a typewriter with a ribbon, but I learned to type in 1973 on a manual Royal typewriter, complete with a typewriter ribbon. You can read an article about the history of the typewriter here at Wikipedia. Here is an old Hermes typewriter — and why was it called Hermes? Probably because Hermes was a speedy messenger... or perhaps because he was the Greek god credited with the invention of the alphabet!


And here's a fun Kids React video: they react to a typewriter!



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