I’ve had four this week alone. Relax, I am alive. It’s just that it is finals week. Lord, how time flies. It seems like only thirteen weeks ago I started the school semester. And here it is, I am practically matriculated (I wish). The fact is, yours truly, has been busy learning the facts of life, death, empires built and lost, hominoids and hominins, and how Willy Shakes (Shakespeare to you) is truly, truly all he is purported to be.
This will be a speed update, and since I need to multi task, (note the use of the Chicago annotation style of comma usage), please excuse me if I shower while I Blog this.
time to prepare sumptuous feasts for my friends.
Several Saturdays ago the Gophers, my schools football team, lost to Wisconsin rivals, the Badgers. While I thought of going to the game, I opted out and stayed home with U of MN alumni, Rick (loop-hole) Lind. I did manage to lay out a very nice buffet.
Lucia (my daughter for those of you following me in Tanzania) invited Rick and me down to Cowboy Jack’s, a popular bar in downtown Minneapolis. Thanks to Uber we were able to get there without resorting to driving and needing to employ Loophole Lind’s judiciary expertise; should we not observe all traffic laws.
The place is nothing but three stories of wall to wall millennials. But they treated us with respect and brought a tear to ours eyes as all of them, enmasse, started chanting, “Okay, Boomer, Okay Boomer, Okay Boomer!” Rick and I have never been more proud.
For my Shakespeare class (and worth a bunch of points), had to select any scene from a play we studied and do something with it . My team, four of us, took the last scene of Taming of the Shrew and pondered, what if Sly came back from the prologue and had a scene. We wrote it and presented it. It went very well. While I do not have a recording for you, I can show you our costumes, that Martha (Tanzania: my wife) helped me procure.
Today was my Shakespeare final, I believe I did well but while I could drag up from memory, the name of Robert Greene, who was the source for Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale, I couldn’t conjure up the novella’s title, Pandosto, The Triumph of Time. Damn, I know it cost me two points.
For the Shakespeare, we were asked to make a Commonplace book (a place to save things we like), a couple lines from each play and a sonata we liked and write our observations on them by hand into a notebook. I created a poster for each one. Here they are. [sorry can’t figure out how to load these. You will just have to wait a day or two.]
Saturday is my Anthropology final. I am doing my best to prepare. In class we learned about the sagittal keel from this neanderthal skeleton. Little is really known about him but interestingly enough, anthropologists were able to determine his name was Karl. Go figure.
To better understand just what a sagittal keel is, note the journalist above (the crest atop his head). This educational redux keeps showing itself, everyday.
I need to wrap this up for now. Shakespeare: done. UK History: done. In UK History we were tasked with an Unessay, some aspect of England. A paper, a website, a piece of art, a whatever. This is what one classmate presented to our professor, today. (Oral review of Eastern Eruopean History on Friday and a paper due then as well, more later on that).
I did a couple of videos based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, Kubla Khan. I surmised, in a six page paper that the strength of the poem is that he couldn’t finish it because of an interruption in remembering it from a dream. I do believe I am the only student in the class who has actually smoked opium, while sailing from New Zealand to Guatemala with a Turkish deck crew. http://kenyon2.com/clientportal/history3152/
If you like the videos, please forward. If you don’t care for them, please submit a seven page paper explaining way, double spaced using 12 point New Times Roman in the Chicago style for annotations with sources (four please).
That’s it for now. Brain dead but loving it.
Yip Yip
walkingtowellesleydotcom 