After watching the “Private Lives” episode of House I began to really analyze privacy as a whole. From this episode I interpreted privacy as being similar to a very exclusive club and once one is married another member is added. The problem begins to arise when  the club goes from being exclusive to all inclusive when personal blogs are added to the mix. Frankie says in the episode that people behave badly when they think no one is watching and that she would not be honest if she chose which parts of her life to blog about. Choosing to end her privacy is her choice, but bringing her husband's life into the blog as well makes me question the boundaries of personal blogs.

For my second time reading the short stories I wanted to go in consecutive order so I read The Story of Es-Sindibad of the Sea and Es-Sindibad of the Land, The First Voyage of Es-Sindibad of the Sea, and The Second Voyage of Es-Sindibad of the Sea. To read the stories I went to the Harvard classics website. I really enjoyed reading the stories one right after another this time because they made more sense that way. I don't think these stories were meant to be read out of order without have the prelude from the first story to set up the atmosphere.

for both the days, i read stories from the harvard classics. the first time, i jumped around and tried to get a general 'feel' of the storises - i read 'the story of jullanar of the sea', the story of nur-ed-din' and 'the story of the fisherman'.

it was only after reading the story of the fisherman that i realised that the other two stories were two or more stories in themselves. it didnt upset me though because despite the fact that it meant that i had read more, the first two stories left me feeling more complete, like i had accomplished more.. whereas in order to get the feel of the fisherman story i had to read ahead and see what happened, or atleast see how it unfolded.

 After I started the Burton version in ELF website, I went back and checked how the Lang version looked in comparison to it.  What I found was that:

There are differing titles for the stories (The Fisherman and the Jinni vs. The Story of the Merchant and the Genius)

The Burton version has much older seeming language , and that turned off this modern day reader

Burton version had many praises of Allah 

Here is the link to House episodes available online.

http://www.casttv.com/shows/house

We're looking at Season 4 - House's Head.

 For the second set of tales in Arabian Nights, I read "The Story of the Greek King and the Physician Douban," "The Story of the Young King of the Black Isles," and "The Story of the Husband and the Parrot," all still in the ELF translation.  To be completely honest, I was still not thrilled.  I had the same likes and dislikes that I spoke about in the last post.  I thought the transitions/some phrasing and stuff in the stories was clever, but on the whole, I didn't really like them.  I like to read things that I can get more invested in, and since the stories in Arabian Nights are so anonymous and legend-esque, they're not really for me.

For our second reading of the Arabian Nights, I decided to pick up from the first tale and read in chronological order the next three (since it seemed that a large number of the class read the first few begining stories, and this would lend some common ground). I attempted to read the first tale on the ELF site in Burton's translation, but could not find in myself a willingness to continue after the paragraph of all-caps. Instead, I read the Lang translations of: "The Story of the Merchant and the Genius" and "The Story of the First Old Man and of the Hind" and "The Story of the Second Old Man, and of the Two Black Dogs"