Folklore Friday Roundup

Hey! It's Folklore Friday! Time for a round-up of relatively recent news from the folklore front.

• Snopes.com has a debunking of a persistent urban legend concerning Oprah Winfrey and tipping.
• Alan Dundes's posthumous collection "The Meaning of Folklore" has been made available as a free ebook. My mother actually gave me a copy of this book for Christmas last year and I devoured it, digested it and loved it. It's nice to have a searchable copy on my laptop. I am not offering the link - the legality of this copy is dubious - but it is easily googleable.
• The New England Folklore Blog has an interesting post commemorating Bear Hibernation Day, and includes a retelling of a Penobscot tale. If you don't already subscribe to this blog, you should.
• There were many memorials about the late Claude Levi-Strauss this past week-and-a-half. Jason Baird Jackson from Indiana looks at Levi-Strauss from the point-of-view of a museum ethnologist. Vital reading.
• I have mentioned it before, but the new Russian Disney movie "The Book of the Masters" is set for general release. The Disneyfication of Russian tales has started (I wonder if Russian folkloristics has its Jack Zipes?)