If I said to you: Miss Lucy had a steamboat…

You would answer…

The steamboat had a bell. (Ding ding!)

Kottke had a post about childhood lore — the comments are pure gold — but it raised an interesting question. How did these rhymes or games or traditions spread before the internet?

Everyone around my age who grew up in the US knows what a cootie catcher is and how to use it. I know this because people came from all over the US to our wedding, and we put a cootie catcher at every place setting that people could use to strike up a conversation with their tablemates. So instead of your fortune on the inside flap, you had a question that you could ask the other person to get the conversation started. Everyone in our age group immediately started using it. People much older didn’t know what it was.

Everywhere I’ve gone, kids have made a tugging motion with their arm while passing a truck to see if the truck driver will pull the horn. Or lifted up their feet when going over railroad tracks. Or typing 80085 on the calculator. But how did we know? I know it passed from older kid on the playground to younger kid on the playground, but how did it jump from playground to playground, across the country? Fast enough that people around the same age would know the same thing, but kids a decade older or younger wouldn’t?

It is clearly easier now with the internet, but how did those common childhood beliefs or games spread across the country or world before it?

It’s a not-very-birthday-y birthday because it’s a work day, and I’m trying to get the twins ready for their summer plans. But that’s just what being an adult is all about, kids. It’s not all popsicles for breakfast and being queen of your own bedtime. Sometimes your birthday passes without big fanfare.

Which is okay.

My birthday will still contain cake, zoolbia, and gianniotiko (with chocolate!) because go-big-or-go-home when it comes to birthday desserts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Last weekend, we were out and about, and I needed something for lunch. I commented that, ideally, we’d run into a grocery store and I would get a yogurt. But as we were walking around, we found a cafe that advertised Greek yogurt parfaits in its window. It was kind of perfect, except that the fruit-to-yogurt ratio was way off. Why didn’t we eat yogurt parfaits at home? Why did we eat boring fruit-flavoured Greek yogurt when we could build gorgeous yogurt concoctions in glass jars?

Our newly-discovered parfait lifestyle lasted for two days. I think I’m just not that fancy. But I’ve been enjoying eating through the rest of the bag of granola.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Before I check a book out of the library, I do two things: I read the first few pages, and I check the rating on Goodreads. I look for books with at least a 3.5 rating and read the last few reviews, trying to pick out one or two 2-star reviews and one or two 4-star reviews. If I click with the first few pages but the ratings are low, I’ll usually still check out the book. But if you needed a reason for why you shouldn’t look at ratings first, Erin McKeown wrote about a famous study that proves how other people’s ratings influence human opinion.

[Hint: click over to read about the study because it’s super interesting and hard to summarize.]

She writes: “I get it, there’s an element of social belonging in liking the same things as other people, but once the boulder starts rolling, it’s hard for other rocks to get noticed.”

The author or musician or filmmaker who gets those first low reviews may receive additional low reviews because the next people who come along are influenced by the opinion of the first random people vs. their own feelings about the work. And then YOU are harmed just as much as the artist because you miss out on great work.

I can think of so many books that fit this description. Fair Play by Louise Hegarty. It was one of the most profound mysteries I’ve ever read; I still think about it. The reviews I saw on Goodreads clearly missed the point of what the book is actually about. You think it’s a mystery; it is something so much deeper than that. I think anyone who has lost someone important will read this book in a very different way once they get the twist.

Would I have given it a chance if I had seen the ratings before I read the first pages? Probably not, in all honesty. And I would have missed out on a profound story.

Erin always gives food for thought. One of the most talented writers (and musicians) I’ve read/heard.

Even though I love blogs because I love personal stories, I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. And I especially don’t read true crime. I love fictional mysteries, but not real-life mysteries. I felt uncomfortable when I listened to the first season of Serial. That was a real girl who was killed. That is a real boy (now man) in prison.

But I got sucked into London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is a true story about a British boy who pretended to be the son of an oligarch, fell in with the London underworld, and fell to his death into the Thames. The story intersects with the Brink’s-Mat theft, which Josh and I learned about from watching The Gold on PBS, and the string of Russian deaths, such as Litvinenko. I’ve been alternating between the audiobook and the e-book. Both are amazing pieces of storytelling.

But there is a part of me that feels uncomfortable enjoying the experience of listening/reading this story. It is this family’s worst moments, captured in words, and I’m gutted for them because there are so many “what if” moments where their story could have continued differently. I don’t know. I feel like I’m processing the story on two levels: the story itself and then the act of consuming the story.

We need a word for the feeling of discomfort that comes from the enjoyment of reading nonfiction that depicts a terrible moment.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Pics and Posts has a great reminder (through flowers) that your history is not your destiny. That just because something is one way now does not mean it will be that way forever. That something not working out in the moment doesn’t mean that it will never work out. There’s always next year for her lilies.

Lastly, every once in a while Grumpy Rumblings releases an old blog draft. This week, there were ideas from 2015. They’re little time capsules for what was occupying their brain at that time, and I snickered at a post about things they don’t understand because I also don’t understand the point of “3 course ‘quick weeknight meals’ that take more than 30 min to prepare.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Processing how I feel about nonfiction. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 22 – 29) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.