Art is at its best when it wakes us up to the reality that surrounds us that we haven’t noticed yet.  Or, perhaps noticed on a subconscious level, but weren’t able to take a step back and observe critically.

Gizmodo has a post about a new art installation which shows how easily we give away personal information online.

You give them an image, your email address, and fingerprint, and in exchange, you get a cute card.  Holding the cute card you realize how flimsy it is next to what you’ve just parted with, but isn’t that the way it goes on so many sites?  You give them access to your Facebook account and all that entails in exchange for access to a mindless quiz.  Or you give them an image of yourself in order to see how you’d look as a cartoon character.

The artist describes the information collection as a playful process, and isn’t that the way it usually goes?  No one would fill out a form if the data collectors said, “just give us all this information and we’ll bombard you with ads.”  Instead we think we’re just taking a mindless quiz, when we’re really handing over hundreds of data points.

It’s a thought-provoking exhibit.  It made me look long and hard at the ways I gave away information this week without really being cognizant of the fact that the bit of fun was in exchange for facts about me.

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

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It’s Halloween this weekend.  I’m debating between going as a 90’s slacker and a random Ravenclaw student.  I have both costumes pulled together; I’m just trying to gauge the weather that night and which one will be better suited for the temperature.

I love taking the kids trick-or-treating.  They go in a huge pack, and the adults follow behind.  What I really mean is that I like seeing the kids getting candy, and then going home and gorging myself on that candy until bedtime.

Are you dressing up?  What will your costume be?  If you’re not dressing up this year, what was your best costume ever?

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.

Back on October 15th, I got to see Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch along with 225,000 other people.  They broadcasted that night’s theater performance into 2000 theaters around the world.  I obviously didn’t jet out to London for a date night.

I mean, I wish I had the means to jet out to London for a date night, but… you know… life.

So I saw it in a totally swank theater that did not have assigned seats.  I had an assigned seat scare when we walked into the theater, but it turned out that you could sit wherever you wished.  They had huge, reclining armchairs, and Josh bought me some Twizzlers, so it was even better than normal theater.

I bet you’re thinking right now, that sounds amazing, Mel.  And it was.  Benedict Cumberbatch was the best Hamlet I’ve seen, hands down. He captured the sad, biting humour in the role, which is so often glossed over. I didn’t agree with the Ophelia direction — the actress was great, I just thought the choices they made with her didn’t reflect the text (of which they cut a few, key lines). I actually didn’t agree with any of the line changes, but that’s neither here nor there. The set was stunning, especially the end of the first part when the black… rubbish blew in.

So yeah, it was a fantastic night. And I really wish they’d release a DVD version because I’d love to see it again, but I believe it was a one-time deal, like so many televised-performance events. Womp-womp.

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Back in 1995, I was kneeling in the stacks in the library when I glanced at a folktale pamphlet and put it back on the shelf. About a year later, I saw a mango and it reminded me of the story I read as I thumbed through the folktale pamphlet. Something about the last two fruits that didn’t have a name. One was the mango, and its name came from the character in the story getting the instruction, “Man, go and…” And what? The second part of the instruction was the name of the other fruit.

“Man, go and papaya.”

That didn’t make sense.

“Man, go and coconut.”

I went through every mango-friendly fruit out there. But I couldn’t turn any other fruit name into a pun like how mango neatly became “Man, go…”

I thought about this EVERY SINGLE TIME I went into the produce section of a grocery store. So let’s say three times a week since 1995. I would test out all the things I saw in the sentence. The closest I ever came to a fit was mango and endive (yes, I’m aware those two things don’t go together): “Man, go and dive.”

So it didn’t really fit.

I Google the story all the time and usually never get a hit, but this week, the story was uploaded to Google Books! The story I read in the library back in 1995. And the other fruit? Orange. “Man, go and arrange” is the sentence (say it aloud), and that is how the last two fruits, mango and orange, got their name.

Sweet freakin’ relief.

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Back to Benedict Cumberbatch since this post is all over the place. The upcoming Sherlock Holmes Christmas special is going to be aired in the theaters, too.

I don’t know how I feel about that: going to the movie theater to see something that I can see at home. I guess if I couldn’t see it at home, that would be one thing. But I can, so it sort of begs the question: why go see it around a bunch of strangers?

I don’t really enjoy seeing things around a bunch of strangers. If I could have seen Hamlet from my home, I would have watched Hamlet in my home.

But I love the Christmas specials; especially Doctor Who. I feel like winter vacation is this television orgasm with 3000 things all aired at once.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday. Get writing!

So this post about selling your clothes on Facebook blew my mind.  I didn’t realize this was a thing.  I should add that I never got myself together for the whole donate/sell thing last spring.  I mean, I got myself together in the sense that I have a very detailed to-do list of what needs to happen, but I work full time and I’m with the kids the rest of it, so there never seems to be a huge chunk of time to take care of stuff like that.

But if I could sell it a little at a time over Facebook?  That would be worth it.  If I sold 10 items at a time, shipped them at the end of the week, and was done with it?  That would be totally, completely worth it.  And I could do the decluttering slowly in drips and drabs.

Has anyone done this?  I’m so excited that there are dedicated groups specifically for this.

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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 in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

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

• None.  Sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Non Sequitur Chica has a pre-beta post about Symptom Spotting.  What a perfect term for it.  She points out that “Of course all of this could be over if I went out and bought a pregnancy test, but I refuse to spend the money. I’ll find out via phone call in a little over 24 hours anyway.”  It’s a familiar post, one I think most people will connect to in some way: that moment of limbo before you know.

Life and Love in the Petri Dish has a post about egg donor compensation, discussing the recent New York Times articles.  She writes: “Besides $35,000 being way more than we could ever afford, it seems ethically dicey to be priced beyond a certain amount (on the other hand, I was saddened that at least one woman in the article was compensated only $2,000 for her cycle, which seems far too little).”  Mo raises a lot of excellent questions; ones without easy answers.

Lastly, Infertile Girl in a Fertile World has a post about going on birth control after infertility.  In one way, it is about control, though she points out, “I may not have had much say in getting pregnant but I can certainly prevent it. It’s a bit of a false sense of control though; I may be able to choose not to get pregnant right now, but if and when the time comes that we want to try for another child I’ll be thrown back to the land of IF.”  In that way, fertility feels more like a seesaw, with the brain sometimes having the upper hand, and other times, the body.

The roundup to the Roundup: Selling your old stuff on Facebook.  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 October 16th and October 23rd) 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.

The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland exhibit we went to on the weekend contained a very sad story about Alice Liddell’s hand-written copy of the book from Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).

The story began with marriage; namely, the wedding that Queen Victoria wouldn’t allow to take place.  Little Alice in Wonderland and Prince Leopold wanted to get married, but the Queen refused.  So the relationship ended, and both people married others but named their children after one another — an Alice and a Leopold.

Alice’s Leopold grew up and went to fight in World War I along with his brother, and both were killed in battle.  She lost her son, but she also lost her connection to her first love with that death.  Soon afterward, Alice’s husband, Reginald, died, leaving her to mind the house alone with her remaining son, Caryl.  She needed money to maintain the house, so she sold the only hand-written copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the world.  It was the manuscript that Charles Dodgson gave her for Christmas, complete with his pre-Tenniel drawings that inspired the ones for the book.  An American bought the book in the auction, taking the copy across the sea.

When she was very old, in 1932, for the 100th anniversary of Dodgson’s birthday, Alice came to America to attend a ceremony in New York to mark the occasion.  While she was there, even though she was exhausted and her son feared that the travel would be too much for her, she went down to Philadelphia to see her book one last time before she died.  She spent a night visiting with her book, holding it.

Two years later, she died back in England.

The exhibit has the chair she sat in to look at her precious book.  You can imagine this old woman, holding her childhood in her hands, remembering those times on the river with her sisters when Dodgson would make up stories.  It made me cry to think about her separated from a prize possession, a tangible reminder of a time in her life, before she was ready to let it go.

Part of me knows that they’re just things.  Objects aren’t people.  Her life went on, even without her book.

But the rest of me knows that things matter.  That objects bring comfort.  That something was missing from her life without her book.

In Oxford, the Bodleian Library displays their copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from time to time.  It’s one of the 50 original copies that were recalled after the first printing, so it’s special, but not quite up to hand-written-by-Dodgson-himself quality.

We missed seeing Oxford’s copy by two weeks on our trip to the college.  For a long time after, I had a lot of regrets about the trip, especially when I would read about the book being on display or a special event being held.  Seeing the hand-written copy of the book this weekend erased all of that.  How can I be sad that I missed seeing a printed copy when I got to see Dodgson’s own handwriting?

Again, they’re only things: feeling happy or sad because I was able or not able to stand in front of a case and gaze at an object; it sounds bizarre when you boil it down to the basics.  And yet it means something.

Right?

What is your most cherished object?