1. What people asked the New York Public Library in the time before Google.

• Is it possible to keep an octopus in a private home?
• I just saw a mouse in the kitchen. Is DDT OK to use? (1946)
• Does NYPL have a computer for us of the public? Answer: No sir! (1966)
• What did women use for shopping backs before paper bags?
• Are black widow spiders more harmful dead or alive?
• Is it proper to go to Reno alone to get a divorce? (1945)
• Are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates the same person?
• Can NYPL recommend a good forger?
• Where can I rent a beagle for hunting (1963). We also had requests to rent a guillotine.
• Has the gun with which Oswald shot President Kennedy been returned to the family?
• What is the life span of an eyelash? Answer: Based on the book Your hair and its care, it's 150 days.

2. This guy in Omaha is working on a warp drive. He even has a 7' by 7' craft he calls the Blue Bird II.

"Some guys spend their spare time restoring automobiles, devoting garage space to motionless Corvettes and Camaros. Pares is making his own warp drive. To hear him and his small team of supporters tell it, something weird is happening out here in the garage. 'The compression of the fabric of space,' Pares says matter-of-factly. Pares’ garage is exactly as it sounds. This is not some converted hangar or temperature-controlled shed. Pares’ laboratory, the headquarters for his Space Warp Dynamics endeavor, is attached to the mid-size Aksarben-area home where he lives with his wife and their cat. It is split in halves, each side large enough to accommodate a not-very-large car. It is hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It is a garage."

3. The most interesting phenomenon on Twitter.

"Soon we noticed the voices of feminists of color everywhere online, shedding the constraints of misogynist respectability, adopting spandex as praxis, and detailing the experiences of marginalized and multifaceted womanhoods. Social media has lifted the barrier between consumers of media and media itself, transforming that relationship into one of active engagement. It has also lifted the barrier between women like us–displaced, disabled, trans, indigenous and black–and the parts of society that were never supposed to deal with us. The nightlights of kyriarchy were turned off and the dark figures of their imagination began to rise from the cellar they had stuffed all of us into. Suddenly a black trans woman denied access to any space you might enter is right here talking back to you with nuanced media critiques." [Pocket]

4. Digital stuff feels like it'll be around forever, but...

"'Digital preservation is really just an oxymoron at this point,' says Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. 'It’s really just putting plus and minus electronic charges on plastic — and that plastic has an extremely short half-life. So that most digital media, even if you take it and store it correctly, is probably not going to last more than eight or ten, maybe 15 years.' By contrast, with 35mm film, 'we just need to put it into a cold, dark, dry place, pay the electricity bill, and it will last for 500 to a thousand years.'"

5. On cooking dinner.

"You work on the Internet all day, trying and sometimes struggling to attach meaning and value to efforts that can seem inherently ephemeral and intangible, and it’s nice to come home and actually produce something, the value of which is self-evident: this is literally the thing that will keep you from going hungry. Do it well enough, and it’s something for you and your loved ones to actually look forward to, but at the very least, it is necessary. This is essential. You are helping people survive. I realize this is a completely preposterous and privileged position to attach to my ability to follow a recipe for kale and potato and turkey sausage soup. My family was not well-off, and my mom did not enjoy cooking—it was just another fucking thing she had to do between working as many jobs as possible to get by and raising three dumb boys... I’ve turned what was one of the unfortunate rigors of her existence into a low-risk, high-reward activity where the inevitable upshot is me feeling undeservedly capable and decent about myself. Down with the bourgeoisie, and start with me." [Pocket]

culinary. The word is a favorite with the POLYSYLLABIC HUMORIST, who often pronounces it kúl-.

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It Is a Garage