Lazy holiday. I spent about half of today watching documentaries on Netflix while finishing our living room curtains and doing the laundry. So inevitably, I learned quite a bit. Without getting too much into things, here is a list of a few things I learned today:

The designer of the Brooklyn Bridge never lived to see the project started and his son, who continued the project, ended up getting a very bad case of the bends from two years of building the caissons… but he didn’t die! He actually continued supervising the project from his bed, with his wife as his eyes and ears.

The New York Public Library is a larger network of branches and extensions than I ever expected including the Lincoln Center and other special interest collections that I had always thought were private or university collections.

H.H. Holmes , whose birth name was Herman Webster Mudgett, was the first serial killer in the United States. Roger swears that he became a “multi-murderer” due to his birth name.

Fingerprinting didn’t come into play for crime solving until 1903. Very hard to identify bodies.

There are a lot of people writing books about roadside attractions… and they are all experts.