You know what? Someday you're going to get old and talk about the stuff in your house with the same intensity you used to talk about art too. It's just part of life. Deal with it.

There are two positions open on the board of the lovely Park Slope Food Coop, that magical place in Brooklyn where neighbor turns against neighbor regarding issues such as boycotting Israeli food and, oh, anything else. But! There are four candidates for the board! Which one will not make the cut!? Here are some excerpts from their statements, which were, the Coop's Linewaiter's Gazette notes, printed "unedited." [PDF here.] Let's meet them!

• "My personal life reflects my dedication to the values of the Coop. As an avid bicyclist, commuting 30 miles a day year round, to and from my office in Queens, and as someone who [...]

"I was born here. The G train is not a train."

"An article on Feb. 17 about a decline in field trips for students because of the New York City school bus drivers’ strike referred incorrectly to the 280-pound albino Burmese python at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. The python, a favorite of schoolchildren, is a 'she' (Fantasia), not a 'he.'" —The NYT is taking this accountability thing very seriously, when it comes to enormous albino zoo animals that are a favorite of children.

Photo by edenpictures.

Downtown Brooklyn has a temporary "glut" of parking, which is mandated for new developments, because in part there is just so much transit available. (These are all transitional issues; also, this is only specific to like, the 18 or so square blocks of downtown Brooklyn.) So the City is working on rezoning to give developers back the parking spaces. "'They would turn it into more luxury housing,' [Councilwoman Letitia] James said, suggesting that it was naïve to think developers would volunteer to turn their extra parking into subsidized housing or a community space." YA THINK.

My 8 year old trick or treated as Artemis Fowl, but people in Brooklyn thought he was Mitt Romney and were actually kind of mean to him :(

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) November 1, 2012

":(" indeed.

It has been really fun to watch reporter Andrew Rice follow the story of a homeless shelter being proposed in Carroll Gardens. It is basically his Silent Spring.

Hello, would you like to buy something weird? Hammer Time is our guide to things that are for sale at auction: fantastic, consequential and freakishly grotesque archival treasures that appear in public for just a brief moment, most likely never to be seen again.

Sixty-two years after its publication, notable events in New York City caused the poem "September 1, 1939" to be immediately, and repeatedly, invoked. Its application seemed clear. But so much of Wystan Hugh Auden’s poetry—for both his generation and those to follow—is full of the kind of abstraction that is less readily apparent, of verses that slowly unfurl with each reading.

The sentiments [...]

Here is a reenactment of novelist Martin Amis getting upset because he has come to view the scene in Brooklyn, where he moved two years ago, as "terribly transactional" and "populated by conventional posers." [Via]

Over the last three years, everyone bought everything in South Brooklyn. Now, the dregs are being dumped onto the market, for surprising—some would say shocking!—prices. Obviously the big palatial townhouses of Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and Carroll Gardens still get listed at $2 and $3+ million. (Also, haha, here is an awful one-bedroom for $760K.) 71 3rd Street, which is two tiny, tiny stories and a basement, recently sold for $1.2 million. 339 Hoyt Street, which was harrowing, if largely untouched—the stairs were made of plywood, held together by little brackets—sold for $1.47 million a few months ago. And now it gets worse.

Exhibit A: a [...]

Devices like iPhones have a unique name, a string that is usually called a "universally unique identifier." That the word "unique" doesn't ever need any modifier is, I guess, beside the point. It's not just unique, it's unique in the whooooole universe. Sometimes they call it a globally unique identifier. Heh. Anyway, a UUID is 32 characters and four hyphens. There are, according to the math whizzes on Wikipedia, 39 digits in the number representing 32 possible combinations of letters and numbers. That's a really big number, more than there are people, for sure.

This is a helpful thing, for obvious reasons. Wouldn't it be amazing if every human had [...]

Choire: Hello, I have some questions, at this time of "holidays" and "family" and "everyone in Brooklyn having a second and sometimes even third child, also often having two at the same time, because IVF" (I almost typed IDF, because of the news!) and I guess my main question is: how do people talk themselves into having children when the world, at least as we know it, is going to likely end during the lifetime of these children?

Ken: So you're considering having a child. Congratulations! Brooklyn is certainly a wonderful environment for children.

Choire: It is true that once every five years I think "HA, I SHOULD GET A [...]

"Oh, it's terrible in Manhattan, we can only imagine how awful it must be in Brooklyn," Manhattan people were emailing the night of the storm, before they couldn't really email any more. Yes: most of Brooklyn lost cable TV for about six hours. There were some twigs about on the broad sidewalks too. Although, the DVRs still played! So most Brooklynites didn't notice much of a thing, outside of the devastation of Red Hook and some more localized disasters, except when Brooklyn was blinded by the Ghostbusters-like shooting lights of Manhattan's power transformers exploding.

Now lots of downtown Manhattan hold-outs turned have-nots are refugees in Brooklyn—except for the likes of [...]

"Community gardening is really just as much about the community as the gardening, and chickens can sometimes point out ways in which that’s the case," says one chicken-lover in Park Slope, who helped build a chicken coop in a large community garden. So the war against chickens is raging in Brooklyn. With the Warren-St. Marks Community Garden housing eight chickens over the winter, neighbors are furious at the possibility of clucking and vermin, even despite the really useful fact that chickens can also point out which of three Bic lighters is the red one. Almost every time. (Also: eggs!) But angry neighbors have a point: does the neighborhood [...]

"This is New York: We all like things our own way. We all think we’re the best. I love New York City — every inch of it, even Staten Island, but I prefer to live in Manhattan. So, what? My friends love Brooklyn. Great! I think it’s time we shelve this antiquated story line about which borough is better and leave it for the Knicks and the Nets to decide. Live where you want. Do what you want. Be nice to people." —What's more irritating about all your friends who have moved to Brooklyn, the way they expect you to give up an hour of your life to the F [...]