Ben Schott — British Writer born on May 26, 1974,

Ben Schott is a British writer, photographer, and author of the Schott's Miscellanies and Schott's Almanac series... (wikipedia)

The web can be a fast trip to the library, giving you immediate access to a government report, or it can filter media for you, which is why I look at around 15- 20 of these sites every day.
I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.
For me, writing is like being taken on a walk by a footnote: It's amazing where you end up.
I read the papers online, and something usually piques my curiosity - that will then be the baseline of my research for the day.
If I'm researching something strange and rococo, I'll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.