Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone users who plan on traveling in the near future may have trouble communicating. In a rare move, the Federal Aviation Administration is advising passengers not to turn on or charge the company’s new Note 7 smartphone after reports of the device catching fire made the media rounds last week, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The agency is even wary about travelers keeping the Note 7 in a checked bag due to the potential for the phone to spontaneously self-immolate. The FAA’s announcement comes on the heels of three Australian airlines—Qantas, Jetstar, and Virgin Australia—banning use of the phone during flights.
Excitement for the release of the Note 7 in August was dampened after a Florida man reported the phone exploded in his Jeep, setting the vehicle ablaze. “Not the barbeque I wanted on my day off,” he posted on Facebook. Samsung has since issued a recall of the phones and has offered exchanges to customers.
What would it be like to be a quarter of an inch tall? Moviegoers in the summer of 1989 were eager to find out. They flocked to theaters to watch as the Szalinski and Thompson kids dodged refrigerator-sized drops of water, befriended a giant ant, fought a fearsome scorpion, and feasted upon a massive cream-filled cookie. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is often viewed as the quintessential live-action Disney film, but its roots are firmly in the horror movie genre. Here are a few surprising facts about the 1989 classic.
1. THE HORROR DIRECTOR BEHIND RE-ANIMATOR CAME UP WITH THE IDEA.
Stuart Gordon wasn’t the first filmmaker one would think of to direct a Disney film. With a background in experimental theater—including a trippy, in-the-nude version of Peter Pan—he made his name with campy horror films like 1985’s Re-Animator, about a scientist who brings the dead back to life, and 1987’s Dolls, about a murderous collection of dolls (tagline: “They Walk. They Talk. They Kill.”). After he became a father, Gordon decided to make a kids’ movie. Along with Brian Yuzna, who had worked with him on Re-Animator, and Dolls writer Ed Naha, Gordon came up with an idea for a film about a hapless inventor who accidentally shrinks his children and throws them out with the garbage. He pitched the idea to Disney, who loved it and gave Gordon the green light to direct.
2. ITS ORIGINAL TITLE WAS TEENIE WEENIES.
The title was a nod to William Donahey’s comic strip from the early 1900s, which followed the adventures of a tiny, inoffensive band of characters. Disney executives hated it, thinking the title would turn off adult moviegoers. So Gordon and company changed the title to Grounded, then The Backyard before deciding to borrow a line of dialogue that Wayne Szalinski utters to his wife, Diane.
3. DISNEY WAS REALLY NERVOUS ABOUT THE FILM.
Although Disney was excited about Gordon’s idea, they weren’t exactly confident the horror director could deliver a family-friendly feature. “Disney was worried that I was going to kill all the kids,” Gordon said in one interview. “And I kept saying, ‘No, I’m not going to kill them. But I want the audience to think they might die.'” Disney’s trepidations extended to the movie’s creature effects—most notably Anty, the heroic ant.
The studio told Gordon they wanted Anty to look less like a real ant and more like E.T. “I said, ‘Well E.T. scared more kids than an ant does,'” according to Gordon. To convince the brass, Gordon invited them to the workshop where crew members were putting the finishing touches on the robotic puppet. Gordon made Anty nuzzle him like a horse to show how friendly the creature could act. And just like that, the executives were convinced.
4. JOE JOHNSTON REPLACED GORDON AT THE 11TH HOUR.
Just as production on the film was set to begin, Stuart Gordon became sick and had to leave the set. Unable to delay the shoot, Disney brought in Joe Johnston, a visual effects specialist who had worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark and all three Star Wars films. It was his first directing job. After the success of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Johnston went on to direct The Rocketeer, Jumanji, Jurassic Park III, and, most recently, Captain America: The First Avenger. Gordon, meanwhile, finally got his shot at directing Honey, I Shrunk the Kids—albeit 10 years later, helming one episode of the television show, which ran for three seasons in the late 1990s.
5. IT WAS FILMED IN MEXICO CITY.
If you thought the Szalinskis’s suburban California neighborhood and backyard looked like the real deal, well, think again. The entire set—including several houses, complete with white picket fences and manicured lawns—was erected on a back lot at Mexico City’s Churubusco Studios. Established in 1945, Churubusco was the epicenter of Mexican film production in the 20th century and a favorite of cost-conscious American producers, with scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Total Recall, Free Willy, and numerous other films shot there. The set work is very convincing, but there are a few seams showing: If you look carefully in the scene where the mailman is walking the neighborhood, you can see the beams in the back lot wall, which had been painted blue to stand in as the sky.
6. ANTY TOOK UP TO 12 WORKERS TO OPERATE.
The heroic ant, who befriends the pint-sized Szalinski and Thompson kids and (SPOILER ALERT) tragically dies fighting off a scorpion, took a lot of effort to bring to life. The special effects team built multiple versions of Anty, including a miniature for stop-motion animation sequences. Most of the scenes in which Anty interacts with the actors involved a large robotic puppet whose legs, eyes, head, and antennae were all controlled by separate crew members. “It takes somewhere between seven and 12 people to make the ant run,” Peter Zamora, the film’s miniatures assistant, said in a making-of documentary.
7. MARCIA STRASSMAN’S HAIR WAS TWO DIFFERENT COLORS.
YouTube
Two weeks into filming, Marcia Strassman, who played Diane Szalinski, received a note from Disney head Jeffrey Katzenberg requesting she change her hair color from reddish-brown to blonde. Strassman complied, and she kept her hair that color for the sequel, 1992’s Honey, I Blew Up the Kid. “We said, ‘But we’ve been shooting for two weeks,'” Strassman toldThe Philadelphia Inquirer. “And [Katzenberg] said, ‘No one will notice.’ And no one did. No one noticed that my hair is two totally different colors in that movie.”
8. THE SET DESIGNERS USED A LOT OF FOAM.
From giant broom bristles to towering blades of grass, the movie’s set designers were masters at fashioning latex and polyurethane foam into outsized versions of everyday objects. To show the kids getting swept into Wayne Szalinski’s dustpan, designers attached the giant foam bristles to a hanging screen that swept across the stage. The enormous cream-filled cookie, meanwhile, was also made out of foam, with globs of actual cream mixed in for the kids to shovel into their mouths.
9. THE BUMBLEBEE FLIGHT REQUIRED SOME TECHNICAL WIZARDRY.
By 1980s movie standards, and even current ones, the bumblebee ride that Nick Szalenski and Little Russ Thompson take is impressive. Creating the sequence required a giant bee model for close-up shots with the actors, along with an extended shot by a camera that zipped and dove around the Szalenski backyard. Pretty standard stuff, but visual effects lead Tom Smith added a third element: a small, $30,000 robotic bee with miniatures of the actors on top. The fine movements of the robotic bee were spliced in with the close-up shots against the green screen, then touched up with some added digital effects in post-production to create the final sequence. “We were able to cut them quickly enough and mix them up so that it gives the incredible sense of flight when you see it,” Smith said.
10. THE ANIMATED OPENING CREDITS WERE GROUNDBREAKING.
The movie opened with an animated sequence showing two tiny children running from a record needle, a typewriter, and other menacing everyday objects as title credits cleverly materialized. According to the graphic design site Art of the Title, the sequence—created by Kroyer Films—was one of the first to combine hand-drawn animations with 3D models. The team that created the sequence included Andrew Stanton, who would go on to work on Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and WALL·E, along with Eric Stefani, an acclaimed animator and brother of Gwen Stefani. Kroyer went on to produce animated sequences for two other films that year: Troop Beverly Hills and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
11. IT WAS ALSO GROUNDS FOR A LAWSUIT.
The musical score that accompanies the animated credits, written by James Horner, sounds very similar to the 1937 song “Powerhouse,” by jazz composer Raymond Scott—a little too close, by some estimations. Scott’s estate sued Disney for failing to credit the composer. The studio settled the case out of court and made sure the estate received its fair share of future royalties.
12. DISNEY REVIVED THE LONG-DORMANT ANIMATED SHORT.
Those who saw Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in theaters may remember the animated short Tummy Trouble, starring Roger Rabbit, that preceded the film. The seven-minute romp—which also features Baby Herman, a swallowed rattle, and a trip to the hospital gone awry—was the revival of the short films that studios often played before a feature presentation. It was Disney’s first “short” in nearly 25 years, and one of several that the studio released aimed at boosting the popularity of classic characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck with younger viewers.
Given the popularity of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, released the previous year, Disney figured its goofball hare would also boost viewership for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Indeed, Disney gave the two productions equal space on promotional posters and print ads, despite the difference in run times.
13. IT WAS A SURPRISE HIT.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’s $14 million haul on opening weekend was the biggest opening ever for a Disney movie—by a long shot. It was also a surprise for the studio, considering the movie wasn’t a sequel, and had received mixed reviews from critics. “Our tracking showed that there was awareness of the film out there, but there was nothing to make us think it would do what it did,” then-Disney head Jeffrey Katzenberg said at the time. In all, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids would earn more than $130 million domestically and $92 million in worldwide release.
14. BATMAN CONTRIBUTED TO ITS SUCCESS.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids opened on June 23, 1989—the same day as Tim Burton’s Batman, which finished number one at the box office and had fans lining up around the block to see it. According to theLos Angeles Times and other sources, many theatergoers who couldn’t get in to see Batman opted to see Honey, I Shrunk the Kids instead, helping to boost that movie to number two at the box office.
15. IT EARNED AN AWARD FOR POOR GRAMMAR.
As any English major could tell you, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is not a grammatically correct title (it should be “Shrank”). This earned public ridicule from SPELL, the Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature, which awarded the film its Dunce Cap Award for 1989. A Disney executive was quick to fire back that the mistake was deliberate, as it’s taken from a line of dialogue in the film (and the error certainly didn’t do anything to hurt the movie’s box office haul).
16. THE SOUNDTRACK CAME OUT 20 YEARS LATER.
Aside from the film’s opening theme, which became tainted by controversy, the music from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids isn’t particularly memorable. Thus the film’s score wasn’t subsequently released as a soundtrack. But composer James Horner, who had previously scored Aliens and Cocoon, became increasingly popular in the years to come as he scored films like Field of Dreams, Braveheart, Titanic, and Avatar. Demand for the score also rose as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids became a reliable cable rerun. So in 2009, tiny music label Intrada put out a limited run of 3000 copies of the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids soundtrack. It’s sold out, but if you just have to have such classic tracks as “Watering the Grass” and “Lawnmower,” you can nab a used copy for around $50 on Amazon.
17. ONLY ONE OF THE YOUNG ACTORS IS STILL WORKING.
YouTube
For the young actors in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, box office success didn’t translate into long-term career success. Robert Oliveri and Jared Rushton, who played young Nick Szalinski and Ron Thompson, respectively, gave up acting in the 1990s. Same with Amy O’Neill, whose only other major role was in 1993’s White Wolves: A Cry in the Wild II (though she popped up in an uncredited role on Baskets earlier this year). Only Thomas Wilson Brown, who played Little Russ Thompson, continues to appear in films and TV shows, and only sporadically at that.
The adult ensemble, meanwhile, fared somewhat better. Matt Frewer (Big Russ Thompson) has worked steadily in films and TV series like Orphan Black and 12 Monkeys, while Marcia Strassman, known for roles in M*A*S*H and Welcome Back, Kotter, made regular appearances on shows like Tremors, Highlander, and Providence, until her tragic death from breast cancer in 2014. And then there’s Rick Moranis, who went completely off the radar in the mid-1990s to focus on raising his two kids after his wife passed away. In recent interviews, he has said that he would return to acting if the right role comes along. His last movie came more than 10 years ago as the voice of Rutt in Disney’s Brother Bear and Brother Bear 2.
18. IT’S BASICALLY A HORROR MOVIE.
Consider the evidence: It’s got an obsessive scientist, giant bugs, a near-death by lawnmower, and the Freudian nightmare of a father nearly eating his son. The nod to horror films of the past was intentional on the part of Gordon, who sees the movie as an homage to fright-night flicks like Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Incredible Shrinking Man. In recent interviews, he’s quick to lump it in with other horror movies he’s made. “Really, it’s not that different than Re-Animator,” Gordon said. “It’s about a mad scientist and an experiment that goes wrong, and so forth. The potential for severing some heads was there when you have a giant ant coming at you with those big mandibles. Who knows what could happen?”
Alice Wondrak Biel/Glacier National Park via Facebook
Glacier National Park in Montana has a new employee, and she’s a little ruff around the edges. Gracie, a 2-year-old border collie, is the park’s first-ever Bark Ranger, a herding dog tasked with keeping wildlife at a safe distance from visitors, NPR and Montana Public Radio report.
Most of her job description includes keeping bighorn sheep and mountain goats away from a busy parking lot in the park’s Logan Pass. The animals like to lick up poisonous antifreeze and nibble on discarded food and often get too close to visitors who are taking photos.
Previously, park employees have tried to shoo away the animals by shouting, waving, and making loud noises, but they tend to return fairly quickly. When wild animals and humans meet, it’s dangerous for both parties, and animals can get used to humans feeding them, bringing them back regularly.
The park has previously used trained dogs to drive away bears from roads during the visitor season. A Canadian National Park uses border collies to keep deer and their newborn fawns away from highly trafficked areas. Eventually, the animals learn to stay away altogether, as the Glacier National Park sheep and goats hopefully will.
Gracie and her handler visit the parking lot to drive away any wild animals once or twice a week. The rest of the time, they’re out in the park teaching people about staying safe around wildlife.
If you’ve ever wondered how long it takes a 10-ton ice cube to melt down to a tepid puddle, a Seattle installation will soon reveal the answer. As City Lab reports, ICE CUBE will be appearing in Occidental Square today, Friday, September 9.
The public art piece is the work of Olson Kundig, an architecture firm based in the city. Their latest project is meant to evoke the stages of the natural water cycle, slowly melting and evaporating as time progresses.
The massive ice block is being installed just in time for the Seattle Design Festival, which runs from September 10 to 23. The designers write on Instagram, “Over the course of the festival the ice will shift from opaque to translucent, offering a cool respite to visitors and scattering ambient sunlight and colors throughout Occidental Park.”
There’s a chance the exhibit, or part of it anyway, will remain in the square even after the festival has ended. Seven hours is barely enough time to melt a 300-pound ice chunk in triple-digit heat. The Seattle ice cube weighs around 66 times that and will benefit from much milder temperatures.
Iceland is known as “The Land of Fire and Ice” for a reason: the country is filled with geographic features on both ends of the heat spectrum, from glaciers to volcanic springs, all of which contribute to its stunning photo ops.
If you can’t make it out for a vacation anytime soon, you can still journey to (and through) the icier side of Iceland with the video below from Blue Eden, a video series from brothers Patrick and Henrick Shyu. In the four-minute clip, the brothers travel inside an ice cave located near “Jokulsarlon Glacier Lagoon and Skaftafell in South Iceland, at the base of Svinafellsjokull Glacier,” according to the YouTube description. They traveled there in the winter of 2014, when it was cold enough that the risk of collapse was relatively low. The video is an extended version of a snippet that was featured in a previous timelapse, which showcases even more of Iceland’s wondrous beauty.
On September 9, 1947, programmer Grace Hopper and her Harvard University peers famously described processing issues with the Mark II electromechanical computer as a “bug.” In their case, the culprit was a dead moth stuck in a relay switch, but the word has been used more generally to describe technical and mechanical glitches since the 1870s, when Thomas Edison used the term to describe problems with his inventions.
Advances in computing, the web, and the internet have spawned some nasty bugs over the past several decades, which the National Institute of Standards and Technology estimated in 2002 was costing the U.S. economy upwards of $59.5 billion per year. Many companies use bug bounty programs or enlist software-savvy patrons to hunt down bugs before they cause too much trouble—but despite all our efforts, more than a few have gotten the best of us.
1. MARINER 1 IS BROUGHT DOWN BY ONE MISPLACED HYPHEN (WE THINK)
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has seen its share of disasters resulting from computer bugs—including during its first planetary mission. NASA launched the Mariner 1 on July 22, 1962, with the intent of sending the probe on a flyby of Venus. But not long after launch, the Atlas-Agena rocket booster blasting Mariner 1 into space started to lose contact with the ground signal, probably due to a faulty antenna. NASA had planned for this scenario; the rocket was supposed to reject the signals and keep on the correct trajectory. But something went wrong with the backup software, throwing off the rocket’s trajectory. There was nothing left to do but abort the mission—and so, just 293 seconds after launch, Mariner 1 was purposely blown up.
What exactly caused the rocket’s software to go haywire is murky, but later reports referred to a tiny error in the guidance system’s coded instructions—variously a dropped hyphen, an “overbar transcription error,” or a misplaced decimal point, depending on the source. According to WIRED, “[officials] may also have been less than forthcoming with hard facts owing to the high-profile nature of the mission … [and] in the face of the much-ballyhooed space race with the Soviet Union, which was well underway by then.” But whatever the glitch’s true cause, sci-fi heavyweight Arthur C. Clarke likely helped Mariner 1 be forever remembered as just another casualty of missed typos that was “wrecked by the most expensive hyphen in history.”
2. ARIANE 5 FLIGHT 501’S PRIMARY AND BACKUP SYSTEMS CRASH IN 0.05 SECONDS
When the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket launched Flight 501 on June 4, 1996, it did so using working code from the Ariane 4. However, just 36.7 seconds after launch, the Ariane 5’s more powerful engines reportedly set off an arithmetic bug in the flight computer, triggering an overflow condition that crashed both its secondary and primary inertial reference systems (the backup tanked first by 0.05 seconds). This caused the rocket’s primary processor to overpower its engines, and—40 seconds after launch—the craft disintegrated. Thankfully, it was an unmanned test flight.
3. AT&T’S MACHINE NETWORK REPEATEDLY CRASHES ITSELF FOR NINE HOURS
Communication errors don’t just plague space-bound computers, as a major 1990 snafu from telecommunications giant AT&T illustrates. On January 15 of that year, a bug in AT&T’s new version of its software for controlling #4ESS long-distance switches crashed the company’s computers by creating a chain reaction of crash-and-reboot signals that repeated every six seconds. Soon, a network of 114 long-distance switches locked in a hopeless loop of self-sabotage. After approximately 60,000 people were left without long-distance service for around nine hours, AT&T was finally able to fix the glitch by swapping in an older version of the software.
4. GOOGLE THINKS THE ENTIRE WEB IS MALWARE—ITSELF INCLUDED
For up to 55 minutes on the morning of January 31, 2009, Google’s search engine warned users that everything on the web—including its own homepage—was malware. As Google’s then-VP of Search Products & User Experience Marissa Mayer explained on the company’s blog, an updated list of known malicious websites included a single, stray, all-too-common forward slash (or “/” ) as an entry—telling Google’s browser, in effect, that all websites were no-go areas.
5. WINDOWS LOCKS OUT PAYING CUSTOMERS FOR ACTS OF PIRACY
On August 24, 2007, Microsoft unleashed its automated antipiracy processes on legitimate new Windows users thanks to a computer glitch. For as long as 19 hours, people who tried to install legally acquired copies of the operating system were informed by Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft’s in-house antipiracy software, that their actions and copies were illegal; new would-be Vista users also had some features shut off. According to Microsoft, what happened was that they sent pre-production code to servers that hadn’t been upgraded to account for changes to product key encryption/decryption, which meant the servers declined all activation requests.
6. THE MARS CLIMATE ORBITER ARRIVES AT ITS DESTINATION … AND DISINTEGRATES
Humankind’s numerous attempts to send crafts to Mars have often met with bad ends because of computer bugs or other technical glitches, and NASA’s efforts are no exception. In 1999, the agency’s $655-million robotic Climate Orbiter probe had finally completed its journey to Mars, where it was supposed to orbit the planet and, eventually, serve as a communications relay for a future Mars lander. But when ground computers that controlled Climate Orbiter’s thrusters calculated its trajectory down to the planet using pound-seconds rather than the newton-seconds NASA expected, the orbiter entered the atmosphere and burned up.
7. WORLD OF WARCRAFT SUFFERS THROUGH THE “CORRUPTED BLOOD INCIDENT”
World of Warcraft is known for its highly detailed challenges, but a 2005 programming oversight led to an in-game outbreak that was a lot more realistic than either designers or players saw coming. At the time, Blizzard Entertainment had just added a new instanced dungeon area to the game that featured a monster capable of infecting player characters with a very damaging, spell-and-potion-proof plague that wasn’t supposed to leave that area.
It was soon discovered, however, that players could transmit the disease to other player characters and even some non-player ones after teleporting back to the game’s capital city—and an outbreak in the thousands ensued. But it was, at least, a learning experience: The “Corrupted Blood Incident” ended up providing a window for disease and terrorism researchers into crowd mentalities and self-preservation behaviors, with Tufts researchers saying the simulated outbreak “raised the possibility for valuable scientific content to be gained from this unintentional game error.”
8. THE MARS POLAR LANDER THINKS IT’S LANDED, PLUMMETS FROM 130 FEET UP
NASA’s exploration of Mars hit another bug-induced stumbling block on December 3, 1999, when time had almost come for its Polar Lander to get settled on the planet. After atmospheric entry, it was supposed to jettison its solar panels and cruise-stage equipment, release its dual Deep Space 2 microprobes, and make a controlled landing on its supportive retrorockets the rest of the way down. Instead, the spacecraft’s computer seemingly interpreted forceful mid-air vibrations on the lander’s legs—likely caused by turbulence—as evidence it had set foot on Mars. So, at around 130 feet above the Martian surface, the $120 million (before launch vehicle), car-sized bundle of technology turned its boosters off and landed with a splat.
9. A TRADING GLITCH LOSES KNIGHT CAPITAL $440 MILLION IN 45 MINUTES
On August 1, 2012, a software glitch caused computers belonging to Jersey City-based Knight Capital Group to buy and sell shares of stocks unchecked for 45 minutes after the stock market opened. The company was forced to sell off its erroneously purchased shares the next day, losing a staggering $440 million. According to a statement released by the company, the event “severely impacted” its capital base (a pool of funds the investment firm used in its daily business of buying and selling) and left it “actively pursuing its strategic and financing alternatives.”
The United States was once a country of many dialects, but the spread of broadcasting media over the last century has taken a toll on regional speech: As radio hosts and TV newscasters started talking to the nation, the nation started to mimic them, abandoning local accents and dialects for a more standardized mode of speech. But now, one podcasting network is trying to help bring back America’s disappearing regional slang.
The Atlanticreports that Acast podcasting network has teamed up with the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) to revive 50 of the most endangered local words and phrases from across the United States. Acast is providing its podcasters—which include BuzzFeed, Ikea, and Financial Times—with a list of near-forgotten regional slang compiled by DARE, and encouraging them to incorporate slang terms into their podcasts. The idea is to help preserve endangered slang, and to get people interested in America’s rich linguistic heritage.
Acast Stories USA founder Karl Rosander tells The Guardian he hopes Acast’s popular podcasts can help combat the linguistic homogeneity of the airwaves. “This popularity should help bring these endangered words back into public discourse, with our podcast hosts using, pronouncing correctly and contextualising the DARE words and phrases in an organic and replicable way,” he explains. “As they say in New England, ‘I vum’ that this project should help restore these words and phrases to their former glory.”
Check out Acast and DARE’s list of endangered slang below:
Barn burner: a wooden match that can be struck on any surface. Chiefly Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Maryland
Bat hide: a dollar bill. Chiefly Southwest
Be on one’s beanwater: to be in high spirits, feel frisky. Chiefly New England
Bonnyclabber: thick, sour milk. Chiefly North Atlantic
Counterpin: a bedspread. Chiefly South, South Midland
Croker sack: a burlap bag. Chiefly Gulf States, South Atlantic
Cuddy: a small room, closet, or cupboard.
Cup towel: a dish towel. Chiefly Texas, Inland South
Daddock: rotten wood, a rotten log. Chiefly New England
Dish wiper: a dish towel. Chiefly New England
Dozy of wood: decaying. Chiefly Northeast, especially Maine
Dropped egg: a poached egg. Chiefly New England
Ear screw: an earring. Chiefly Gulf States, Lower Mississippi Valley
Emptins: homemade yeast used as starter. Chiefly New England, Upstate New York
Farmer match: a wooden match than can be struck on any surface. Chiefly Upper Midwest, Great Lakes, New York, West Virginia
Fleech: to coax, wheedle, flatter. South Atlantic
Fogo: An offensive smell. Chiefly New England
Frog strangler: a heavy rain. Chiefly South, South Midland
Goose drownder: a heavy rain. Chiefly Midland
I vum: I swear, I declare. Chiefly New England
Larbo: a type of candy made of maple syrup on snow. New Hampshire
Last button on Gabe’s coat: the last bit of food. Chiefly South, South Midland
Leader: a downspout or roof gutter. Chiefly New York, New Jersey
Nasty-neat: overly tidy. Scattered, but especially Northeast
Parrot-toed: pigeon-toed. Chiefly Mid Atlantic, South Atlantic
Pin-toed: pigeon-toed. Especially Delaware, Maryland, Virginia
Popskull: cheap or illegal whiskey. Chiefly Southern Appalachians
Pot cheese: cottage cheese. Chiefly New York, New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, Connecticut
Racket store: a variety store. Especially Texas
Sewing needle: a dragonfly. Especially Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Massachusetts [Folk lore says that it would sew up one’s eyes and mouth (or fingers and toes) if one fell asleep outside.]
Shat: a pine needle. Chiefly Delaware, Maryland, Virginia
Shivering owl: a screech owl. Chiefly South Atlantic, Gulf States [Its cry is said to portend a death in the family or other ill omen.]
Skillpot: a turtle. Chiefly District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia
Sonsy: cute, charming, lively. Scattered
Spill: a pine needle. Chiefly Maine
Spin street yarn: to gossip. Especially New England
Spouty: of ground: soggy, spongy. Scattered
Suppawn: corn meal mush. Chiefly New York
Supple-sawney: a homemade jointed doll that can be made to “dance.” Scattered
Tacker: a child, especially a little boy. Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania
Tag: a pine needle. Chiefly Virginia
To bag school: to play hooky. Chiefly Pennsylvania, New Jersey
Tow sack: a burlap bag. Chiefly South, South Midland, Texas, Oklahoma
Trash mover: a heavy rain. Chiefly Mid Atlantic, South Atlantic, Lower Mississippi Valley
Tumbleset: a somersault. Chiefly Southeast, Gulf States; also Northeast
Wamus: a men’s work jacket. Chiefly North Central, Pennsylvania
Whistle pig: a groundhog (also known as woodchuck). Chiefly Appalachians
Winkle-hawk: a three-cornered tear in cloth. Chiefly Hudson Valley, New York
Work brittle: eager to work. Chiefly Midland, especially Indiana
Committing to the care of a pet over its lifetime has substantial emotional rewards. Unfortunately, it can also carry the occasional financial penalty. Depending on the diagnosis, some individuals can spend upwards of $30,000 out of pocket on medical care for a four-legged loved one. In fact, Fortune reports that pet owners in the U.S. are expected to shell out a total of $15.9 billion this year on veterinary care, according to the American Pet Product Association.
Despite rising veterinary costs, less than 1 percent of the nation’s 174 million dogs and cats are covered by some kind of pet health insurance. If you’re on the fence about signing up, here are a few things you should know.
Health insurance for pets generally mirrors the same policies as bipedal human coverage. There’s typically a deductible, co-pays, and a monthly premium that can be as little as $25, with the cost increasing for more comprehensive plans. (The higher the premium, the more the insurance is likely to pay out, with some options covering up to 100 percent of incurred expenses.)
For a relatively healthy animal, it’s likely that the premiums will outpace any needed veterinary care. But if your pet should be struck with any number of complicated issues—cancer, heart trouble, accidents, or long-term monitoring—the bills can quickly add up into the thousands. Even a moderate policy would help offset some of those costs.
Naturally, insurance companies aren’t in the habit of being generous, which is why reading the fine print is crucial. Some policies won’t cover certain breeds due to chronic health issues or pre-existing conditions like hip dysplasia; others may insist on the insured paying the veterinarian and then waiting for reimbursement.
If you can afford a surprise bill, you may have trouble justifying the expense. But if a lump sum would be hard to come by, you might be best off having some form of coverage. In either case, preventative medicine is a must: Routine health care like brushing a pet’s teeth or making sure they’re spayed or neutered can help offset future complications. (Tooth plaque can lead to lung issues; spaying can reduce the incidence of tumors.) It’s also a good idea to watch your pet’s weight. The thinner they are, the fatter your wallet is likely to be.
This is not your grandmother’s flowered wallpaper. New patterns from Murals Wallpaper depict gorgeous marble designs that will make gradient kitchen counters jealous. The UK-based wallpaper supplier has long been known for its creative designs. Past themes include maps, forests, cities, and animals. Space lovers can enjoy gigantic galaxies on their walls while aspiring marine biologists can deck out their bathrooms in sharks. Their latest marble theme offers elegant designs that can work in almost any room in the house.
Each design is custom made to fit the exact wall size; it can be applied by anyone who has experience hanging wallpaper. At $34 a square meter, it’s certainly more affordable than getting walls actually made of marble.
