Month: February 2017

Running out of ways to say you’re feeling vexed? You’re in luck. We’ve teamed up with our trusty pals at the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) to liven up your livid language. From the Big Easy and New England to the Appalachians and Hawaii, here are 13 regional idioms for “angry.”

1. FÂCHÉ

PO’d in the Bayou? You can say you’re fâché, which translates from French as “angry.”

2. HAVE A BLOOD RUSH

Another Louisiana term. According to the wonderfully titled Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales, “He’s havin’ a blood rush” means “He’s getting angry.”

3. HUHU

This Hawaiian term meaning angry or to become angry is also spelled hou-hou. “No Hu Hu” is a popular song, according to a quote in DARE, and has “appeared on road repair signs” to mean “Pardon the inconvenience.” According to Pidgin to Da Max, an illustrated dictionary of Hawaiian “pidgin” words, the haole or non-native Hawaiian phrase “Relax. Don’t get upset” might be translated in pidgin as “No huhu, brah.”

4. JUMP SALTY

African American vernacular meaning “to get angry,” or to respond “in an extreme or unexpected manner.” Despite its awesomeness, jump salty seems to have died out in the 1970s. From James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974): “He warned me if I didn’t take my hands off him we might never get uptown and then my Daddy might jump salty.”

5. BURN THUNDERWOOD

If you’re raging in Georgia, you might say you’re burning thunderwood. Thunderwood is another name for poison sumac, known for its angry, itchy oil.

6. GET ONE’S CHIN OUT

Nettled in Nevada? You could say you’ve gotten your chin out.

7. ALL HORNS AND RATTLES

This wrathful Western term refers to cattle’s horns and snakes’ rattles, according to DARE. As Western Words: A Dictionary of the Old West puts it regarding someone in an all-horns-and-rattles mood, “Maybe don’t say nothin’, but it ain’t safe to ask questions.”

8. ON THE PECK

Another Western saying, on the peck means irritable, angry, or ready to fight. Peck probably comes from the sense to nag or scold. According to some of the quotes in DARE, on the peck also refers specifically to a bad-tempered cow.

9. CHEW FIRE

Those feeling cross in Kentucky may say they’re chewing fire. The term is a blend of the aggressive idioms “chew nails” (as in a hammer and nails) and “breathe fire.” While the latter means to express oneself angrily, the former, according to DARE, refers to “a very mean person”—in other words, someone “mean enough to chew nails.” Other “mean” sayings involving masticating hardware include “chew twenty-penny nails,” “chew nails and spit rust,” and “chew nails and spit submarines.”

10. CHEW ONE’S BIT(S)

Those storming in the South and South Midland might be chewing their bits. This could be related to the horsey idiom, champing or chomping at the bit. To chew one’s bit also means “to argue or talk too much or too loud,” according to DARE.

11. HAVE KITTENS

This Northern phrase similar to have a cow means to lose one’s composure or become agitated or angry. Variations include get kittens, have a kitten, and pass kittens. A cat fit is a “burst of joy or (more often) anger.”

12. BUST A HAME STRING

To bust a hame string—where hame string is an alteration of hamstring—means “to make a sudden great effort,” with a transferred meaning of “to become excessively angry.” Usage is scattered throughout the U.S. with DARE quotes from the Appalachians, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and New Mexico.

13. FEATHER WHITE

This New England term refers to both an angry sea and an angry person. Maine Lingo: A Wicked-Good Guide to Yankee Vernacular says that a “wind-whipped sea, all whitecaps, is said to be feather white,” and hence, “some degree of agitation in a person: ‘He came all feather white to give me a piece of his mind!’”

If you’re looking for a restaurant that’s off the beaten path, consider The Pearl in Brussels. To eat there, diners must venture 16 feet below the surface of an indoor pool.

According to Reuters, The Pearl consists of a 6-foot-wide underwater pod that’s only accessible after a quick scuba dive. Once patrons climb inside and shed their gear, gourmet grub in air-tight containers is delivered by wet-suited servers.

The menu includes foie gras, lobster salad, and champagne, as well as a price tag to match. The whole experience costs around $106 per person. If you’re willing to spend serious cash to enjoy an aquatic dinner, there are underwater restaurants elsewhere that don’t require their diners to get wet.

[h/t Reuters]

There’s nothing weirder than learning that one of your favorite stories didn’t really happen that way. For the thousands of devoted fans of the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, that problem is particularly acute. After all, the books are based on real events—but events that are also largely fictitious. Where does history end and fiction begin? On the 150th birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder, here’s a reminder that truth and fiction don’t always coincide.

1. THE INGALLS FAMILY DIDN’T ALWAYS HEAD WEST

From the moment the Ingalls family sets out in their wagon and leaves the Little House in the Big Woods, the Little House books show an unceasing push West. Real life and Manifest Destiny don’t always line up, though, and in fact the Ingalls family tracked back and forth several times before setting down in De Smet, South Dakota.

The Ingalls family’s first stop after Wisconsin was Independence, Kansas (with a possible stop in Missouri), where they built a “little house” on the open prairie. But the land was not theirs to settle: It was owned by the Osage people [PDF] and the Ingalls family, like thousands of other settlers, were squatters waiting for the Osage to be driven out so that the United States could take it over. It’s not entirely clear why the Ingalls family left, but instead of continuing west they went back to Wisconsin.

Next, they went west again, this time settling near Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Then, financial difficulties, illness, and a plague of locusts forced them to move on. They went to visit family elsewhere in Minnesota, but while there, Laura’s 10-month-old brother, Freddie, died after a sudden illness. Then they continued on to Burr Oak, Iowa, where they ran a hotel. The Ingallses then backtracked to Walnut Grove, where Mary lost her vision, then went west again and eventually settled in what is now South Dakota.

Nonetheless, Laura and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who heavily edited and helped develop the first books, decided that the fictional Ingallses should always move West. The result is a sense of wanderlust and movement that gives the series its structure.

2. JACK, LAURA’S DOG, DIDN’T LEAVE KANSAS

Aw, Jack! Laura’s happy little puppy pal! Though faithful Jack tracks the fictional Laura through the books until she becomes an adolescent, Laura revealed in Pioneer Girl, the original autobiography that formed the basis for the books, that he was actually left behind in Kansas when Pa traded him for some horses and ponies. When writing the book, Laura decided to have Jack die peacefully in his sleep—perhaps in a way she could control, as opposed to the uncertain fate of her real-life dog.

3. MARY INGALLS PROBABLY DIDN’T HAVE SCARLET FEVER

Everyone knows the story of how Mary Ingalls contracted scarlet fever and lost her sight permanently. Except she probably didn’t. Dr. Beth Tarini, a professor and pediatric and adolescent medicine specialist, obsessed over Mary’s diagnosis from the time she was a child, then discovered in med school that scarlet fever can’t blind someone.

But viral meningoencephalitis can—and Tarini thinks that Laura and her daughter, Rose, attributed the blindness to scarlet fever either to make the story more accessible to kids or because the disease may have already been familiar from other novels like Little Women. She even published an academic paper about it [PDF]. (In real life, Laura wrote Mary had “spinal meningitis,” which she crossed out and replaced with “some sort of spinal sickness. I am not sure if the Dr. named it.” She also wrote that the blindness was caused by a stroke, but Tarini deemed a stroke unlikely since there were no other signs of one.)

Mary may not have gone blind from scarlet fever, but she did lose her sight. She ended up attending the Iowa College for the Blind, where she could take classes like civil government, botany, and piano tuning. Mary was an adept student and put the industrial training she got there to good use: After Pa died, she made fly nets to help the family earn more money.

4. THE INGALLS FAMILY HAD GUESTS DURING THE LONG WINTER

Houses were small in the pioneer era, but that didn’t mean that they were all devoted to single-family living. During the “hard winter” of 1880-81, the Ingalls family took in a couple named Maggie and George Masters. George was the son of a family friend and Maggie was his new wife, who had married him in an apparent shotgun wedding situation. “Maggie didn’t want the baby to be born at her folks’ and disgrace them,” Laura wrote in a letter to her daughter, Rose. “George’s folks were mad because he married her.”

The Masters family were not the best of houseguests. In her notes to Pioneer Girl, Ingalls scholar Pamela Smith Hill explains that Maggie had her baby in the house without the assistance of a doctor, and the newlyweds ran out of money and kept wearing out their welcome. “Times like this test people,” wrote Laura, “and we were getting to know George and Maggie.”

So why aren’t they in The Long Winter, the award-winning book that relates the story of a winter so extreme, the blizzards lasted six months? Chalk it up to authorial savvy: Laura felt it would dilute the power of a family stuck inside their house, forced to face the elements as a unit.

5. NELLIE OLESON WASN’T A REAL PERSON

If there’s a villain in the Little House books, it’s Nellie Oleson, the snooty brat who torments Laura when they’re girls and tries to steal Almanzo from Laura when they’re young women. In reality, though, there wasn’t a single Nellie Oleson. She is thought to have been a composite of three real-life people named Genevieve Masters, Nellie Owens, and Stella Gilbert. Laura had unpleasant run-ins with all three, interactions she apparently never forgot.

BONUS: “ALMANZO” WASN’T PRONOUNCED AL-MAHN-ZO

Laura gives her beau, Almanzo, a sweet nickname in the books: Manly. (She also referred to him as “the man of the house” in real life.) That’s for good reason—his name was pronounced Al-MAN-zo, not Al-mahn-zo.

The wrong pronunciation apparently took hold through the confounding influence that was the Little House on the Prairie TV show—a polarizing pop culture phenomenon that also introduced inaccuracies and anachronisms like adopted children and basketball into the fictional Ingalls family.

From bath bombs shaped like the Harry Potter sorting hat to bath bombs that resemble Pokeballs, the scented products can make the simple act of taking a bath more interesting. Some—like this set modeled after all the planets (and the sun) in our solar system—can even help you soak in a more out-of-this-world experience.

Each of the nine bath bombs features a colorful design that resembles that of its corresponding planet and is made natural ingredients. The “Sun” is made up of ginger and jasmine, “Mercury” makes use of Moroccan spices with activated charcoal, “Venus” includes guave goji, “Earth” smells like an olive grove, “Mars” incorporates rose and peony, “Jupiter” features saffron and honey, “Saturn” smells like lavender, and finally, “Uranus” and “Neptune” share black raspberry and vanilla.

The whole set of nine can be purchased on Uncommon Goods for $48.

6 Stops on the Hunt for the Holy Grail. The relic might be nowhere at all, but the places in the legend’s history are real.
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Like the CIA and DARPA before them, the FBI will no longer receive FOIA requests by email as of March 1. You’ll have to use fax machines or snail mail.
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Secrets of the Centenarians. They all attribute their longevity to something different, so maybe it is just luck.
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The Rock Springs Massacre. In 1885, the mining community of Rock Springs, Wyoming, exploded in anger over Chinese laborers in the mines, leaving 28 dead.
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The first episode of The Walking Dead may still be the show’s finest hour. Six years later, the series is less than it could be.    
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During World War II, the U.S. Saw Italian-Americans as a Threat to Homeland Security. Over half a million came under government restrictions.
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The First Underwater Portrait. The 1899 technology that enabled it was rather dangerous. 
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17 Spooky Photos of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary. It’s easy to believe the place is haunted.

The Terminator is back—this time, in board game form. Space Goat Productions, a Washington-based comic book studio, has announced that it’s launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund an official game based on the classic 1984 movie. The campaign is slated to go live on February 15.

Space Ghost Productions has teamed up with Lynnvander Studios—the Canadian game design studio responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the Board Game and Galaxy Quest: the Board Game—to design The Terminator game. In a news release, it’s described as “an asymmetrical strategy game played across two boards, one in 1984 and one in 2029.” One player controls the game’s Skynet machines (Hunter Killer flying machines, Terminator Endoskeletons, and a few new robots), and other players are members of the human resistance fighting against the machine uprising.

The Terminator Kickstarter isn’t live yet, but fans of the movie can sign up to receive email updates. Once it’s up and running, the campaign will provide backers with a discount on The Termination Box, a box of game accessories and miniatures. For more information, visit the game’s website.

Even in an increasingly digital world, there’s still a need for printed text. But wasting paper could be a thing of the past with new technology under development by a research team from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; the University of California, Riverside; and China’s Shandong University. This new paper is printed with light instead of ink, allowing it to be reused up to dozens of times, Co.Design reports.

The paper, described in Nano Letters, is blue rather than white, and it’s covered in a nanoparticle coating that is sensitive to UV light. These titanium dioxide nanoparticles are mixed with Prussian blue pigment (the blue color in blueprints), which becomes colorless when its particles gain electrons. The reaction that occurs when these pigments are exposed to UV light turns the blue clear. After about five days—or 10 minutes at 250°F—the paper fades back to solid blue, erasing the writing.

A UV light printer can either print white text on a blue background or be programmed to print the background itself instead, resulting in blue text against a white background. The nanoparticle coating can be used over and over again, allowing one sheet of paper to be reprinted 80 times before it has to be thrown away.

The researchers hope to one day be able to print in full color with a similar system. They are currently working on a laser printer compatible with their light-printable paper. Until it hits the market, you’ll have to content yourself with buying notebooks that can be erased in the microwave.

[h/t Co.Design]

Earning a degree usually entails sitting in classes, meeting with fellow students in study groups and stopping by your professor’s office to ask questions. But online universities allow students to earn a degree or certificate without attending classes in person or meeting instructors face-to-face. Although some people are still skeptical of online education, more and more students are opting to learn this way. Take a look at these nine common myths about online degrees.

1. THE MYTH: THEY’RE NOT AS VALID AS “REAL” DEGREES.

Contrary to popular opinion, most online programs offer rigorous curriculum and personalized instruction. And attitudes about the quality of online education are shifting; in addition to online-only institutions, many top-ranked universities now offer online and distance learning courses as well.

2. THE MYTH: THE COURSEWORK IS EASIER.

Accredited online programs offer coursework that is just as challenging as what you’d get in a traditional in-person class. While online students may have more scheduling flexibility, they still have to complete assignments on time, participate in discussions and study the same curriculum as traditional students.

Some people think that students opt for an online degree because they’re too lazy to get dressed and show up to class, but most online students actually have high levels of self-discipline. Because they’re not in the same room as their professor and fellow students, online students must manage their time well (often while juggling a job or other commitments) and motivate themselves to engage with the material to do their best.

3. THE MYTH: THEY’RE ONLY MEANT FOR PART-TIME STUDENTS.

It’s true that many students choose online degree programs because they need to continue working while they obtain their degrees. But, just as traditional colleges run on a quarter, trimester or semester schedule, online degree programs follow a set schedule that may require a significant amount of study and class time. Students can typically choose to attend part-time or full-time, and both represent a significant time requirement. Online students must regularly participate in online discussions, work on group projects and meet due dates and deadlines.

4. THE MYTH: STUDENTS SUFFER WITHOUT FACE TIME WITH THEIR PROFESSORS.

Although they’re not in the same room as their professors, online students have plenty of opportunities to interact with them. Besides asking questions about the material via email and online chat, online students may also talk to their professors on the phone, communicate via video chat or have lengthy discussions on message boards. Some professors even offer online office hours to give students personalized attention and another opportunity to connect one-on-one.

5. THE MYTH: CHEATING IS RAMPANT.

It’s definitely easier to cheat on an exam when you take it at home without a proctor. But studies show online students don’t cheat more than traditional students. To prevent cheating, some online students have to turn on their webcam when taking timed tests, and professors use software to detect plagiarism, just as professors at traditional colleges do. And frequent assignments throughout the semester give professors a good idea of the quality of a student’s thoughts and writing, so they can easily spot any deviation from the norm.

6. THE MYTH: STUDENTS DON’T GET TO INTERACT WITH THEIR PEERS.

Online students don’t sit next to their fellow students in class, but they do have opportunities to exchange ideas, debate issues and socialize. Students are often assigned group projects, which provides them an opportunity to learn from each other and collaborate. Students can talk to one another in live chats, discussion boards and video chat.

7. THE MYTH: STUDENTS CAN’T TRANSFER CREDITS TO ANOTHER SCHOOL.

Not all students who start studying at one school finish their studies there, so the ability to transfer credits, which can save students time and money, is important. Different online degree programs have varying rules, but most students can transfer any credits they earn in an accredited online program to another school, online or not. Students should check with their new school to determine specific requirements for transferring credits.

8. THE MYTH: STUDENTS WON’T BENEFIT FROM THE SCHOOL’S AUXILIARY SERVICES.

On-campus students have convenient access to their school’s auxiliary services such as libraries, career counseling centers and job placement offices. But online students can also take advantage of these services. They can access digital books by logging on to their school’s library website, discuss course requirements with their academic advisor over email or talk to a career counselor over video chat. Some online students who live within driving distance of a campus may also have the option to visit a library or have a meeting with faculty members in person.

9. THE MYTH: ALUMNI WON’T GET A GOOD JOB.

Although employers and hiring managers once dismissed most job candidates with online degrees, attitudes towards such candidates are shifting. Today, fewer employers view candidates with online degrees with skepticism. To encourage their current employees to learn new skills, some employers even pay for them to participate in a part-time online degree or certificate program.

There’s no need to put your life on hold while you work towards your Master’s degree. Florida Tech offers in-demand programs—including an MBA—online, which gives you the flexibility to study on your own time. Click here to learn more about the convenience of online learning with Florida Tech.