Why is it called a "Pet Peeve"?
This, and other questions & answers for your curious inner child.
If you’re new to this newsletter, this is my just-for-fun segment each month that is essentially: “What I Googled This Month”. The intention is to bring some levity to your inbox and who knows- maybe you can parade some new fun facts at your next gathering.
You can read a brief blurb about my insatiable thirst for random facts here.
Please note: I am not an expert and this is truly just for fun. I don’t personally stand behind any of the sources. If you’d like to learn more or fact check, feel free to do some googling on your own as well and let me know what you find!
What I learned:
A peeve is an annoyance, and a pet peeve is an annoyance that’s nurtured like a pet — it's something someone can never resist complaining about. There are all kinds of pet peeves, like littering, misusing punctuation, driving slowly in the fast lane, or talking during movies. If something like that drives you crazy and you have to yap about it, it's a pet peeve. (Source)
What I learned: Asides from the obvious answers (clear water in shallow areas and white sand at the bottom reflecting light), another big reason is due to “upwelling”.
This is the movement of surface water being replaced by colder, nutrient-rich water (usually at the bottom of the ocean where all the dead animals are). In a lot of tropical places, this movement doesn’t happen due to the fact that the water is SO much warmer in tropical places at the surface, versus in colder places where the discrepancy between the two is smaller and allows for more mixing.
As vacationers will argue, it can often seem like tropical waters are FULL of life. However, this is apparently only along the coast where coral can live (with clear waters, it can photosynthesize as needed) and deeper tropical waters are desert-like. (Source)
Note: This then led me down a rabbit hole of learning about how marine animals are classified based on their thermal strategy— sort of “warm blooded” and “cold blooded”, and this determines whether they are seen more in the tropics, or in the other oceans. (Source)
What I learned: A perfect storm comprised of a few reasons:
1.) LED headlights— they’ve kept roads safer, but they’re also much brighter, with aftermarket ones being 12x the brightness (!!) of the Halogen headlights that used to be standard. There is also apparently very little regulation of the LED industry. (Big LED™️?)
2.) The popularity of taller/ lifted vehicles. Sometimes I wonder if folks in pick-up trucks or large SUVs feel the same eye-watering struggle at night that I do (in my lil hatchback). With larger lifted vehicles, the headlights are unfortunately positioned in the perfect place to blind folks in vehicles closer to the ground.
2a.) And on that note, directionality of headlights is a thing too— according to this reddit thread. It’s something that can be adjusted; however, lots of folks don’t know how.
What I learned: Terrifyingly, yes, as they’re mammals just like us (and raccoons, and rats… etc).
We can rest easy though since it IS pretty rare— so much so that the cases that are discovered become news pieces like this one and this incident with a polar bear.
What I learned: Yes! To quote one of the (male) biologists that created her:
“Dolly is derived from a mammary gland cell and we couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands than Dolly Parton’s.” (Source)
Turns out you never stop being a teenaged boy. 🙃