Get up on the wrong side of the bed:  to start the day in a less-than-sunny mood
In Roman times, it was considered bad luck to get out of bed on the left side.  Hence if you exited on that wrong side, your day was fated to be a bad one.   Find origins of twelve common idioms at:  http://www.womansday.com/life/the-origins-of-12-common-idioms-83098 

Get off on the wrong foot:  make a bad start to a project or relationship

Richard Harvey, in Plaine Perceuall the peace-maker of England, 1590, is the first to record the wrong foot in print:  "Thou putst the wrong foote before."  Despite the implication otherwise in the phrase put your best foot forward we only have two choices, so if there's a wrong foot there has to be a right one too and get off on the right foot is also in common use.  How did these phrases originate? Well, we don't know.  It may be that it comes from the long-standing preference people have for the right.  Most people in all cultures are right-handed and in English at least the bias is part of the language.  There is a suggestion that it in ancient Greece it was considered unlucky to put the left foot on to the floor, or into one's shoe, first.  Brewer records this in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898.  I can't find supporting evidence for that view, so I'll just repeat what Brewer had to say here:  It was thought unlucky to enter a house or to leave one’s chamber left foot foremost.  Augustus was very superstitious on this point.  Pythagoras taught that it is necessary to put the shoe on the right foot first.  "When stretching forth your feet to have your sandals put on, first extend your right foot" (Protreptics of Iamblichus, symbol xii.).  Iamblichus tells us this symbolised that man’s first duty is reverence to the gods.  Another suggestion is that the concept of a right foot and a wrong foot comes from the military, where in order to march in step soldiers all have to start with the same foot.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/150300.html 

Although its history remains unclear, some historians claim that Canton, Ohio, residents Frank and Robert Menches invented the hamburger.  In 1885, these two brothers were selling pork sandwiches at the Erie Agricultural Fair in Hamburg, New York.  Supposedly, the brothers ran out of pork and could not find a butcher willing to slaughter a pig.  The two men proceeded to purchase five pounds of beef, ground the beef up, and then mixed several items, including coffee and brown sugar, into the meat.  The Menches brothers supposedly named their sandwich after the town where they first served the product.  Demand purportedly was so high that the two men continued to travel from fair to fair, selling their hamburgers. In 1991, descendants of the Menches brothers discovered a copy of the original recipe.  They began selling the original hamburgers at fairs, just like their ancestors had done.  Today, they also sell the hamburgers, known as Menches Gourmet Burgers, in grocery stores. The company is located in Green, Ohio.  They also have sold the hamburgers on QVC, a television shopping channel.  Some historians attribute the invention of the ice cream cone to the Menches brothers as well.  In 1904, the Menches brothers were selling ice cream at the St. Louis World's Fair. According to the story, the brothers ran out of bowls in which to serve the ice cream.  A few concession stands away, Ernest A. Hamwi, a pastry chef, was selling Zalabia, a Syrian pastry.  The Menches brothers rolled the Zalabia, a flat pastry, into cones, and used them to hold the ice cream.  Thus, they invented the ice cream cone. http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Frank_Menches

July 30, 2013  A "fake" French restaurant in Devon, England has been removed from a travel review website after it emerged it did not exist - despite nine positive reviews.  Oscar's Restaurant was ranked on TripAdvisor as number 27 of 64 food establishments in Brixham.  Eight of the reviews rated it as "excellent" and one was rated "poor".  TripAdvisor said it was "absolutely committed" to ensuring content remained accurate.  The person behind the listing was not available for comment.  On the website on 23 July, the restaurant was described as a "restored and converted fishing trawler 'phantom class' moored on the beautiful Brixham quayside".  One comment, posted on 19 July, makes reference to the owners Colette and Alfredo - two names which also feature in the film Ratatouille.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-23504081 

J.D. Salinger: Glimpses of his hidden writing in new book by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic  Sept. 3, 2013.  J.D. Salinger spent almost half a century hiding in plain sight.  This is perhaps the most interesting revelation both in David Shields and Shane Salerno’s oral biography “Salinger” and its accompanying documentary (which opens this week in New York and Los Angeles) — that far from being a recluse in the traditional sense, Salinger led, for a while anyway, an unexpectedly connected life.  He traveled, he saw friends, he raised children.  He interacted with the townspeople of Cornish, N.H., and Windsor, Vt.  And, it is now confirmed, he wrote: at least five volumes of material that is scheduled to be published over the next several years, as well as a copious store of letters to acquaintances, admirers and romantic partners, some of which are quoted in Shields and Salerno’s book.  Indeed, this is a key difference between the two versions of “Salinger” -- that in print, we come upon Salinger in his own words.  Shields and Salerno quote him throughout the book, not just the works with which we are familiar (“The Catcher in the Rye,” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), but also correspondence and writings we haven’t seen before.  Early on they offer a few quick glimpses of an unpublished story, “The Magic Foxhole,” which touches on the author’s war experience; the original manuscript is in the Story magazine archive at Princeton University.  “The Magic Foxhole” is just one of a number of unknown or lesser known Salinger writings that, like their creator, are also more available than they might appear.  In addition to what’s at Princeton, there is a small set of papers at the University of Texas’ Ransom Center, not to mention the so-called uncollected stories:  22 pieces of short fiction ranging from early 1940s magazine work to his final publication, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which appeared in the New Yorker in 1965.   http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-the-jd-salinger-glimpses-of-hidden-writing-in-new-book-20130903,0,4449462.story 

Sept. 16, 2013  In a study of 70 million posts on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, Rui Fan and a team of others at Beihan University tracked the spread of joy, sadness, anger and disgust across the social network.  According to the MIT Technology Review, they found that angry tweets were far more likely to be retweeted by others — or be the subject of angry responses — up to three degrees away from the original user.  It could be that China's Internet is uniquely angry.  But if you've spent any time at all reading U.S.-based comment threads, digital rage should sound like a familiar idea.  People have proposed all sorts of remedies for online anger, such as making Internet commenters reveal their real names.  Nobody really knows whether ending anonymity will civilize comment trolls, however.  Increasingly, there is one thing researchers think would almost certainly help a society awash in anger:  better emotional intelligence, or the set of abstract skills that help human beings interact with one another without resorting to conflict.  Almost by definition, a more emotionally intelligent Internet would be a kinder, more empathetic place.  The question is how to build it.  As the New York Times magazine reported recently, some elementary schools are becoming the first testbeds for social-emotional learning.  Students now go through detailed and sometimes "heavily scripted" training curricula that critics say is more rote than stimulative or engaging.  But studies also show that emotional intelligence, when it's achieved, can pay off in the job market, in marriage, in school and a host of other areas.  Pro-social behavioral training is being sold as a way to reduce bullying and incidences of teen suicide.  But if the byproduct of that training extends beyond the classroom, so much the better.  Brian Fung  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/16/the-internet-isnt-making-us-dumb-its-making-us-angry/?hpid=z12 

Twenty months after it capsized off the Italian coast in a disaster that killed 32 people, the Costa Concordia cruise ship emerged from the Mediterranean on Monday thanks to a painstaking $800-million salvage effort.  Fifty-six giant pulleys slowly heaved the half-submerged vessel back to an upright position in a 19-hour operation that went into the early hours of Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2013.  "The rotation has finished its course, we are at zero degrees, the ship is resting on the platforms," said Italy's civil protection chief, Franco Gabrielli, at a 4 a.m. news conference on Giglio island, where he was applauded and cheered by residents.  The Costa Concordia is believed to be the biggest ship to be hoisted back upright after capsizing.  The technique, known as parbuckling, has been used in the past, notably on warships, including the battleship Oklahoma, which was righted by the U.S. military in 1943 after it was bombed during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.  Tom Kington  http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-italy-costa-concordia-20130917,0,937131.story