“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Brass Monkey Weather

One of my favorite English sayings is, and this is true of Houston today:

"It's so cold it'd freeze the balls off a brass monkey."

I give this to you, people of Earth. Use it wisely.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can take the man out of England, but...

Anonymous said...

Do you know what that's from? Cannon balls on a ship used to be made of iron and the stands they were stacked on were the same metal: you'd always lose the bottom layer to corrosion. So they made the stand out of brass instead. For some reason, the name of this stand was "monkey". But in cold weather of a certain temperature, the monkey would shrink and the balls would pop off it.

Nevertheless, when I lived in New England there were some winters when I swear I saw a crowd of brass monkeys carrying welding equipment...