That type of Triscuit is a low-key treasure.
I'm still mad at them for shrink-flation messing up my ratio. I have cheese and crackers for lunch most days, and it was always 1 package of sliced cheese to 1 family-size box of Triscuits (no, not per day). Not anymore - now it is just chaos with no idea whether the cheese will run out first or the crackers will. Hi, I'm Matt and this is my First-World Problem of the day.
Reminds me of the story I heard about someone trying to cancel out spicy peppers with menthol. They reported that "hot" and "cold" have different sensors on the tongue that can absolutely activate simultaneously...
In my younger, stupider, drunker days, me and my buddies would exclusively drink Red Bull & vodka all night so our brains would get drunker than our bodies. That was the night we invented the concept of helicopter jetpack paintball.
Basically the same thing, right?
In my younger, stupider, drunker days, me and my buddies would exclusively drink Red Bull & vodka all night so our brains would get drunker than our bodies. That was the night we invented the concept of helicopter jetpack paintball.
Basically the same thing, right?
Sounds like Quidditch, but I expect y'all's rules make more sense.
It was definitely going to be deathier than Quidditch.
That’s not what I pictured as the origin of that saying. Although it did occur to me that, even on the poshest of English estates, you don’t see many brass monkey statues.
It's one of those etymological arguments. Also, I am aware of CANOE - the Conspiracy to Assign Nautical Origins to Everything, which might have an effect.
In my younger, stupider, drunker days, me and my buddies would exclusively drink Red Bull & vodka all night so our brains would get drunker than our bodies. That was the night we invented the concept of helicopter jetpack paintball.
Basically the same thing, right?
Oh man, I think the first time I tried that was back when you could only get Red Bull in these bottles and it felt both completely dangerous and also cyberpunk AF 'cause no one could read Thai so we had no idea what was really in the bottle other than "energy drink"
That’s not what I pictured as the origin of that saying. Although it did occur to me that, even on the poshest of English estates, you don’t see many brass monkey statues.
Sorry, and with respect to HMRN, that's total bullshit. The contraction rate of brass is 19 x 10^-6 per degree Celsius, and the contraction rate of iron is 12 x 10^-6 per degree Celsius. Brass thus contracts 0.4 percent going from room temp to liquid nitrogen; while iron would contract about 60% more, the change from room temp to freezing or well-below would be pretty much undetectable for any reasonably manufactured shot holder.
Also, here is an actual shot garland from 1811, recovered from a wrecked warship. Note the distinct lack of stacking or, indeed, brass. Also, the obvious stability issues of *stacking* shot on a moving deck with all sorts of urgent going on is just fearful. Those puppies would be rolling around in no time. For that reason, the shot were kept in secure storage below decks until engagement was imminent, then it was hand-carried and placed in racks, some around hatchways, but also at lower points around the scuppers of the deck as well as in purpose built wooden racks brought up for the fight.
Total fantasy.
I'm 99% with Robear that it's total BS, but with a couple of caveats.
1: The British Navy is an entity that's been around for centuries. Just because the style for shot storage in 1811 doesn't line up with the likely apocryphal story, doesn't mean that in, say, 1540 on the Mary Rose, the brass monkeys as shown in the picture weren't a real thing.
2: viz-a-viz contraction rates: Ro neglected to consider that we're talking about 3 dimensional arrangements of objects. The brass monkey's contraction that allegedly causes the balls to be spilled is going to be one dimensional (i.e. the sides of the triangle getting shorter), while the shot will be contracting in a 3 dimensional fashion (i.e. into a smaller sphere). The math of how much linear contraction of the brass monkey occurs vs how much ball-shrinkage (hur hur) occurs, and whether that's enough to cause a spill is more complicated than "iron contracts more than brass".
Like I say, 99% sure it's BS, but pedantically picking holes in pointless internet debates is fun!
As a counterpoint, when I visited Portsmouth Naval Museum a couple of years ago, shot was displayed on 16/17th century museum ships stacked up. No comment on how historically accurate they are, just an observation that they're there.
Considering that the earliest mention of the phrase "Brass Monkey", without reference to Balls, seems to be from 1835, we can safely discount earlier uses, as we have voluminous and exhaustive naval records from Great Britain and US and other English services, as well as memoirs, and there is simply no such device described (again, largely for the reasons I described, which amount to "there was already a better system in use"). The particular story here seems to date to the early 20th century and is thus probably a sort of "just-so" fabulation. (See the OED.)
Now, the interesting thing to me is that on the Mary Rose, it appears that the stone and iron shot were... just lying around during combat, with a part of the aft-most gun compartment designated as the "shot locker". So there is a a point at which there were no shot frames, rail storage or other systems we seen in the later Royal Navy. I did find a mention that there were *no* shot storage holders found in the Mary Rose wreckage at all, brass or not, so I think we can discount that period as an origin for the usage of a mid-20th century phrase. 
(This practice might have been reasonable with frame separators that could keep them from rolling too far, as well as fairly light and irregular shot, but as balls increased in size and some became explosive, solutions that immobilized them in places where they could be easily put during combat definitely existed. The Mary Rose itself had hooks for hanging grape shot or the medieval equivalent between the guns. I need to find out more.)
Note further that the Mary Rose entirely pre-dated the "Navy Royal", having been built in 1510-1511 and sunk in 1545. The Royal Navy descends from the administrative entity King Henry VIII set up in 1546 (Gosh, I wonder why, he sure *loved* the Mary Rose lol) and so it is not representative of a systemic approach to naval shipbuilding (which would include innovations would keep sailors safer and prevent accidents, as well as making the movement of powder and shot faster - a big concern in battle).
HMS Victory, brought into service in 1737, use shot racks by the guns during combat, but stored all shot in the hold. Carrying the 42 pound shot up to the gun deck shot garlands must have been something they really worked on. So sometime between 1511 and 1737, sailors came to their senses and started organizing shot storage methodically, in England anyway.
The Mary Rose had at least one gun that was 210mm (8.2"), which would have used an iron shot that weighed around 67 pounds. That's... Yeah, sucks to be *that* crew.
This aspect is gonna bug me, but I reiterate - there is no way that "just-so" story is true. I have seen enough of the Navy and other services to know the sense of humor those folks have - if you ever get me in person, ask me about the famous 1980's UFOs off the Pennsacola coast lol - and I think that entire display is there simply to wind up tourists.
10/10 would nitpick again.
If anyone goes to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyards, please DM me - they're very close to me and I'd love an excuse to go again.
If anyone goes to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyards, please DM me - they're very close to me and I'd love an excuse to go again.
Dud - I have family near Chichester, and my daughter has begged to go again next time we're over the pond, so we'll be back there. Might even be this summer. GWJ Field Trip!
All I know for sure is that Brass Monkeys are Funky Monkeys.
DudleySmith wrote:If anyone goes to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyards, please DM me - they're very close to me and I'd love an excuse to go again.
Dud - I have family near Chichester, and my daughter has begged to go again next time we're over the pond, so we'll be back there. Might even be this summer. GWJ Field Trip!
Absolutely!
I wish I could...
Pepperoni pizza doesn't make your pee smell, though.
Pepperoni pizza doesn't make your pee smell, though.
Two words for you.
Greasy. Poops.
EvilHomer3k wrote:Pepperoni pizza doesn't make your pee smell, though.
Two words for you.
Greasy. Poops.
Better than the opposite...
Poopy grease?
Don't underspend and get that poopy grease, you'll only regret it.
Fun fact: in Belgium a C4 is the employer form you need to apply for unemployment benefits. "Getting your C4" is the colloquial way of saying "Getting fired" over here.
farley3k wrote:
Fun fact: in Belgium a C4 is the employer form you need to apply for unemployment benefits. "Getting your C4" is the colloquial way of saying "Getting fired" over here.
Less fun fact: C4 is the name of a popular technique for modelling/diagramming software architecture. It’s a way to explain “what has been built” and “what should be built”, but also “how to progressively knock down what has been built so it can be replaced with what should be built”.
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