I was walking the dog tonight and thought to myself, “Baby, it’s COLD outside.” Sixteen degrees and getting colder. It wasn’t Chosin cold – by a long shot – but maybe Battle of the Bulge cold. Then I thought of all the troops stationed in Afghanistan right now, and when I got home looked up the temperature in Kabul – 39 degrees, dropping to 24 at night. Pretty chilly for our men and women on the front lines.
Military personnel have suffered cold temperatures in conflicts dating back to Valley Forge, so I figured there must be some pretty colorful descriptions of cold by now and did some searching on the internet.
Setting aside the well-diggers, witches and brass monkeys, here are some ways the troops in Afghanistan could describe the weather.
It is…
Colder than a toilet seat in an igloo.
Colder than a mother-in-law’s kiss.
Colder than a penguin in a refrigerator on Baffin Island [in]January.
Colder than a banker’s heart.
Colder than a polar bear’s toenails.
These are the only ones I could print. The rest were a little more “colorful.”
Then I found this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnSzpe3t_Hs[/youtube]These lunatics jumped into Lucky Peak Reservoir in Idaho for the annual “Polar Bear Challenge,” a fund raiser for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
The temperature was described as, “somewhere around zero,” with a wind chill around ten below. And they were wearing swimsuits.
That’s colder than a mother-in-law banker kissing a penguin’s toenails in an igloo’s refrigerator.
On Baffin Island.
In January.
