"Brass Monkey" Weather EXPLAINED:

Ok, there're several explanations of where the term "brass monkey weather" --or, in its longer form-- "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" came from:
The most common is that it's cold enough to freeze the testicular apparatti off a brass monkey statue. This one's most-widely accepted for its obvious humour value :-)))
Another explanation I ran across several years ago in The Old Farmer's Almanac seemed rather far-fetched: Apparently during the War of Northern Aggression, cannonballs were stacked in pyramids, and these pyramids were called "brass monkeys". During extreme cold, the balls themselves apparently cracked & broke. But to the best of my knowledge, cannonballs were rarely made of brass, and I can't imagine how a pyramid of 'em resembled a monkey in any way/shape/form.
After bringing up the subject in an IRC channel this morning, I was enlightened on the cannonball theory. Seems the Old Farmer's Almanac was wayyyy too-simplified and vague in their explanation. Actually, the cannonballs were most commonly made of iron (just what I thought!), and they were stacked in a pyramid (usually in layers of 16, 9, 4, & 1 from bottom to top), an efficiant space-saving config.. But the bottom layer needed some kinda support (usually a brass plate with 16 intentations or an exterior rail) so the balls wouldn't go rollin' out all over the place. This support was referred to as the "brass monkey" (although again I see no resemblance to monkeys). Now, during extreme cold weather, the brass support would contract a lot faster than the iron balls and somtimes even break, releasing the cannonballs, hence our extreme-cold-weather expression that we've grown very fond of :-) Furthermore, this support configuration apparently origninated on ships, as they had flat decks. In the field, I would imagine the bottom layer of balls could hold their own in the dirt & grass --fer th' most part.