Hotter than...

Here in the Chicago area, we are sweltering through a third day in a row of extreme heat (100+ degrees) and many homes in my community were without power for most of the week due to a powerful storm that barreled through last Sunday. All over the state of Illinois and the Midwest, it's been hot, hot, hot.  How hot, you ask? Well, a hot librarian knows where to go for answers to all sorts of questions, including those about the weather!

Hot time in the old town tonight?

How how is it?
Hotter than a honeymoon hotel... 
Hotter than a stolen tamale...
Hotter than a fur coat in Marfa --Texas, that is...
(Thanks for my friends at Texas Monthly for those!)

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How hot is it?
It's so hot that I have found out (the hard way) that my seat belt buckle could be used as a branding iron.
It was so hot today I saw an Amish guy buying an air conditioner.
(Courtesy: www.yooohaaa.com)

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How hot is it?
Hotter than the backlog o' hell...
Hotter than hell with the blower on...
Hotter'n a burnt boot...
All from Cowboy Lingo: A Dictionary of the Slack-Jaw Words and Whangdoodle Ways of the American West by Ramon F. Adams (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2000) 

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How hot is it?
Hotter than a two-dollar pistol - Very hot, an allusion to cheap 19th-century pistols that got hot when fired. 
Hotter than Methodist hell - About as hot as it can get; an expression used chiefly in Maine. 
Hotter'n a skunk - 1. Very drunk. 2. Very hot weather or anything hot. 
Hotter'n love in hayin' time - Extremely hot. 
All from: Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms: Local Expressions from Coast to Coast by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 2000)

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How hot is it?
Hotter than an iPad 3 after a couple minutes use...
Hotter than a steel playground slide at noon...
Hotter than a habañero orbiting the sun...

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How hot is it?
Hotter than a Times-Square Rolex...
Hotter than a brazen hussy in church...
Hotter than blue blazes...

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This actually makes sense from a scientific point of view since the hotter the source of light, the shorter its wavelength, and blue light has the shortest wavelength of the visible spectrum. Well, officially it is called violet, but physicists generally refer to the end of the spectrum that includes violet as the blue end and this is due to how our eyes see color. We have three kinds of color sensing cells, called cones, in our eyes. These cones sense red, green, and blue light. So every color we perceive is some combination of red, green, and blue. That includes yellow, believe it or not. So physicists just talk about those three colors. Maybe they never had the 64-pack of Crayola Crayons to color with as children! But I digress... So hotter than red hot, even hotter than white hot, is blue hot. (Or, for purists, violet hot.)
(Thanks to Amazing Space from the Space Telescope Science Institute's Office of Public Outreach.)