Hot Temperature Quotes

Molly: So how do you think of Bryce Hamilton crowd so far? Boys hot enough for you? Bethany: I wouldn't say hot. Most of them seem to have a normal body temperature.

Oregon almost never got too hot. An Oregon governor must have passed a law a long, long time ago that said Oregon had to always have moderate temperatures.

It was fucking cold. The rover and trailer regulate their own temperatures just fine, but things weren’t hot enough in the bedroom. Story of my life.

Whoever said lying was hard was so, so wrong. Lying was easy. Lying was like a hot knife slicing through room-temperature butter. Lying was a bunch of words strung together in a pretty sentence designed to make the other person feel like everything was fine. Telling the truth, however, was impossible.

Death stripes away many things, especially when it arrives at a temperature hot enough to vaporize iron ... The immortal remains of Brother Watchtower watched the dragon flap away into the fog ....

I did warn you Ry had a hot friend. I guess you decided to dip your thermometer in and take her temperature.” “You’re a sick fuck!” “You wouldn't want me any other way.

I'm sure love has its own means of survival, its preferred host, its ideal temperature, its own law of thermodynamics. Why else would women crave hot baths?

In that latitude the temperature flirted with a hundred degrees for a few of the dog days, but to a child it can hardly ever be too hot. I liked the sun licking the backs of my legs, and the sweat between my shoulder blades, and the violet evenings, with ice cream and fireflies, wherein the long day slowly cooled. I liked the ants piling up dirt like coffee grounds between the bricks of our front walk, and the milkweed spittle in the vacant lot next door. I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut. We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves.

Women, and what went on under their collars. Hotness and coldness, coming and going in the strange musky flowery variable-weather country inside their clothes -- mysterious, important, uncontrollable. That was his father's take on things. But men's body temperatures were never dealt with; they were never even mentioned....

I like to drink just enough to change the temperature in the brain room. I’ll turn to less mainstream substances if I want to rearrange the furniture.

More murders are committed at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature. Over one hundred, it's too hot to move. Under ninety, cool enough to survive. But right at ninety-two degrees lies the apex of irritability, everything is itches and hair and sweat and cooked pork. The brain becomes a rat rushing around a red-hot maze. The least thing - a word, a look, a sound, the drop of a hair and - irritable murder. Irritable murder, there's a pretty and terrifying phrase for you. - Touched with Fire

The rover and trailer regulate their own temperatures just fine, but things weren’t hot enough in the bedroom. Story of my life.

Re the temperature of Venus's surface No one had expected such a hot Venus

Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not having brought a jacket. One degree higher, and a skim of sweat might have glistened at her hairline. But at this precise degree, she required neither wrap nor breeze. Were there a word for such a temperature, there would have to be a corollary for the particular ecstasy of greeting it - the heedlessness, the needlessness, the suspended lack of urgency, as if time could stop, or should. Usually temperature was a battle; only at this exact fulcrum was it an active delight.

Everyone tends to think of October as being an autumn month. Not so much in south Alabama, usually. There, it's another warm, if not hot, summer month. But the Alabama summer heat will sometimes get broken by cooler days. The haze of the depth of summer lifts, the humidity backs off, and the sky takes on a clearer, sharper blueness that the more languid summer days rarely could manage. And sometimes, there will be a day where the temperature gives a clear peek of what's coming.

I tend to go back and forth between romanticism and cynicism. Crossing those barriers between hot and cold, I forget the lukewarm boredom of life; that lukewarm state is what I fear the most. Unable to return to feeling hot or cold, to be numb within a state of room temperature. In that state, we’re nothing better than dead.

Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, as panting dogs do. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem. And the effect would be fast: after a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out. At eleven or twelve degrees Celsius of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot anytime soon, though some models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually, over centuries. But at just five degrees, according to some calculations, whole parts of the globe would be literally unsurvivable for humans. At six, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the United States east of the Rockies would suffer more from heat than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. New York City would be hotter than present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.

While we're on brunch, how about hollandaise sauce? Not for me. Bacteria love hollandaise. And hollandaise, that delicate emulsion of egg yolks and clarified butter, must be held at a temperature not too hot nor too cold, lest it break when spooned over your poached eggs. Unfortunately, this lukewarm holding temperature is also the favorite environment for bacteria to copulate and reproduce in. Nobody I know has ever made hollandaise to order. Most likely, the stuff on your eggs was made hours ago and held on station. Equally disturbing is the likelihood that the butter used in the hollandaise is melted table butter, heated, clarified, and strained to get out all the breadcrumbs and cigarette butts. Butter is expensive, you know. Hollandaise is a veritable petri-dish of biohazards.

Windhoek has three temperatures: hot, mosquito, and fucking cold.

You." His fingers staying on mine, hot but steady in temperature. He's holding himself back as much as he can. "I am in love with you, and I want you more than anything else in the world.

The Sun contains about a thousand times more mass than Jupiter. If it were cold, gravity would squeeze it a million times denser than an ordinary solid: it would be a 'white dwarf' about the size of the Earth but 330,000 times more massive. But the Sun's core actually has a temperature of fifteen million degrees-thousands of time hotter than its glowing surface, and the pressure of this immensely hot gas 'puffs up' the Sun and holds it in equilibrium.

The summer of 1950 was the hottest in living memory, with high humidity and temperatures above 100 F. My mother had been washing every day, and she was attacked for this, too. Peasants, especially in the North where Mrs. Mi came from, washed very rarely, because of the shortage of water. In the guerrillas, men and women used to compete to see who had the most 'revolutionary insects' (lice). Cleanliness was regarded as un proletarian When the steamy summer turned into cool autumn my father's bodyguard weighed in with a new accusation: my mother was 'behaving like a Kuomintang official's grand lady' because she had used my father's leftover hot water. At the time, in order to save fuel, there was a rule that only officials above a certain rank were entitled to wash with hot water. My father fell into this group, but my mother did not. She had been strongly advised by the women in my father's family not to touch cold water when she came near to delivery time. After the bodyguard's criticism, my father would not let my mother use his water. My mother felt like screaming at him for not taking her side against the endless intrusions into the most irrelevant recesses of her life.

Oh what marvels fill me with thanksgiving! The deep mahogany of a leaf once green. The feathered fronds of tiny icicles coating every twig and branch in a wintry landscape. The feel of goosebumps thawing after endured frozen temperatures. Both hands clamped around a hot mug of herbal tea. The aromatic whiff of mint under my nose. The stir of emotion from a child's cry for mommy. A gift of love detached of strings. Spotted lilies collecting raindrops in a cupped clump of petals. The vibrant mélange of colors on butterfly wings. The milky luster of a single pearl. Rainbows reflecting off iridescence bubbles. Awe-struck silence evoked by any form of beauty. Avocado flecks in your eyes. Warm hands on my face. Sweetness on the tongue. The harmony of voices. An answered prayer. A pink balloon. A caress. A smile. More. These have become my treasures by virtue of thanksgiving.

The challenges of managing the prison—which was designed to hold twelve hundred inmates but instead had three times that number—were overwhelming. In the summer, the temperatures inside rose as high as 115 degrees, which is why prisoners would later call Leavenworth the Hot House.

What was it you called me? Hell’s overlord who wields his lucky pen like it’s… what was that last part?” Enough! Elise’s tolerance disappeared in a sulfurous cloud of smoke. “Hell’s overlord who wields his lucky pen like it’s his staff of masculinity,” she ground out, then lowered her head and furiously pounded on the laptop’s keyboard. Luc laughed and the hairs at the nape of her neck prickled. “Staff of masculinity. How could I have forgotten that? You could have just said—” Her cheeks burned red hot. “I made that up before I knew you liked to beat your lucky pen against the desk.” He turned in his seat and smiled the smile that never failed to raise her body temperature a hundred degrees. “And it was that particular phrase which made your habit of sucking on pen caps all the more bearable.” She glared at him and his smile widened. “Don’t make me get up and come near your desk, Lucien Masters.” “Getting up and coming near my desk are the least of my worries,” he replied in a husky, Southern rumble.

But maybe my expression isn’t as bad as I think it is. Maybe Galen’s just really good at reading me. Or maybe he’s just being overly mushy himself. He is a tad protective, after all. I glance at Toraf, who’s sitting on the other full-size bed next to Rayna. And Toraf is already looking at me. When our eyes meet, he shakes his head ever so slightly. As if to say, “Don’t do it.” As if to say, “You really don’t want to do it.” As if to say, “I know you really want to do it, but I’m asking you not to. As a friend.” I huff, then adjust myself in Galen’s death grip. It’s not fair that Galen and Toraf silently ask me to accept this. That my mother is putty in Grom’s proficient hands. That her temperature barely raised a degree around my dad, yet Grom, within an hour of reunion, has her titanium exterior dissolving like Alka-Seltzer in hot water. I can’t accept it. Won’t. Will. Not.

The earth in its rapid motion round the sun possesses a degree of living force so vast that, if turned into the equivalent of heat, its temperature would be rendered at least one thousand times greater than that of red-hot iron, and the globe on which we tread would in all probability be rendered equal in brightness to the sun itself.

For five days the city had wilted under a hard sky, sweltering in a temperature that stayed fixed in the middle nineties. Even at night there was no relief from the heat. Pyjamas and nighties stuck clammily to damp skin. Half-clad, self-pitying figures rose, exasperated by insomnia, to stumble through darkened rooms in search of a cooler plot than their bed, hoping that, all accidentally, they might waken any gross sleeper the house contained. Cold water ran hot from the taps, and the roads turned to tar.

Summer in Karachi is brutal. The heat alone is ugly and unforgiving. Add unrelenting humidity, and the elements become merciless. The city sits on the sea but is surrounded by desert land that has been known to reach some of the hottest temperatures anywhere. When the heat reaches its peak, you feel baked in an oven and the thick, humid air gives everything an extra, hot skin. It's an effort to even lift your finger. You could get by with air-conditioning, but in this teeming, overpopulated Third World megapolis, it is a luxury few can afford.

The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian airports- to break the icy seal. Stepping outside was like stepping onto another planet, for at those low temperatures nothing seems quite normal. The air burns. Sounds are brittle. Every breath hovers in a strangle slow-motion cloud, adding to the mist of ice that pervades the city and blurs the sun. When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars.

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

Yogasanas have often been thought of as a form of exercise. They are not exercises, but techniques which place the physical body in positions that cultivate awareness, relaxation, concentration and meditation. Part of this process is the development of good physical health by stretching, massaging and stimulating the pranic channels and internal organs. When yogasanas are performed, respiration and metabolic rates slow down, the consumption of oxygen and the body temperature drop. During exercise, however, the breath and metabolism speed up, oxygen consumption rises, and the body gets hot. In addition, asanas are designed to have specific effects on the glands and internal organs, and to alter electrochemical activity in the nervous system.

Love is how the other person likes their coffee on a morning. How long they put their toast in the toaster for. How they like their throw pillows on the sofa to be arranged. How hot they have their shower water. How many bubbles in the bath. How they always leave empty glasses on the bar in the kitchen, and how they know exactly how you take your coffee. How they know how many candles to light around a bathtub before you get in, and how chilled your wine has to be before it’s an acceptable drinking temperature. We still have so much to learn about each other, and while I know there’s no rush, I want to know these things. I want to know if he prefers butter or jelly on his toast on a morning and if really he prefers tea over coffee, which I suspect he does. I want to know if he changes the temperature of the shower water to my preference of red hot instead of a normal hot. I want to know every little thing I don’t. Because at the end of the day, when it gets hard and you’re in the middle of the room shouting at each other over something trivial, you won’t remember the huge declarations of love. When you’re sitting against your bedroom door crying because you hate fighting, you’ll remember the way he smiles at you over breakfast and the way he trails his thumb down your spine to make you shiver. You’ll remember all the crazy little things that remind you that, no matter what, no matter how difficult or impossible it may seem, there’s no one else in this world more perfect for you than he is.

That was the main thing wrong with Mrs. Kamal. She spent such an extraordinary amount of mental energy feeling irritated that it was impossible not to feel irritated in turn. It was oxygen to her, this low-grade dissatisfaction, shading into anger; this sense that things weren't being done correctly, that everything from the traffic noise at night to the temperature of the hot water in the morning to the progress of Mohammed's potty training to the fact that Fatima wasn't being taught to read Urdu, only English, to the fact that Rohinka served only two dishes at dinner the night of her arrival to the cost of the car insurance for the VW Sharan to the fact that Shahid didn't have a 'proper job' and seemed to have no intention of getting one, let alone a wife, to the unfriendliness of London, the fact that it was an 'impossible city,' to the ostentatious way she complained about missing Lahore, especially at dinner time, giving meaningful, sad, reproachful looks at the food Rohinka had cooked.

In despair, I offer your readers their choice of the following definitions of entropy. My authorities are such books and journals as I have by me at the moment. (a) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy of a system which cannot be converted into work by even a perfect heat engine.—Clausius. (b) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy which can be converted into work by a perfect engine.—Maxwell, following Tait. (c) Entropy is that portion of the intrinsic energy which is not converted into work by our imperfect engines.—Swinburne. (d) Entropy (in a volume of gas) is that which remains constant when heat neither enters nor leaves the gas.—W. Robinson. (e) Entropy may be called the ‘thermal weight’, temperature being called the ‘thermal height.’—Ibid. (f) Entropy is one of the factors of heat, temperature being the other.—Engineering. I set up these bald statement as so many Aunt Sallys, for any one to shy at. [Lamenting a list of confused interpretations of the meaning of entropy, being hotly debated in journals at the time.]

Planck understood that Clausius was not simply stating the obvious, but something of deep significance. Heat, the transfer of energy from A to B due to a temperature difference, explained such everyday occurrences as a hot cup of coffee getting cold and an ice cube in a glass of water melting. But left undisturbed, the reverse never happened. Why not? The law of conservation of energy did not forbid a cup of coffee from getting hotter and the surrounding air colder, or the glass of water becoming warmer and the ice cooler. It did not outlaw heat flowing from a cold to a hot body spontaneously. Yet something was preventing this from happening. Clausius discovered that something and called it entropy. It lay at the heart of why some processes occur in nature and others do not.

Who’s teasing? I’m telling him the truth. He ain’t going to have it. Neither one of ‘em going to have it. And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ‘em to. No. and you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say. Everything: get the right temperature in your hot-water bottle and make sure the smoking tobacco in the silver humidor is fresh each and every day. There’s something else you not going to have. You ever have five thousand dollars of cold cash money in your pocket and walk into a bank and tell the bank man you want such and such a house on such and such a street and he sell it to you right then? Well, you won’t ever have it. And you not going to have a governor’s mansion, or eight thousand acres of timber to sell. And you not going to have no ship under your command to sail on, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three. And you not going to have no breakfast tray brought in to you early in the morning with a red rose on it and two warm croissants and a cup of hot chocolate. Nope. Never. And no pheasant buried in coconut leaves for twenty days and stuffed with wild rice and cooked over a wood fire so tender and delicate it make you cry. And no Rothschild ’29 or even Beaujolais to go with it.” A few men passing by stopped to listen to Tommy’s lecture. “What’s going on?” they asked Hospital Tommy. “Feather refused them a beer,” said. The men laughed. “And no baked Alaska!” Railroad Tommy went on. “None! You never going to have that.” “No baked Alaska?” Guitar opened his eyes wide with horror and grabbed his throat.” You breaking my heart!” “Well, now. That’s something you will have—a broken heart.” Railroad Tommy’s eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. “And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.” “Mr. Tommy, suh,” Guitar sang in mock humility, “we just wanted a bottle of beer is all.” “Yeah,” said Tommy. “Yeah, well, welcome aboard.

Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.

The principal energy sources of our present industrial civilization are the so-called fossil fuels. We burn wood and oil, coal and natural gas, and, in the process, release waste gases, principally CO2, into the air. Consequently, the carbon dioxide content of the Earth’s atmosphere is increasing dramatically. The possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect suggests that we have to be careful: Even a one- or two-degree rise in the global temperature can have catastrophic consequences. In the burning of coal and oil and gasoline, we are also putting sulfuric acid into the atmosphere. Like Venus, our stratosphere even now has a substantial mist of tiny sulfuric acid droplets. Our major cities are polluted with noxious molecules. We do not understand the long-term effects of our course of action. But we have also been perturbing the climate in the opposite sense. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have been burning and cutting down forests and encouraging domestic animals to graze on and destroy grasslands. Slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial tropical deforestation and overgrazing are rampant today. But forests are darker than grasslands, and grasslands are darker than deserts. As a consequence, the amount of sunlight that is absorbed by the ground has been declining, and by changes in the land use we are lowering the surface temperature of our planet. Might this cooling increase the size of the polar ice cap, which, because it is bright, will reflect still more sunlight from the Earth, further cooling the planet, driving a runaway albedo* effect? Our lovely blue planet, the Earth, is the only home we know. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right, a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows. The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.

Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, “Stick it in!” With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer’s rectum. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t normal. At least it wasn’t for me. This was definitely against God’s plan. I was supposed to check the monitor and announce if the temperature was above ninety-degrees. The first one was fine. But before I had a chance to remove the probe, Tim set the hot branding iron against the steer’s left hip. The animal let out a guttural Mooooooooooooo!, and as he did, the contents of its large intestine emptied all over my hand and forearm. Tim said, “Okay, Ree, you can take it out now.” I did. I didn’t know what to do. My arm was covered in runny, stinky cow crap. Was this supposed to happen? Should I say anything? I glanced at my sister, who was looking at me, completely horrified. The second animal entered the chute. The routine began again. I stuck it in. Tim branded. The steer bellowed. The crap squirted out. I was amazed at how consistent and predictable the whole nasty process was, and how nonchalant everyone--excluding my sister--was acting. But then slowly…surely…I began to notice something. On about the twentieth animal, I began inserting the thermometer. Tim removed his branding iron from the fire and brought it toward the steer’s hip. At the last second, however, I fumbled with my device and had to stop for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that when I paused, Tim did, too. It appeared he was actually waiting until I had the thermometer fully inserted before he branded the animal, ensuring that I’d be right in the line of fire when everything came pouring out. He had planned this all along, the dirty dog. Seventy-eight steers later, we were finished. I was a sight. Layer upon layer of manure covered my arm. I’m sure I was pale and in shock. The cowboys grinned politely. Tim directed me to an outdoor faucet where I could clean my arm. Marlboro Man watched as he gathered up the tools and the gear…and he chuckled. As my sister and I pulled away in the car later that day, she could only say, “Oh. My. God.” She made me promise never to return to that awful place. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d found out later that this, from Tim’s perspective, was my initiation. It was his sick, twisted way of measuring my worth.