"Look! I can freeze my drool!"
— Pinky, Wakko's Wish
There are all kinds of climates in this world, whether they are hot, humid, windy, or freezing cold. In the case of that last one, the temperatures there can range from nippy, to freeze-your-nuts-off, to almost sub-zero. You want to pack warm if you don't want to suffer hypothermia, which is not a pleasant way to die.
One indicator of how ridiculously cold a place is is when your own body fluids wind up freezing mid stream when expelled. The most common ones being snot, tears, and urine, but on rare occasions can be things like blood and vomit. Whatever it is, expect it to go from liquids to ice cubes or fixtures within a matter of seconds.
Usually Played for Laughs. May also be a form of Toilet Humour if it's urine or vomit. Overlaps with Nature Tinkling if the character is peeing outdoors and it happens, and Nose Nuggets and Freeze Sneeze if it's snot.
Not to be confused with the expression "[his/her/my] blood froze", a metaphor for an Oh, Crap! realization with heavy overtones of fear.
Examples:
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- In Everybody Pees, a man tries to write in the snow with his pee, but his stream of pee freezes, then he gets hypothermia.
Anime & Manga
- Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood: Isaac McDougall, the Freezing Alchemist, turns his own blood into frozen spears when cornered in a fight with the Elric Brothers.
- The climax of Pokémon: The Movie Black/White features the Sword of the Vale castle rising into Earth's Mesosphere, with Ash, Pikachu, and Victini still on it. Needless to say, as Ash thinks he'll die from the cold and oxygen loss, his Single Tear freezes solid almost as soon as it leaves his face.
Comic Books
- Disney Ducks Comic Universe: One Scrooge McDuck comic has Scrooge bet he can finish a dogsled race faster than a competitor. The judge starting a race proves how cold it is by spitting on the ground, which turns into an ice cube midair.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes:
- In one strip, Calvin steps outside into the snow, looks shocked, clutches his nose and says, "Don't you hate it when your boogers freeze?" In the 10th Anniversary Book, cartoonist Bill Watterson states his hope that a historian will confirm he's the first person to use the word "boogers" in a newspaper comic.
- In another, Calvin discusses with Hobbes the possibility of a sneeze spontaneously freezing, giving him a 3-D model of his sneeze.note
Film — Animation
- At some point in the first Ice Age movie, during a blizzard, Sid's nose becomes runny from the cold and his snot freezes.
- In Wakko's Wish (the movie of Animaniacs), Pinky makes ice sculptures by spitting because it's so cold, his spit freezes instantly.
Film — Live-Action
- Dumb and Dumber: While traveling through wintertime Colorado on a scooter, Lloyd and Harry are so cold that, when they reach Aspen, their nasal fluids have frozen into icicles hanging from their nostrils.
- In both the 1982 and 2011 versions of The Thing, a dead body with its wrists and throat slit are seen, frozen blood making crimson pillars to each wound.
Literature
- In Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, after a particularly severe blizzard, Pa discovers some eerie-looking snow and ice covered cattle that are frozen to the ground with long streams of ice coming from their snouts. Pa breaks these ice streams, and this revives the cattle and probably saves their lives.b
- The ignominious fate of Trotsky in the short story "Truth, Justice, and the Politically Correct, Soviet Socialist Way" from the anthology Superheroes due to a sudden, very cold, very hard Siberian wind. Bolshe-Man decides to keep his frozen body in his Fortress Of Solidarity much like Lenin, though its pointed out Lenin gets more visitors.
- The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen: When translating the original text to German, Gottfried August Burger added an extra tall tale: Hunting in the Russian winter, Munchausen is attacked by a bear just when he has disassembled his gun to repair it. The baron takes refuge in a tree, but accidentally drops the knife he needs to assemble the gun. By directing "the stream of that water of which there is plenty of supply in great fear" onto the handle of the knife, the baron creates an icicle by which he pulls up the knife, then assembles the gun and shoots the bear.
- In the audio book Tell Me a Story, the story "Ciann Moore" establishes the weather as so cold, the cows give ice cream instead of milk.
- In To Build a Fire, it is -75 degrees Fahrenheit; when the man spits, the spit freezes mid-air with "a sharp, explosive crackle".
Video Games
- Pokémon: The beard that Beartic possesses is essentially this trope, being made from its previous evolution Cubchoo's Snot Bubble turned ice fixture.
Western Animation
- American Dad!: According to Steve, this happens to him in one episode when he tries to pee behind a tree out in the forest at night during wintertime.
- The Fairly OddParents!: In one episode, Timmy and Vicky get trapped in a snow cave on a mountain, and whenever Vicky cries her tears come out as ice cubes.
- Family Guy: in "Into Fat Air", Peter vomits after drinking beer to experience a better buzz on Mt. Everest's altitude, only for it to freeze in his mouth into one solid piece.
Peter: Hey Brian, you want a pukesicle?
Brian: I would love a pukesicle. [starts licking it frequently after Peter passes it to him] - Fugget About It: When Jimmy and Cheech face off against each other in a peeing contest in "Rainbows And Painted Hos", both their pee streams freeze solid in the cold Regina weather before they even touch the ground.
Jimmy: Okay, we'll call it a draw.
- Looney Tunes: In the episode "8 Ball Bunny", Bugs Bunny embarks on a trip with a small penguin to Antartica (OHH! I'M DYING!), only for the penguin to tell him that he actually lives in Hoboken once they get there (OHH! I'M DYIN' AGAIN!). When Bugs refuses, the penguin starts crying again with his tears turning into ice cubes.
- The Loud House: In "Schooled!", when Lincoln arrives in a very exaggerated Canada, he is told not to blow his nose lest his snot freeze.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In the episode "Survival of the Idiots", Spongebob and Patrick are locked inside of Sandy's tree dome during winter, resulting in them being caught in a blizzard. The saliva around their mouths freeze, as does their nasal drippings, which Spongebob even points out.
SpongeBob: I'm so cold, that I can use my nose drippings as a pair of chopsticks.
- In "Anything Yukon Do I can Do Better" from Total Drama World Tour, during the sled-pulling challenge, DJ starts crying because the snow and ice from Yukon remind him of his mother's freezer. Because of the cold, his tears froze and he couldn't see anything, leading him to push a baby seal off a cliff. Despite not seeing anything, he still managed to cross the finish line first, but his team still lost because they left Bridgette behind.
- Xiaolin Chronicles: At the beginning of the episode "Heal me!", due to the location of the Shen Gong Wu being frozen mountains, Dojo's snot freezes after he sneezes. He also tastes it and thinks it's not bad, but Ping Pong points out it's disgusting.
Real Life
- A persistent urban legend holds that a woman was killed by a long stream of urine leaking out of an airliner's toilet, which froze into a spear midair.
- Baron Larrey, surgeon to the French armies in the Napoleonic Wars, described frostbite and "congélation" as important reasons for the defeat of the army in Russia in 1812. What he meant by "congélation" was the nasty tendency, in temperatures way below zero, not only of urine to begin freezing as it was being expelled, but for the urine stream to freeze faster than it could be ejected — with frozen urine blocking the penis. "Congélation" also occurred during defecation, with the sufferer who was baring his arse to Siberia suddenly discovering he was trying to excrete a very unpleasant ice cube. Congélation as a hazard of extreme cold was rediscovered by the German medical services in Russia in 1941 and the subsequent winters.
