Tempest in a teapot (American English), or also phrased as storm in a teacup (British English), or tempest in a teacup, is an idiom meaning a small event that has been exaggerated out of proportion.  There are also lesser known or earlier variants, such as storm in a cream bowl, tempest in a glass of water, storm in a wash-hand basin, and storm in a glass of water.  Cicero, in the first century BC, in his De Legibus, used a similar phrase in Latin, possibly the precursor to the modern expressions, Excitabat enim fluctus in simpulo ut dicitur Gratidius, translated:  "For Gratidius raised a tempest in a ladle, as the saying is".  Then in the early third century AD, Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophistae, has Dorion ridiculing the description of a tempest in the Nautilus of Timotheus by saying that he had seen a more formidable storm in a boiling saucepan.  The phrase also appeared in its French form une tempête dans un verre d'eau ('a tempest in a glass of water'), to refer to the popular uprising in the Republic of Geneva near the end of the eighteenth century.   One of the earliest occurrences in print of the modern version is in 1815, where Britain's Lord Chancellor Thurlow, sometime during his tenure of 1783–1792, is quoted as referring to a popular uprising on the Isle of Man as a "tempest in a teapot".  Also Lord North, Prime Minister of Great Britain, is credited for popularizing this phrase as characterizing the outbreak of American colonists against the tax on tea.  This sentiment was then satirized in Carl Guttenberg's 1778 engraving of the Tea-Tax Tempest  where Father Time flashes a magic lantern picture of an exploding teapot to America on the left and Britannia on the right, with British and American forces advancing towards the teapot.  Just a little later, in 1825, in the Scottish journal Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, a critical review of poets Hogg and Campbell also included the phrase "tempest in a teapot".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_in_a_teapot   

Red kuri squash is a thin skinned orange colored winter squash, a cultivated variety of the species Cucurbita maxima.  It looks like a small pumpkin without the ridges.  It belongs to the Hubbard squash group.   Inside the hard outer skin there is a firm flesh that provides a very delicate and mellow chestnut-like flavor.  Other varieties of this subspecies include 'Hokkaido', 'Red Hokkaido' and 'Sweet Meat' squashes.   It is generally understood that all squash originated in Mesoamerica, but may have been independently cultivated elsewhere, albeit later.  Red kuri squash is commonly called "Japanese squash", "orange Hokkaido squash", "baby red hubbard squash", or "Uchiki kuri squash".  In Japan, the word kuri may refer to either the squash discussed in this article or to Japanese chestnuts.  In France, it is called potimarron, and in the United Kingdom, it is commonly called "onion squash".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_kuri_squash  Thank you, reader.   

Michael Brown (1920–2014) was an American composer, lyricist, writer, director, producer, and performer.  He was born in Mexia, Texas.  His musical career began in New York cabaret, performing first at Le Ruban Bleu.  In the 1960s, he was a producer of industrial musicals for major American corporations such as J.C. Penney and DuPont.  For the DuPont pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair, Brown wrote and produced a musical revue, The Wonderful World of Chemistry staged 48 times a day by two simultaneous casts in adjacent theaters. For years, he maintained a reunion directory of the cast and crew, which included Robert Downey, Sr. as a stage manager.  Several of his songs have entered the American repertoire, including "Lizzie Borden" and "The John Birch Society," which were popularized by the Chad Mitchell Trio.  Children know him best as the author of three Christmas books about Santa's helper, Santa Mouse.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Brown_(writer)   

PUN:  Hickory, hickory dock, three mice ran up the clock  The clock struck one and the other two escaped without serious injury.   

Origin of Fight Tooth and Nail  This idiom dates back to the 1500s and comes from the idea of fighting like a wild beast.  Animals don’t have weapons, so they fight with everything that they’ve got:  their teeth and nails.  Charles Dickens famously used the phrase in David Copperfield (1850):  I got at it tooth and nail.  https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/fight-tooth-and-nail   

October 17, 2025