Ramble Time!

I haven't posted up a good ramble in donkey's years. So here's one.
Just to explain the term 'ramble' based on its application in this blog, a 'ramble' is a blog post that is one hundred percent improvised. I have to rely on my writing abilities to keep the blog post going for as long as I can without it descending into unimaginative drivel.
I explain this because quite a few people have started to follow my blog since I last rambled. I think it's about time that these newbies were introduced to this wonder.

Right, so off we go. Well, I suppose I could start by referring back to the beginning of this post, where I used the phrase 'donkey's years'. Now, what is meant by that phrase? I know it means a long time, but when inventing this phrase, why did they pick on the donkey? To my knowledge, they aren't that slow - disgruntled donkeys have been known to lash out with lightning-fast rapidity. Is it something to do with the speed at which they age? Do donkeys age particularly quickly? I know that people refer to a dog year as one seventh of a human year (which, by the way, is a method founded on bullshit), but is a donkey year any shorter? I assume that is what they were getting at with the phrase, that there are more donkey years in a human year and this allows for some clever-sounding hyperbolic time-based exaggerations.

You know what? I'm going to look it up. Right now. I'll look the phrase up, and get back to you.

...

Well, it turns out that the phrase may have originated from rhyming slang, as one alternative to the phrase was 'donkey's ears', which rhymes, of course, with years. This could have been the original pronounciation. So it would appear that at some point, people just couldn't be arsed to rhyme any more, so they went for the more direct approach (defeating the objective of rhyming slang...) and just used the word 'years'.
Oh, those lazy olden-days people!
Then, when people started to say 'donkey's years', they may have thought it to be an allusion to the lifespan of a donkey (which, in direct contrast to my theory and more logically, is quite long). The source from where I obtained this information mentions a Blackpool donkey by the jolly old name of Lively Laddie, who died aged 62.

Heh. You learn something new every day. Now you can't say you don't learn something from this blog! Nyah!

Anyway, must be toddling off now. Auf Wiedersehen, etc.