After Miles' death in the desert Ben says to Hemlock "they found him in the desert, dead as Kelsey's nuts"
Does anyone know what this reference means? Who is Kelsey? HELP!
Many thanks
Rock n' Chief
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It just means he was quite dead. Over-emphasis, I suppose. A lot of the dialog uses plays on words, and is catchy to keep you interested. Like "Either one of you vampires touch this telescope and you're gonna need surgery to get it out of your a**". Or, "by the looks of him he couldn't find his tallywacker with a six-man search party". Cute lines that keep the viewer interested.
I found this on an internet search
http://www.babylon.com/definition/deader_than_Kelsey's_nuts/English
but you never know if the person wrote that himself or just copied and pasted it from another site, or if some or all of it is untrue. And as is the case with folklore, sometimes it becomes impossible to track something down, for the simple fact that people just regurgitate it on down the line without making sure that what they are saying or claiming is based on fact. So I have no idea whether the origin is as stated in that link, but based on the context, it just meant "really dead".
Just BTW, in the movie "Up in Smoke", the character named Curtis says "clean and skeet as peter" or "clean as skeeter's peter". Another one of those weird movie quotes that no one really knows the answer to for sure.
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Kelsey is not a character in the movie, if that's what you mean. It's an old saying.
See this site for the full details:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-kel1.htm