* He Dont Do The Metric, Mamma
Fact: One pencil thickness, determined through an extensive and tedious research project, is about 8 mm, plus or minus 1/16 inch. The survey was conducted in two parts.
Part one was a relentless tramp through many, many school supply stores and stationers, ruler in hand. Given the rise of “big box” retailers in recent decades and the declining fashionability of traditional wooden pencils (the kind with no moving parts or batteries), there are very few old school suppliers left, and the simple act of finding them was not easy at all. Not one bit, ladies and gentlemen. Not one tiny bit.
Collecting a decent sample size required visits to at least 17 states and possibly one territory. Most of the wares located (pencils in this case) were found neglected in small boxes on back shelves in out of the way corners under decades worth of dust, wrapped in cobwebs, and beneath layers of randomly-scattered insect parts. In dimly lit rooms only partly supplied with semi-breathable air. This was not fun at all, not even every now and then, for a few seconds at a time.
Part two, as a double check on the methodology, enlisted the talents of veteran grade school teachers. Several dozen of them. The burlier, ethically less conflicted, and lower-salaried ones willing to terrorize their diminutive charges for the sake of a few extra bucks. These proved most helpful. All in the name of science, of course. These teachers (and a few of their larger and scarier aides) were told simply to grab likely pencils at random and measure them. We do not know if any of these pencils were returned or simply retained, and resold in dark alleys, and we didn’t ask either.
At any rate we can state without a doubt that one pencil thickness is about as stated above, and that’s good enough for us.
Another fact: The metric system was invented in France, by a committee, in 1793. This committee was a group of men who wore silk stockings and elaborate powdered wigs. And spent their days endlessly multiplying and dividing. And not the fun kind of multiplying and dividing, but the kind that used quill pens, and ink, and made a mess of endless sheets of paper.
This committee of French scientific dandies defined the meter (whence the name for the whole metric system) to be one 10-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, and decreed that exactly every other measurement should be based on that decision. They decided on the one 10-millionth part because that gave them a final length that, if they had a stick that long, would be a handy size to whack things with. In other words, it was appropriately sized to the human body, like all other measurement systems throughout human history. This once again reaffirmed man (and the occasional uppity woman) as the measure of all things.
But as everyone says, the neat thing about the metric system is that you can convert one unit to another by either multiplying or dividing by 10. It’s incredibly tidy — divide this, multiply that, and so on. That’s the kind of system you get from a posse of effete sneezing snuff sniffers in silk stockings.
Anyway, this all seemed to be such a thunderingly good idea at the time that most people fell for it. Now we have meters. (The word meter just means measure, and how clever is that?) Not only meters but kilometers and centimeters and grams. And dynes, ergs, baryes, poises and pascals. Not to mention amperes, Kelvins, candelas and moles. If you have a lawn full of lumpy excavated spots that appear to regurgitate themselves overnight, every night, then you now know who to blame for moles.
And if you’re trying to measure anything remember that there is no exact way to get the true distance from the equator to the North Pole. No one even remembers who the North Pole was anymore, or what his exact street address actually was. And on top of that every measurement, no matter how fine you cut it, is an approximation. In the best case. Usually it’s a guess.
Think about it. You want to measure something, so what do you use? A measuring stick. And where do you get the measuring stick? You (or someone else) makes it in the standard size, whether that is a foot, a yard, a meter or whatever. And how to they know what size that is? They measure it with a measuring stick. Therefore all measurement is circular. You can’t measure something unless you already know how long it is, and you can’t know how long it is until you measure it.
This is true, and this is why the human body is so dang handy. No matter where you go, there you are. Hold your finger or your arm or foot up against something, and say “good enough for the gods”, and get it over with.
So you can get fancy and use the metric system or just stay with God’s Own System® also known as the Imperial System, based on the old familiar humble English inch (sometimes spelled inche, or ynchhe, and so on), which is the length of three barleycorns. This system was used by centuries of despots and their illiterate lackeys all the way back, and it still works the same way today. No assembly required.
If you want to see if something is an inch long and don’t know how long a barleycorn is, then go to your nearest bulk food store and buy three of them, the barleycorns. Then carry them with you wherever you go. You will never be at a loss. Or just say screw it, this is close enough, use your knuckle as a rough measure, and go with that, or just guess. See, you also get to make up the rules as you go along, and you can eat them if you get hungry (the barleycorns).
A major advantage of the Imperial system is that although it’s not more accurate, or easy, it is a lot of fun. It has units like the poppyseed (1/4 of a barleycorn, and also edible), the barleycorn (the length of a barleycorn), the digit and the finger (either of which is handy when waving to friends in traffic), the palm (three inches), the hand (four inches, dig it), the cubit (the length of your forearm, or 18 inches or 54 barleycorns), the yard (three feet or 36 inches), the mile (originally Roman, at 5000 feet, extended to 5280 feet in medieval times to make it an even number of furlongs). Furlongs! What ever happened to those furlongs, for crying out loud? We could use a few right now!
We also have the mouthful, the jigger, the cup, the pint, the quart, the pottle, the peck, the gallon, the rundlet, the barrel, the tierce, the hogshead, the firkin, the puncheon, the tertian, the pipe, and the butt.
With the butt we come to the end of our treatise, as is proper.
Bite me, French committee bureaucrat dudes in your fancy ruffled pants, bite me. On my Imperial butt. (The butt is 126 wine gallons, or 1.5 puncheons, or 3 tierces, or 7 rundlets, or either 108 or 103 ale gallons, depending on whose conversion factors you use. The colonies (us) got the wine gallon, smaller than the ale-beer-water gallon, which is the present Imperial gallon, which is why the English have bigger gallons than we do, the bastards.)