Give ’em an inch, they’ll take a meter

HUH?

(CNN) — The metric system is the kind of thing that you can expect from the 60-vote filibuster-proof majority Democrats now have in the United States Senate.

After the Watergate scandal in 1974, Democrats trounced Republicans in the mid-term elections, getting 61 seats in the Senate and 291 in the House.

In the Senate, they adjusted the rules to make it harder for Republicans to filibuster (reducing the magic number from 67 to 60 to invoke cloture, which ends debate). In the House, they passed all kinds of reforms to take power away from senior members and give it to junior members. And Congress mandated that the American people embrace the metric system.

The metric system idea never really caught on…

The Watergate scandal led to screwing up the U.S. entry into a rational system of weights and measurements? OR… a disputed election (and recount) in the State of Minnesota somehow means the United States will finally do something the rest of the planet finds good enough, smart enough and gosh-darn it  like it …

Today is the U.S. national holiday when people in the United States celebrate their unique usos y costubres, like a screwy system of weights and measurements no one else understands.  Here in Mexico (which receives the most U.S. visitors and has the largest number of U.S. residents) there’s actually a monument to the adoption of the metric system (in Veracruz, where this particular reform is among several memorialized in an impressive, block long Benito Juarez memorial complex).  But, being Mexico, land of a million gringos, there are sometimes problems.

The temperature right now here in Mazatlan is 28°… which someone in the U.S. I was speaking to on the phone wanted to know what that was in “real” temperature. Uh… 28 degrees… warm and sunny… would it be hotter if it was 29 degrees, and does it make all that much difference if it’s 82.4° Fahrenheit?

Close enough… and that’s the “problem” for people in the U.S. When joining the rest of the planet and adopting the metric system was first proposed in the U.S., academics were the ones excited by it. I realized why no one else thought it was a good idea when I saw a sign on a university campus reading “15 MPH/ 24.14 KmH” — No shit!

That’s the problem… we expect everything to be exact… which just ain’t the way things work here.  If answering a personal ad (and I’m mature… not dead!) I say I’m 1.77 m tall. Except for the gringos, who think 5’10” (requiring two different calculations) is my height (and actually adds a couple of millimeters). C’mon… nobody’s that anal (and if they are, I don’t think I’d be interested in meeting anyway), but I’m still surprised how many people move to Mexico (or anywhere else) and find this a problem.

My simple rules for snowbirds and other measurement challenged folks.

• A half kilo is about a pound.
• A liter is a quart and some.
• A kilometer is about 2/3rds a mile
• I’m not short.
• I’m not tall either.
• Mazatlan is hot.

That’s all you need to know. And the 4th of July is for fireworks and drinking beer (except in those jurisdictions where the ley seco is in effect the day before election day, too).

I don’t think one Senator from Minnesota (even  a known math whiz)  is going to change the Republic… and even if people in the U.S. never do figure out how to divide and multiply by 10… there are still be some things the U.S. gets mostly right:

From the 2002 Fourth of July celebrations in Washington DC.