Second Innings

Yeah, it's my second winter in Boston. You can tell by the fact that I now speak Farenheit. It's such a relief that I can do that now. It's been excruciating to have to mentally convert from degrees F to degrees C, just to decide whether I should feel icy cold or totally frigid.

But I still resent the Farenheit scale for being inexplicably difficult. It was originally designed so that the temperature of the human body would be 96 degrees. Not 100 degrees, but 96. Then, in an "improvement", the scale was modified so that the difference between the melting and boiling points of water would be 180 degrees. Not 200 degrees, but 180. Oh, and of course the freezing point of water is 32 degrees. Not 30 degrees, but 32. It is a travesty of common sense that the scale still survives.

Clearly it takes more than 2 winters to learn to speak in ounces. That's partly because of the number of ounces that exist. There's the avoirdupois ounce, the troy ounce, and the Maria Theresa ounce, each of which is a different measure equivalent to between 28 and 31 grams. Then there's the Dutch ounce which, with characteristic Dutch obtuseness, is 100 grams. And then, just to really make things enjoyable, there's the fluid ounce which is not even a measure of weight. So when I go shopping for food, it's always a matter of conjecture as to whether I will buy enough to feed a family of 3 or an entire clan of Indians.

I miss the sheltered, metric world in which I grew up. It was a simpler time, when men were men, women were strangers, and it was a cold day if you could stand in the sun without breaking into a sweat.

Interestingly, according to the 2006 CIA World Factbook as quoted in Wikipedia, i.e. according to an obviously incontrovertible source, there are only 3 countries which do not use the metric system as their standard for measures. One of them is the US. The second is Liberia. The third is Myanmar.

Make of that what you will.