May the Road (as Long as It's Not Marked in Kilometers) Rise Up To Meet the "Metric Martyr"
Britons and the Irish can still walk a mile to the pub for a pint of beer instead of trudging 1.6 kilometers for 50 centiliters of the sudsy stuff, European Union regulators ruled.
In a belated victory for Britain's "metric martyr," the European Commission dropped plans to force the U.K. and Ireland to replace Imperial measures such as pints, yards, feet and inches with the metric system by 2009.
The metric climbdown, triggered by a public-opinion survey in the two countries, "honors the culture and traditions of Great Britain and Ireland," Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said in a statement in Brussels today.
Today's decision is a posthumous victory for Steven Thoburn, an English grocer dubbed the "metric martyr" when he was fined in 2001 for selling bananas by the pound. Thoburn died of a heart attack at the age of 39 in 2004 after his appeal was rejected.
Other traders were prosecuted for selling mackerel, Brussels sprouts and pumpkins by the pound.
In other recent rulings, speaking in Esperanto anywhere in the EU–other than when chanting along to the 1965 Esperanto movie Incubus starring William Shatner, of course– will be punished by death.
And let's not miss the irony that the Irish now get to keep the "Imperial" weights and measures system imposed on them by their, well, former imperial overlords. The important thing is that Van Morrison need not learn how to re-measure anything at this point in his life.
And never forget that Gerry Ford's darkest hour came not when he pardoned Nixon, or refused to admit that Poland was under Soviet domination, or when he unveiled his sadomasochistic WIN campaign. It came when the signed The Metric Conversion Act of 1975, surrendering American sovereignty when it came to feets, inches, and all the rest. Luckily for us, he was in that, as in all else, a failure.
