What's this white, powdery stuff?

[Fittisize]

btw. in my LA book I found an article about the Metric System in Canada and how it's integrated...bwaha.

The Metric System [Sort Of]

Canada was declared a metric nation in 1971, and after 2.8 decades, it's safe to say that we're as metric as we're going to get. At first, the to systems, metric and imperial, battled it out-the metricists seized the road signs and thermostats, while the stubborn imperialists reused to buy anything that wasn't measured out according to some body part. You may recall extremists in Ottawa driving all the way to Carleton Place, a distance of sixty-three kilometres, to fill up at a service station that still sold gasoline in gallons. But that's all ofver now. Resistance and insistence proved equally futile.

Purists on both sided have lamented the resulting mism-mash, failing to see that what we have now is a system that's uniquely Canadian. By combing the more sensible features of the metric system, or SI (Systeme International d'Unites), with some long-cherished aspects of hte imperial system, we've come up with a seamless hybrid that makes prefect sense to us all. Let's call it simperial. Like franglais and "Progressive Conservatism," simperial is the ideal Canadian comporomise.

For example, the other day I asked directions to an auction sale: "Drive ten kilometres down this road," I was told, "and you'll see a barn about two hundred feet in from the highway." That's simperial. Only in Canada can a river be half a mile wide and thirty metres deep. At building supply yards, you can buy 100 square metres of shingles and a boz of three-quarter inch roofing nails to hold them down. When I ask my daughter, who is fourteen and has been raised metric, how tall she is, she says "Five four." What's the temperature outside? "Plus three." Simperial.

In our quite, peackeeping way, we took the best features from each extreme and consigned the rest to oblivion. Simperial simply makes more sense than either of its two feeder systems. Nobody's feet should be size forty-two anything. But at the same time, zero degrees, not thirty-two, is obviously the temperature at which water should freeze; if anyone knows that, it's us.

After the auction, I stopped at that gas station in Carleton Place. The pump registers gasoline by the litre now, of course, and when I went in to pay, the guy in the booth pointed his chin at my car.

"How is she on gase?" he asked.

"I get 100 kilometres on siz litres," I said, quoting the manual; I had no idea what it meant.

He nodded appreciatively. "That's pretty good mileage."