Is This What They Meant By “Going Metric”?

Back when The Curmudgeon was in elementary school, a representative of the telephone company visited his class every year.  One of the things the telephone company man always told us was that one day we would all use what he called “picture phones,” which were demonstrated to us with a brief film strip (remember film strips?).  Only it never happened.  Sure, today we can Skype (The Curmudgeon uses that term even though he really has only a vague idea of what it means) or use webcams or other means of seeing one another while we talk, but people do not routinely see one another when speaking on the phone.  It was one of those things we were told was inevitable but never came to pass.

The same is true of the metric system.  The whole world’s going metric, our teachers told us, and soon, the U.S. will, too; that’s why they spent so much time teaching us the intricacies of grams, meters, liters, and more.  Well, a long time has passed and the U.S. still hasn’t gone metric.  Sure, the marquee event in the track competition at the Olympics is the 100-meter dash, not the 100-yard dash, and the next most important event is the 1500 meters, not the mile, but Americans still don’t routinely use the metric system for any purpose.  If you don’t believe that, try going into a paint store some time and asking the guy behind the counter how many gallons of Benjamin Moore sapphire ice you need to paint a bedroom that’s 6.5 by 4.25 meters.  He’ll look at you like you’re from Mars.

Or maybe Marseille.

But some things do change with the times.  Consider, for example, the old jukebox – when, that is, you can find one.  In the mid-1970s, Loudon Wainwright III sang

Bobby give me change for a dollar
I wanna buy some cigarettes
I wanna play some music on the juke box, Bobby
A quarter plays a two-song set.

And later, he had an even worse vision:

I’m sittin’ on this bar stool
I guess that’s where my butt belongs
Dreamin’ about the time
When a quarter could buy you three songs
Bobby, you’re a gamblin’ man
How’d you like to place a little bet?
It won’t be long before
Two bits’ll buy a one-song set.

We’ve also become accustomed to referring to certain products, especially food products, by the units in which we purchase them, but those units have been changing, seldom for the better, over the years.  Hershey’s downsized its chocolate bars; the one-pound can of coffee now holds only thirteen ounces; a box of cereal, which you could always count on to be sixteen ounces, is sometimes only fourteen.

But now they’re hitting The Curmudgeon where he lives:  ice cream.

A bit under the weather last week and of the long-time opinion that in the question of whether one should feed a cold and starve a fever or feed a fever and starve a cold one should always feed anything that takes food, The Curmudgeon decided he wanted – no he needed ­– a sweet treat.  Why feed what ailed him?  First, because your body will tell you, in a clear and emphatic way, when it doesn’t want food; and second, fighting disease takes energy, and calories are, first and foremost, a unit of energy.  It takes energy to fight illness, The Curmudgeon reasons, so since his body was still telling him food was okay (okay, there’s a third reason:  The Curmudgeon likes to eat), he decided to treat himself to some ice cream.

Haagen-Dazs, to be precise.  Chocolate, because The Curmudgeon has never really seen the point of… not chocolate.

So when The Curmudgeon went to the supermarket, he was thinking he’d buy two of those little single-serving containers of chocolate ice cream.  Of course, they’re only single-serving containers for women and children, but he only wanted to whet his whistle, not gorge himself.  He couldn’t find any, though, so he went looking for a pint – his usual container of choice.  He found the Haagen-Dazs, found the chocolate, and picked it up.  It felt…small for a pint, so he took a closer look.

It turns out that a pint of chocolate Haagen-Dazs is no longer a pint of chocolate Haagen-Dazs.  It’s fourteen ounces of chocolate Haagen-Dazs – or, to be more precise, seven-eighths of a pint of chocolate Haagen-Dazs.  87.5 percent of a pint of chocolate Haagen-Dazs.  Definitely not a pint of chocolate Haagen-Dazs.

The Curmudgeon can live with the disappointment of never speaking on a picture phone, can deal with having no idea what the world record is for the 1500-meter run even though he spent his childhood knowing, for certain, that the world record for the mile at the time was Jim Ryun’s 3:51.1, doesn’t mind that the Hershey bar has shrunk because years before it did he realized Hershey bars aren’t even worth eating, and can even accept the need to purchase his favorite granola cereal more often because its maker devilishly decided to shrink the box rather than raise the price, but this is taking matters too far.

You can’t go around shrinking a boy’s pint of ice cream.  It’s just…wrong!  Go ahead:  don’t fill the coffee can.  Sure – no one will miss two ounces of cereal.  But less ice cream?

Sacrilege!

Or sacre bleu, as they might say in Marseille, where those metric system-using Frenchies probably don’t know anything about pints of ice cream.

Tagged: going metric, Haagen-Dazs, Loudon Wainwright III, picture phones, shrinking pint of ice cream, U.S. going metric