October 8, 2007
The metric/imperial debate has largely been decided: most countries of the world with the exception of the US, and, you guessed it, Burma and Liberia, officially use the metric system of weights and measures. Being raised in Canada, where the metric system has been in place since the days of The Great Trudeau, The Shark Book authors grew accustomed to being struck with a meter-stick for misbehaving at school rather than the yard-stick, which was the weapon of preference for the homeroom teachers of their parents’ generation.
However, if you were to ask a random person on a Toronto street how much he or she weighed, the response (if you were to get one that didn’t consist of a finger to your eye, or a curt “Drop dead creep”) would probably be in pounds. Somehow, the metric system just isn’t a comfortable fit when discussing weight or the length of certain appendages of import – those spammers sending out emails on how different a gentleman’s life might be with 12 inches never boast of how impressed the ladies would be with 30.48 centimeters. And of course, when you go to a bar, you order a pint – and if the bartender were to give you any lip about 0.473176475 liters, well his quarter tip might stay firmly clenched in your fist when it comes time to pay.
Drinkers’ familiarity with pints, while maybe not reversing the trend toward metrication, is at least slowing it down. A recent ruling in the European Union’s Court of Justice came down in favor of the imperial measure when it granted Diageo, the maker of girl-drink drunk favorite Baileys Irish Cream, permission to sell mini-bottles of the liqueur in Germany.
Bailey minis are sold in individual units, each one containing an eighth of a pint (0.071), which while allowed in imperial-friendly Britain and Ireland, is a non-standard measure in Germany and therefore technically illegal. The German drinking public, the distillers argued, would not know what to make of the little bottles and the non-standard amount of sweet liquid it contains. The EU, further proving that it has given up all hope of ever trying to force the British or Irish to order anything other than a pint at a bar, disagreed and interpreted the relevant laws in such a way that they gave Diageo permission to sell the wee bottles throughout Europe. (Full story here)
