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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, July 21, 2004 Basic Black by Arthur Black ! ; - m. i 1 j[l Measure for measure By the time you read these words, Steve Thobum could be in jail. But probably not. After all, he was convicted of his heinous crime 'way back in the year 2,000 and despite the might and majesty of a hugely disapproving government, he's still walking free. Truth is, the government is just a teensy bit aft-aid of Steve Thobum. And well they might be, for this is a man who despite grave tln-eats and dire promises of doom and perdition from the highest levels levels of authority, blissfully went ahead and... sold bananas. Correction: Steve Thobum sold bananas by the pound. And that's not allowed in the country Steve Thobum calls home - which by the way, is not Nigeria or North Korea or some other fly-blown Third World tin pot dictatorship. Steve Thobum is an Englishman--a greengrocer greengrocer in Sunderland, to be precise. This makes him a citizen of the state that came up with the dictum dictum 'a man's home is his castle'. But it also means he belongs to a member country of the European Common Market. And in the ECM, pounds and ounces are verboten. Sounds, well, Hitlere-sque, but the fact is, anytime a customer in Britain asks for goods in pounds and ounces, and the shopkeeper fails to measure the goods out in their metric equivalent, equivalent, said shopkeeper is committing committing a criminal offence and is liable to jail time. What complicates the problem problem is that every day that simple simple law is ignored, flouted and trampled in the Albion dust about ten million times. Brits are quite happy with their pounds and ounces, their fathoms fathoms and furlongs, their pecks and pints and quarts. Ninety percent of them strenuously oppose the idea of converting to metric. This is why the government government tiptoes around Steve Thoburn and his old-time measuring scale. If they send him to jail, they'll have to do the same thing to virtually every shopkeeper in the country. And Mister Thobum? He's no Jesse James. He's not even a Robin Hood. He is, in the country Adam Smith called 'a Summer Dance Camps IN ORONO August 16th-20th August 23rd-27th Ages 5-9yrs. 9 am - 12 pm Ages 10 & up I pm - 4:30 pm Cost $80 week till Angela at 905-983-5002 Dancing & Crafts. Snack provided. JAZZ, TAP, BALLET, MUSICAL MOVEMENT nation of shopkeepers' -a shopkeeper. shopkeeper. He's just trying to satisfy satisfy the folks who buy his produce. produce. Here's how he puts it: "I object so strongly to this interference interference in the way I serve my customers just because of a law passed in another country by people we did not elect that I shall continue to sell in pounds and ounces if my customers want it. If I am prosecuted again, I will not pay any fine and they can put me in prison." Don't know why the Brits don't just ask Canada for guidance. guidance. After all we've had the metric system since 1970, when Ottawa made it official. We've got 34 years of hands-on metric experience over here. That's why today we live in a country where, on your driver's licence, your height is described in centimeters, but on a police APB it's in feet and inches. That's why we get to buy gas in litres for cars that are rated in miles per gallon. And live in houses that are measured in. square feet, built on lots measured in square metres and erected with two-by-fours held together with three-inch nails. My favorite morsel of metric metric measurement? The wind chill factor, which is now officially officially measured in watts per square metre. Yeah, that's use- able. My grocery store has two scales: one in kilos, the other in pounds and ounces. And good luck finding anyone on staff who can tell you whether 250 grams will be enough for the quarter pound of butter your cake recipe calls for. In my experience, the grocery clerks are just as confused as.. .well, I am. Three decades on and what we have is a mish-mash of weights and measures and millions millions of Canucks not quite sure just how far the next town is or how much that sack of potatoes weighs or how to brag about the fish we just caught ("Look, Maw - a 42 centimetre Largemouth! Must run about one-point-seven-five kilos!") I know the argument for metric: it's simpler and makes international trading easier. Well that might be true if we'd actually adopted it--and if our major trading partner, the U.S., used it, which it doesn't. The solution? Hey, who said anything about solution? This is Canada, a country that's half French and half English, half European and half North American, half enthralled with the U.S. and half terrified of it, half winter and half summer. summer. ..Why shouldn't we have a system of weights and measures measures that's half metric and half Imperial? We're Canada, eh? 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