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Fie upon thee federasts!

On Wednesday and Thursday, some parts of the UK could be struck by 60mm to 80mm of rain, and possibly even up to 100mm.

That’s 2 inches, 3 inches and 4 inches of rain. For it falls in Imperial upon our currently dank island!

29 thoughts on “Fie upon thee federasts!”

  1. Surreptitious Evil

    Where is the best source of gopher wood?

    And would a modern Noah have to take two of each gender?

  2. Well, if you will live in QLD…
    Quite enough here, thank you very much. Driving down to Devon yesterday was not nice, and it’s been pissing down all night here.

  3. Post Brexit, all EU imports into the UK of relevant goods should be denominated in imperial, and if tariffs apply, higher tariffs applying to those which do not.

  4. I was about to say that The Young don’t understand Imperial when I realised that the “Imperial” was redundant.

  5. It sounds more when they use millimetres than it would if they said “one-sixteenth to one-tenth of a yard”.

  6. Those 4inches, known as “floods” to British Railways, were enough to bring trains to a halt in the south east

  7. “And would a modern Noah have to take two of each gender?”
    The first Noah already did. One male unicorn and one unicorn that defined as female.

  8. Well worth impoverishing the country so we can buy Apples in groats or something
    Other advantages …um……..

    Nope thats it

  9. Rather irritating, isn’t it, that the UK signed up to SI, which isn’t decimal, but counts in thousands (and very few others did). So there’s (almost) no such thing as a centimetre, only metres and millimetres. Damn schools teach what is effectively the cgs system, not SI. Not, of course, that other metric system users have any problem with bastardizing it for their own purposes, rather like the Yanks did to Imperial with ‘kips’.

  10. Well, formally SI goes up & down in powers of 1000, known as ‘Engineering Units’ on my calculator. That’s a bit of a clue. But there is no one stopping us using day-to-day units like cm, or even pecks & bushels if you want to in informal conversation. El Reg has a beautiful set of units if you want to be perverse, but sadly legalities make formal unit definitions a necessity.

    As an aside, I wonder if any laws will have to be modified now that the kilogramme is no longer based on the mass of a bit of metal in a vault in Paris?

  11. Facepaint–you suck enough EU dick without adding the metric gang. Pity for your unfortunate dentist.

    French scum I believe who came up with metric crap.

    I’d bring £sd back–just to hear the whining of scum like Facepaint. And it would force dumb youngers to use their brains or lose their money.

  12. @ Newmania
    We didn’t use groats in the 50s and 60s; Her Majesty handed out a few on Maundy Thursday but apart from those they were not legal tender.
    Your history teacher failed you.

  13. Imperial measurements are ridiculous, come on (honourable exception for pints of beer). One of the lesser noticed problems of the UK and the EU is that favouring metric and opposing the EU are somehow seen as incompatible positions.

  14. Bloke in North Dorset

    “I’d bring £sd back–just to hear the whining of scum like Facepaint. And it would force dumb youngers to use their brains or lose their money.”

    Wouldn’t work, they don’t use cash, it’s just a tap of the ’phone or entering a credit card pin. Hell, even I only carry a £5 just for emergencies because some places won’t accept CC under £5. I have some small change in my locker for our gambling on the golf course.

  15. @Doc Bud
    I’m told it goes back to Napoleon. The Corsican wasn’t too keen on some of the excesses of the Revolution & forced metrication was one of them. So he got a law passed, said that although the new measures were the legal standard no Frenchman could be prosecuted for using the old ones. And you can still see things sold in inches, pints & pounds in France

  16. BiND–Helping to do yourself in with the cashless crap. The political/bureaucratic scum just LOVE the power that will give them once it is compulsory.

  17. “Imperial measurements are ridiculous…”
    Curious, then, how many metric standards are simply the metric equivalent of the Imperial standard. Kitchen worktops are usually installed at 91.5cm. Conveniently, 3ft. Timber sizes & lengths mirror the Imperial intervals. And there’s a good reason. The Imperial measures are related to the human form & the actions it performs. Metric measures derive from the circumference of the planet.

  18. @ bis
    Metric measures derive from *an erroneous estimate* of the circumference of the planet.
    If you check the original definition of the metre you will be amused to find that it is closer to the yard than the current length of a metre!

  19. The beautiful simplicity of the ounce. It can be achieved by repeatedly dividing the pound. Try doing the same with a kilo into grams.
    Or the relationship between gallons & pints.
    The 12″ foot is pure genius. Exactly divisible by 2,3,4 & 6. Whoever needed to divide anything by five?
    The important thing about any measure is not the unit but what it’s being used for. It has no other purpose.

  20. @ Rob
    No they are not, which is why the livre was still in common use in France up to the Nazi occupation (and is still used in some places). Imperial measures are the ones which had been found useful for many hundreds of years prior to the invention of the EU a few decades ago.

  21. @john
    WikiP claims the polar circumference is 40,008 km, which means the metre should be ~0.02% longer than its current value.

  22. @bloke in spain June 11, 2019 at 10:14 pm

    The Imperial measures are related to the human form & the actions it performs

    Yep. Inch is ~ length of phalanx of thumb; yard is ~ length or arm & hand

    I can visualise an ounce of butter but not a gram of butter.

    Tyres are weird combo: 205/16 = 205mm wide 16″ diameter

    Weight: I prefer stone & lbs vs USA lbs only – he’s 5’8″ and 9st 7 vs 5’8″ and 133lbs

    Where I do like metric is tools: eg 10mm, 13mm, 17mm spanners vs eg 3/8″, 1/2″ 11/16th” and spark plug gaps

    Timber: 2×1, 4×2, 6×2; Slabs: 3×2 etc works for me

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