‘Twas a grim day in the Fact Haushalt. Okay, it wasn’t that grim - or at least not that much grimmer than usual – there was however a problem, the kitchen tap was broken and needed repairing/replacing. Not much of a problem in and of itself, it was the constant nagging that the kitchen tap was broken and needed repairing/replacing which was the problem.
I duly retrieved my trusty micrometer, measured the diameter of the pipe and headed off to my local DIY store. Alas, they had nothing that was marked as being 12,7mm wide. Eventually I asked the spotty, teenaged assistant whether they had 12.7mm connectors or it was possible that I’d made a mistake in my measurements.
“Ah, we don’t do 12.7mm,” he said, but, you know, in German, “half an inch is the standard size.”
As Neil Herron once more goes on the trail of some petty bureaucrats because a Rotheram butcher has the audacity to sell meat by the lb, isn’t about time someone showed a bit more enthusiasm in stopping Europeans from using Imperial measurements – it only confuses we Brits who own metric rulers.
Song playing as this was published:The White Stripes -Icky Thump
Why would the “spotty, teenaged assistant” be speaking, “you know”, in German? Was this post a couple of years in the making?
PS Great related searches on your hover-over linky thing for half an inch being the standard size!
Well quite, I’ve been trying to squeeze in (ahem) the “half an inch is the standard size” for a couple of years now, but to no avail. I was starting to get a little frustrated, I can tell you. Why the metric martyrs had to be doing minced beef this time, as opposed to sticking to bananas, or, better still ‘The Great British Sausage.” or something, I don’t know.
Being serious, why do people get arrested in the UK for selling things in imperial measurements (if people ask for them), when many objects on the Festland are marked up in Zoll?
If Germans can cope with the fact that my bike has 28″ wheels, but a 60cm frame, I’m sure the mince-buyers of Rotheram could cope with dual-labelling.
The related searches in the hover-over linky thing on ‘28″‘ is also quite interesting! But just like with the half an inch hover thing, one of the main suggestions each time appears to be ‘erectile dysfunction’. With 28″? That would be like owning a ferrari but running out of juice (so to speak).
(Actually, it would be more like owning a whole factory full of ferraris!)
I’m not convinced by this pop-up search thing. Bananas = Sudoku and Tuesday Morning, along with Avian Flu which is turning up in all of them. I could understand the Neil Herron link brining it up, but I obviously missed the discovery of a link between bird death and boomerang shaped fruit.
And how many times have the Telegraph used that headline?
BTW, does that pop-up work for any link? In which case spot the one added purely to see what Snap dredges up. And a plug for Mr Khachaturian just to fox it.
Appy: Is the story about the man with such a large, er, ferrari that whenever he had an erection, fainted due to blood rushing from the rest of his body apocryphal? If not, maybe the 28″ search is for those who want erectile dysfunction?
Anyhoo: It’s headline-writing correctness gone mad! And I think I’ll give snap a few more days (if only so that your comments make sense) before getting rid of it. As for your test, Armenians are obviously responsible for avian flu. And erectile dysfunction. Haven’t you read Turkish government literature?
Waschtisch? When I was young this was called Waschbecken. What kind of political correctness is this? Is the world coming to an end?
I think we should be told…
Armin: Yes, but doesn’t Waschtisch sound much more valuable? Whereas a Waschbecken is obviously the poor man’s option…..
At least they weren’t confusing matters further by using the traditional German inch (= 3 cm). And let’s not even get started on the Dresden elbow…
Anyhoo: You’ll be pleased to be told that awful snap thing has been turned off.
Wintergreen:
It’s worse than you think, Mr Fact. You’ve been lied to for many years. That great composite noun “Sechzehnmeterraum” you heard about while almost falling asleep whenever watching the German national team? Well, it’s not 16 m. Due to the English original, the 18 yard box (i.e. the 16.4592 m box), the German box is almost half a metre longer than the name suggests.
We knew it all along. Sports journalists are not exactly worshipping accuracy and Germans just claim to be accurate and rule obeying.