My wife and I are in Vancouver, on one of our regular visits to our son -- this time for his 40th birthday.
At the Public Market on Granville Island, yesterday, I bought some cherries. The pricing was shown only by the pound. Undaunted, I asked for 600 grams. The woman serving me put cherries in a plastic bag and started to seal it with a twist tie. I asked her how she knew it was about 600 g. She indicated that it would be weighed at the cash register. I moved to the cash line and discovered, when I got to the front, that the scale was calibrated only in pounds. My cherries weighed 1.51 lb, which is closer to 700 g than 600 g, but I accepted them anyway. (I really like cherries.) Back at the hotel, I checked a container of Safeway Select not-from-concentrate orange juice and a small carton of Mocha Mix I had bought at the local Safeway. To their credit, Safeway had only metric on the orange juice -- 1.89 L. Soft metric, to be sure, but at least metric only. On the other hand, the small Mocha Mix was marked "1 pint (473 mL)." That is, of course, outrageous, as the pint is the U.S. pint, which has never been legal in Canada. Oh, Brian Mulroney, what have you wrought? (Mulroney was the Prime Minister who rolled back the metric regulations of the Pierre Trudeau era.) Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
