I woke up this morning from a dream where I was a consultant for company specializing in archaic measurements. We were contracting with various sports governing authorities to de-modernize various sports. The ‘why’ is unimportant–or at least never made itself known to me.

The work was kind of interesting. We were playing with ideas such as in North American style football the game would be played on a field of 20 rods. Teams would only get two downs and would have to move the ball 1 rod to reset the downs. Progress ground to a hault when a faction started advocating the 4 downs / 2 rods approach. This presented the opportunity for further factionalization apparently because there was suddenly another group who wanted to go with chains. The idea being to use a field of 5 chains and teams get 8 downs to move the ball 1 chain.

I asked to be moved to a new committee but baseball wasn’t much better. The disucssion was on how to measure the ball. One faction wanted to use barleycorns while another was interested in using nails. The barleycorn side thought that using fractions of a nail made little sense while the nail proponents felt that barleycorns were far too small to provide a meaningful number. They tabled the discussion and went on to how to measure the weight of the ball. This one was easy, apparently, and it was decided that baseballs would have to be between 30 and 31.5 zolotniks.

I woke up to the alarm which was putting out sound in the vicinity of several phons.

And, in a pre-emptive post-script…Yes, I know that inches/feet/yards/miles is just as silly and archaic. Also interesting, a megadeath is equivalent to an incident causing 1 million deaths.