Loose Parts by Dave Blazek for August 21, 2020

If it weren’t for Peter Piper and his pickled peppers, who would even remember the word?

I imagine he’s addressing the chicken.

peck.

You don’t have to get all imperial about it.

he’s sounding pretty hen-pecked…

¼ bushel = 3.14 lbs.

We used to have a lot of farm stands around here…

It was common to see the prices of local produce listed for a pound, a bushel, or a peck.

There were special baskets for a peck… though you didn’t get to take home the basket with your purchase.

That’s about 10 pounds of apples, maybe 12 pounds of cucumbers or tomatoes…

about two brown paper grocery sacks, filled to a reasonable level, not to the very top.

I still see the those baskets sometimes at the farmer’s market… usually just for display… a peck price is not mentioned.

I don’t think that many people recognise the term any more…

and farmer’s market produce is so expensive, most people only buy a pound or two anyway.

It wasn’t was as many years ago as it will sound like to younger readers, because produce prices started doubling and tripling in fairly recent years…

But I used to buy at least one peck of apples every autumn for a dollar or two…

I’d eat a lot of fresh apples, make applesauce, and sometimes give kids a choice of an apple or candy at Halloween.

You’d be surprised at how many preferred an apple.

Or I’d make caramel apples to give out.

Now, of course, no child will take an apple or a home made treat.

Necessary (maybe) but sad.

Besides, apples have gotten too expensive to hand out… more expensive than candy.

That one guy; always trying to compensate for his small pecker.

never argue with a chicken

4 barleycorns, round and dry, laid end to end.

Got to love the Imperial measuring system. My desk is 5 feet 6 and a quarter inches. Which is 5.53 inches – but my ruler doesn’t have tenths of an inch. It goes down to the very easy to work with fraction 1/32 of an inch.

Metrically it.s 168.275 centimeters. Or we could round that to 168.3 cm – after all what’s a millimeter among friends.

Decimals are a lot easier to work with than fractions and certainly a lot easier to work with than mixed units like yards, feet and inches.

Without working in base 3 and base 12 arithmetic, I can’t tell you off the top of my head what half of 1 yard, 2 feet, 7 inches is. However I can tell you that half of 640 cm is 320 cm without using pencil and paper and a calculator.

I am not a great fan of Napoleon, but I think he got this one right. One metre = one millionth the distance from the North Pole to Paris.

And now that the pecking order has been established…

Harrumph! Attention United Statesians! Your homes are wired for 240V electricity. And every “customary” unit you use to measure the world is nowadays defined in terms of the S.I. No, really! You could look it up.

Working with those people is always a race against the cluck.

How stupid of me to stare at the panel and not be able to connect. But in my defense…when was the last time you bought a “peck” of anything, or for that matter, even heard the word used. And when was the last time you saw a chicken…and no KFC doesn’t count.

Remember “I love you a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck”?

So, which weighs more, the pound of feathers or the pound of gold? (There is a factual answer)

Myanmar and Liberia and the United States, the only 3 countries who don’t use the metric system. I guess influential Lawmakers recognized that we are not smart enough to learn anything new.

That bird will pound it into you…

Very low paying job. They get paid chicken scratch.

He’s even wearing a peck-tie.

Oh, he’s talking to the hen. I had thought he was talking to the woman with all the paper.

“A peck is an imperial and United States customary unit of dry volume, equivalent to 2 dry gallons or 8 dry quarts or 16 dry pints (9.09 (UK) or 8.81 (US) liters). Two pecks make a kenning (obsolete), and four pecks make a bushel. Although the peck is no longer widely used, some produce, such as apples, are still often sold by the peck in the USA (although it is obsolete in the UK, found only in the old nursery rhyme “Peter Piper”."