Metric

When the United States first became a thing in 1776, the bottom line law of the land was a document known as the Articles of Confederation, which was basically a state’s rights advocates wet dream.  Not surprisingly, trying to organize what amounted to thirteen independent countries into a single cohesive unit with a federal government whose only power was to ask nicely didn’t really work out so well.  The weakness of the federal government resulted in the country entering into an economic tailspin, various states getting close to declaring war on each other, and an outright revolt against the newly created United States government.  Tiring of such shenanigans, the founding fathers met up to try again, eventually creating the U.S. Constitution in 1789, which gave the federal government sweeping new powers to keep the states in line.  Amongst these was the ability of the U.S. Congress to fix a universal standard of weights and measures.

Now at the time, what had been the original thirteen colonies was a complete cluster fuck of every state using different standards of weights of measures, which were largely terms pulled out of people’s asses based upon random objects decided upon by various idiots in England and the Netherlands over the preceding centuries.  It should go without saying that this made interstate trade a god awful needlessly complicated mess.  The idea of having a universal standard was viewed as a way to bring the states more together into a single nation, and was seen to be of such great importance that George Washington mentioned it in his first state of the union address.  Being a politician who actually got things done, Washington soon after set his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, to the task of coming up with such a standard.

Now Thomas Jefferson was a man who thought France was just the tits, having lived there for five years, only returning on Washington’s behest to serve as Secretary of State.  At the time, France was going through a little period of unrest today known as the French Revolution, which like the earlier American Revolution was a fight for equality and the end of monarchy, but unlike the American version involved murderous mobs cutting peoples’ heads off left and right.  While Jefferson wasn’t all that down with wanton head chopping, he was very interested in various ideas being made by French intellectuals to modernize the country, first and foremost amongst them a brand spanking new standard of measure known as the metric system, which used all sorts of sciencey mathematical formulas to break all measurements into handy dandy units divisible by ten.  For instance, a meter was one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole, the liter was a volume equal to 0.001 cubic meters, and a kilogram was the mass of one liter of water.

Unfortunately, many of the members of Congress were not so impressed with this new Frenchy way of measuring things, with many wanting to make up their own more American system and others wanting to just stick with the current standards they were used to, because learning new things is hard.  Some members of Congress even went as far as to claim the metric system was the work of the devil.  As a result, nothing was done for some three years, frustrating Jefferson to the point that he finally wrote to some friends in France asking them to send somebody to convince his colleagues to quit being such idiots.  The French, loving the shit out of Jefferson, for some reason sent a botanist by the name of Joseph Dombey with a copper rod one meter in length and a copper cylinder weighting one kilogram.  It’s rather uncertain exactly how a guy who loved plants holding a rod and weight was supposed to convince anybody that the metric system was the best, but sometimes it’s the thought the counts.  Anyways, it didn’t really matter, because on the way across the Atlantic Dombey’s ship got captured by pirates and he died six months later a captive on some tropical island.

Back in the United States, the debate over a standard of measures continued for another two years, with Jefferson desperately trying to get Congress to accept the metric system, of which many members continually caused delays because they just didn’t care.  This might have been the state of things for god only knows how long, except in 1795 the U.S. Army and its Native American allies managed to finally beat the British and their Native American allies in a ten year conflict known as the Northwest Indian War, opening new wide swaths of formerly Native American territory in what is today Ohio for settlement.  Selling land was a great way for the perpetually broke U.S. government to raise money, but in order to do so they needed a standard measurement for land.  Since most of the settlers flooding into the area were of Scot-Irish descent, Congress just went with the familiar English system most recognized by these settlers, passing a law that made it the universal standard in 1796.  Though there have been many subsequent attempts to change to the metric system, this English system remains in place to this day.

Tree Jizz

It’s probably best to get it right out in the open from the beginning.  Trees have a very wild and varied sex life.  Depending upon the species, some trees have a separate male and female version, some have male and female parts on the same tree, and some can even magically switch from one sex to the other as needed.  However, being rooted to the ground, trees aren’t exactly able to hit up their local brewpub on singles night to get their freak on.  No, instead trees breed by just throwing huge gobs of their DNA into the air and hoping for the best.  Okay, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s get to it.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States experienced a rapid surge of urbanization, with countless people leaving rural farmlands to work in factories and businesses involving wearing suits in tall buildings.  This resulted in most cities across the nation expanding exponentially, creating huge swaths of asphalt and concrete.  Now for some reason, most of these people fresh off the farm didn’t really consider industrial hellscapes to the most beautiful of sceneries.  To soften the look of their new homes a bit, they began planting trees and other such greenery, creating whole new industries and branches of botany specifically targeted at integrating the natural and urban worlds.  The preferred type of tree utilized by these early adopters was the elm tree, which aside from being big towering beautiful bastards, were very resistant to adverse climatic conditions and pollution.  So many elms were planted, that avenues lined by arched rows of towering elms became an archetype of the new urban world.

Unfortunately, having a lot of trees in cities had a few downsides.  Trees tend to drop a whole bunch of shit on the ground throughout the year.  Out in the countryside, this shit was just allowed to lay around until it rotted away, making new soil and completing the whole circle of life thing.  However, in the city, with all of its asphalt and concrete, the tree shit had to be cleaned up, which nobody really liked doing.  Now early on people just kind of accepted such things.  Mother Nature was an uncontrollable force, and if she wanted to hike up her skirts and pee on your leg, there wasn’t much you could do about it.  However, by the middle of the twentieth century, scientific progress replaced this attitude with one better summed up as punching Mother Nature in her bitch mouth.  Botanists and urban planners, being clever bastards, came up with a simple solution to the problem.  If they just planted cis-gendered male trees, then there would a hell of a lot less clean up each year.  After all, it was the female trees dropping all the seeds, pods, nuts, and fruits.  As a result, by the early 1950’s, every landscaping business in the country was pushing male versions of maples, aspens, ash, and what have you.

Now at first, this shift in urban botanicals occurred at a slow and steady pace.  After all, you just don’t go around ripping up perfectly good giant trees to put in little new ones.  However, this all changed in the 1960’s, when an outbreak of the dreaded Dutch Elm Disease, a fungal disease spread by bark beetles, killed some 75% of the elm trees in the country.  Needing to replace a whole bunch of now dead elms, botanists stepped up production of litter free male trees, developing hundreds of new varieties.  They also developed new cloning techniques, which was not only faster than growing new trees from seeds, but also allowed them to grow new male trees from the pieces of existing male trees.  The effort was so successful, and consumers so happy with the results, that these same botanists soon after turned their efforts to developing all male bushes, shrubs, and ornamentals.  In only a few decades, the urban landscape became dominated by cis-gendered male plants.

So, here’s a bit of a problem.  Though it was pretty impossible for all of these male trees and plants to breed, what with the decided lack of female versions of themselves, they most definitely did not stop trying, every year throwing their tree jizz into the air.  Now the more astute of you probably know that the more common name for tree jizz is pollen, and I’m guessing even the most ignorant of you are aware that pollen causes allergies.  You can probably see where this is going.  Now in normal conditions, female versions or parts of plants tend to snag up quite a bit of pollen that gets thrown in the air, you know, because it’s what they’re designed to do.  However, with no female bits about, there’s nothing to grab up the pollen, a situation made worse by the over abundance of male plant bits in our cities, and one that has only grown worse as the trees have matured and grown larger.  Over the past several decades, severe cases of allergies, asthma, and sleep apnea have grown exponentially amongst urban dwellers, resulting in the creation of new billion dollar medical industries to fight the rising tide.  Though far from being the only factor involved in this rise in respiratory maladies, the rapid rise in pollen levels is certainly one of the most major factors.  All of this thanks to a little plant sexism and people being too lazy to clean up some tree shit.

Bush Versus Gore

The 2000 presidential race between Democratic Al Gore, an android desperately trying to learn what it meant to be human, and Republican George W. Bush, a former drunk who would do anything to win back his daddy’s love, was one of the closest elections in U.S. history.  As the night progressed, it became obvious that whoever managed to win Florida was going to win the whole thing.  Of course, everyone involved managed to make it one of the biggest cluster fucks in the history of American democracy.

The first big screw up of the night was when all of the major news networks declared that Gore had won Florida even though the polls hadn’t even closed in all parts of the state.  Apparently not bright enough to look at a map, these eminent purveyors of information failed to realize that a good chunk of the Florida panhandle, home to a shit ton of Republicans, was in a different time zone.  As these votes began to be counted, Gore’s once so-called insurmountable lead dwindled and disappeared.  Eventually it got to the point where the talking heads had to admit they completely screwed the pooch, first declaring Florida was back in play, and then eventually in the early hours of the morning declaring instead that actually Bush had definitely won Florida.  As you can imagine, the Gore camp did not take this very well.  However, this being a time when politicians at least pretended to be classy, Gore called up Bush and congratulated him on his win.  Unfortunately, soon after it became apparent that the news media had completely screwed it up again.  Votes were still being counted in Florida, and as the night went on, Bush’s lead fell to some 1,800 votes, a level under Florida law which required a recount.  Suddenly back in the race, Gore called Bush back and declared his earlier congratulations hadn’t counted because his fingers were crossed, and both sides began sending lawyers galore to Florida.

Now if there was one state where a recount was sure to be a nightmare, it was Florida.  For some stupid reason, each of the state’s 67 counties were allowed to choose their own balloting system, meaning the state was a confusing mish-mash of punch cards with exceedingly confusing formats dependent upon the whims of the local county officials.  State laws regarding recounts were little better.  In the case of a recount, each county first had to verify that all of their vote counting machines were in good working order, and then run all the ballots through again, all while lawyers from both parties watched the whole process to ensure that no shenanigans took place.  The Democrats were especially concerned about this given the state’s governor was Jeb Bush, George’s little brother, and most state officials were Republicans.  The recount took about a day, and narrowed Bush’s lead to a little over 300 votes, a level which than allowed Gore to request for a hand recount.  However, state law did not require a hand recount of the entire state, but rather just whatever counties Gore wanted recounted.  He of course just chose the four most Democratic counties in the state.

From the start of the hand recount, both sides started lawsuits, with the Bush side trying to stop the process and the Gore side trying to knit pick on which ballots would be counted and not counted.  Due to the shitty quality of many of the punch card ballots used in Florida, some 10,000 ballots in the four counties had only been partially punched and therefore not counted in the machine recount.  Due to a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court, these ballots had to be counted if the clerks could ascertain voter intent.  This involved the people doing the recount holding up each of the contested ballots so lawyers from both sides could eyeball them and argue over whether or not the card was sufficiently punched to declare voter intent, with the arguments used by both sides flip flopping dependent on who the vote appeared to be for.  If the argument was too contentious, then the ballot was brought before a judge for a final decision.  The Gore team also tried to sue to block absentee ballots from being counted, mostly from overseas military personnel, and to have a number of votes for the third party candidate Pat Buchanan added to Gore’s total because the ballot setup was so confusing that some Gore voters voted for Buchanan by mistake.  Both of these lawsuits were rejected for pretty obvious reasons.

Now originally by Florida law, the recount was supposed to be finished by November 14.  However, due to the ongoing legal shenanigans, it soon became obvious that it wasn’t going to be finished, so the Gore side successfully convinced the Florida Supreme Court to extend the deadline, not once, but twice, pushing the recount into December.  However, the hand count wasn’t coming out the way the Gore team had hoped, they were closing the gap, but Bush was still ahead, so they started a new lawsuit to get an additional 60,000 partially punched ballots from the other 63 counties in the state reviewed as well.  The Florida Supreme Court agreed to this, but this decision was soon after overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared the whole thing had gotten ridiculous to the point where Florida judges were making up the law rather than interpreting it and selectively enforcing the law on a county by county basis.  The court basically ruled that though the rules set in place prior to the election were imperfect, they were the rules in place, and could not be magically changed just because one side didn’t like the results.  The recounts were halted and Bush was declared the winner, though controversy and claims of a stolen election continue to this day.  A later unofficial statewide recount conducted by a collection of newspapers found that Bush would’ve won even if the partially punched ballots had been counted.