Pleasure You Can't Measure Vs. The Noble Pint

A few months ago, Mars bars changed forever. They became fluffier, the packaging changed and they started to use the slogan “Pleasure You Can’t Measure”. This, I can’t help but think, is a very clever slogan, because they also became two grams lighter, so any measurement you did make would be unlikely to favour the new bar. This, perhaps, goes some way to explaining why one idiot filled a large portion of his house with a vast stockpile of the old-style bar before the change.

But I think you can measure the pleasure. We just need a new unit, or rather, we don’t. Modern society has problems changing from one system to another. The BBC just can’t get the hang of widescreen, NASA can’t quite work metric, and my Dad has trouble with VideoPlus. Perhaps. But I have solved one of these problems. There are exactly two units of measurement that everyone, metric or imperial, understands: the first is the second and the second is the pint (if you follow me). The second measures time, and while it does a very good job of it, it isn’t terribly flexible. Therefore, I propose to base all future measurements on the Pint. This is exactly as hare-brained as it seems, but bear with me on this one.

Some qualities are very easy to measure in pints, such as volume, capacity, drunkenness, or attractiveness. Others are more difficult, but it can be done. For example, we don’t, it turns out, actually need seconds at all. The pint is already an accepted value of time, defined as a comfortable time to finish a pint of beer before leaving a pub, as in “We’ll stay for one pint, and if he doesn’t show up, we’ll go on without him”. The pint has also long been accepted as the standard unit of currency for students, who prefer not to deal in small change, since they very rarely seem to have any. Anybody who goes on a lot of pub crawls has a good idea of what length and area a pint constitutes. A crawl will be a certain length, and cover a certain area, and a certain number of pints will be drunk. From this, it is easy enough to work out the definitions of the pint length, and the pint area, unless of course you have just completed the research. Yet more quantities are very difficult to express in pints, but they can all be done. Weight, for example, is a tricky one. It is quite simple to say that a book, or a coat weighs as much as two or three pints of beer, but this is not a smart way to measure the weight of a car. Therefore for larger objects the weight is defined as the number of pints you would have to consume before you think you can lift it. The pint can even measure electrostatic potential and data capacity. As far as I know, there is no imperial unit equivalent to the Volt. The pint is here defined in terms of how drunk you have to be to touch a pair of contacts at a given voltage. Also, there is clearly no imperial unit equivalent to the byte, so the pint of data is defined as the difference between the amount you can hold in your head before another drink, and the amount of said data you can remember afterwards.

I choose to measure pleasure by the number of pints you would need before you would rather have them than the Mars bar. It doesn’t come out very favourably.