brain coral > other days

may 2002

5.1.02
Hmmm...what a crappy way to start a month. Maybe something interesting will happen by tomorrow.

5.2.02
Haven't they replaced you with a coin-operated machine yet?

5.2.02
I'm in a ranting kind of mood, so let me get a couple of things off my chest that have been percolating for a while.

Let's start with my "If-I-Was-President" rant: If I was president, the first thing I would do is move the US to the metric system. No committees, no debates, no long, drawn-out process. Within six months, all signs and labels would be converted to split metric/english notation, with the metric measurements being at least three times as large as the english. A year after that, nothing but metric. I'm convinced that this is the only way we're ever going to move to the same system that pretty much everyone else on the planet uses. Americans are just too set in their ways to do things gradually; it has to be fast and forceful and there can be no arguments about it, like pulling out a loose tooth.

Along similar lines, the next thing I would do as president would be to get rid of the dollar bill and replace it permanently with a dollar coin. And not a dollar coin that feels like a quarter in your pocket, either—something heavy and solid, like a British pound. This, too, would begin immediately—say a year to design and produce a new coin and then another year to take the bills out of circulation. Nothing gradual—when a bank gets bills, they don't return them to circulation, they simply exchange them for coins. And I could give a damn about vending machines—either upgrade your technology or sell stuff for less than a dollar. If the countries of the EU can switch from all of their various currencies to the Euro over the course of a few months, we can certainly take one lousy bill out of circulation. And in other currency-related changes, I'm not all that fond of the penny, either—maybe it's time for the coin to join its long-deceased sibling, the halfpenny.

Finally, I would eliminate the electoral college. In this day and age, there is absolutely no reason why the president should not be elected by a straight popular vote, just like every other elected official. The electoral college is an outmoded and outdated system that is becoming more anachronistic with each passing election cycle. And no, this change is not a result of the mess that happened in 2000 (although that certainly underscored many of the flaws with the system)—the electoral college hasn't made sense since some time in the 1800s, and it's high time we abandoned it.

I figure I would only need a couple of years to actually accomplish these tasks, but I would need to stick around for the final two years to make sure no one undid them right away. After that fourth year, I think people would be so used to the changes that they would be ready to defend them just as staunchly as they idiotically defend our current practices.

Now, on a completely unrelated topic, let me tell you how irritated I am at the networks and their ridiculous sweeps stunts (another system that could do with some reform, by the way—why can't they just do an average of ratings across the whole year, instead of just four months? I mean, I know they can, so why don't they?). The latest annoyance is the joint plans of CBS, Fox, and ABC to force their viewers to make a Sophie's Choice regarding which show's finale to watch. On Sunday, May 19, these three networks will pit the season finale of Survivor against the season finale of The Practice against the series finale of the X-Files.

Really, I blame CBS the most for this nonsense—Survivor is the only one of these shows not appearing on its normal night, and if it stuck to its regular slot, it would be easy to tape one of the other finales and watch the other one (if I were feeling really paranoid, I would call this a plot by TiVo to sell more recorders, since as I can understand it TiVo can record two other shows while you're watching another one). As it stands, we're going to have to sacrifice one of them, most likely the Practice, because only a fool would choose the increasingly cliched legal drama over the final two hours of one of the most compelling and innovative dramas of the last ten years. Survivor wins the prime slot just because it has that feel of a sporting event that's happening live—it just feels weird to watch it on tape for two hours when you know you could go to the internet and get the final score in five minutes.

There. That feels better. I think I'll spare you anything further.

For now.