July 03, 2004
Improving A Joke

Henry Hanks (Croooow Blog) refers (here and here) to Michael Moore's latest movie as "Fahrenheit 911 Lbs". That gave me the idea for an even better joke along the same lines, in fact the perfect title for Moore himself, or his next movie -- on American health care! --, or both. It's in the extended entry, if anyone wants to treat this as a riddle and try to guess it.


Avoirdupois 911

Posted by Dr. Weevil at July 03, 2004 01:22 PM
Comments

Very funny. It took me a second to recognize where you were going with this. (Of course, it's the cocktail hour so I was distracted.)

Posted by: Pious Agnostic on July 3, 2004 05:11 PM

Talk about a Dennis Miller joke...

Posted by: Dean Esmay on July 5, 2004 06:47 AM

Ok, I beg your indulgence, but I don't get it. Of course I am an intellectually deprived Texan, so that might not be surprising.

Fred

Posted by: Fred Jenson on July 8, 2004 01:07 PM

Sorry to be so obscure. Avoirdupois refers to good old-fashioned American pounds, ounces, and tons -- in this case, pounds. We don't usually have to worry about the other kinds, since the rest of the world has gone metric, but jewelers and precious metal dealers apparently still use Troy measurements. I'd only heard of Troy ounces, not Troy pounds, but I did a Google search just now, and learned that the Troy pound is 144/175 of the Avoirdupois pound, divided into 12 ounces instead of 16.

Weight is a lot like temperature in this respect. Often you can't just say "degrees" without specifying Fahrenheit, Centigrade, or Kelvin. Since Moore put Fahrenheit in his title, I figured Avoirdupois was the weight equivalent. Of course, if he keeps packing on the pounds, he could easily pass 911 pounds and head for 911 kilos, which comes to just over one ton U.S. (2008 pounds).

Posted by: Dr. Weevil on July 8, 2004 05:15 PM

Thank you, I always appreciate being enlightened.

Posted by: Fred Jenson on July 13, 2004 12:00 AM