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Metric is Coming

Back in 99 there was that fear of Y2K

We’d wake up in the Stone Age at the dawn of new years day

Some talking heads from CNN proclaimed we oughta stash

A year of bottled water batteries and extra cash

Turns out nothing happened things were fine but even so

Some of us had flashbacks to many years ago

A cataclysmic cloud that foretold awful things in store

Life as we know it was going to be no more, see

Congress had decided that they’d all grown really weary of

Sharing weights and measures with just Burma and Liberia

And so they passed a law to freak each Yankee out alive

The metric conversion act of 75

Metric is coming! Metric is coming ooooh!

We went through the streets wailing and running

Metric is coming! Metric is coming

They were coming for our cups our quarts our ounces and our drams

Fahrenheit to Celsius, pounds to kilograms

Bad kids would not feel the yardstick cracking o’or their head

They’d get concussions from meter sticks instead

Then came the cry of protest from the local corner bars

They cannot take our kegs they will not take our yards

We’ll fight to keep each pint, we’ll fight down to each ounce

Cause 47 hundredths of a liter is just way hard to pronounce

CHORUS

Then came the day of reckoning, the country woke distraught

We turned on the TV to see what havoc had been wrought

The weatherman predicted sun from Maryland to Maine

But warned the west coast might see up to half an inch of rain

Inches, that’s not metric! They haven’t switched it yet

Maybe if we don’t say anything, maybe they’ll just forget

Thirty years have come and gone avoidance served us well
The first known public policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

CHORUS

They said the English system was outdated and confusing

Too hard to convert, too many units to be using

What a load of hooey, we’ve been coping all along

Tonight we’re going to prove those metric pushers they were wrong

Here’s the sing-along part, I’ll sing the unit first and

You say the new equivalent after you’ve done the conversion

No need for calculators this thing will be a breeze

When you get the answer say it nice and loudly please

How clearly we’ve converted we’ve shown that here tonight

We don’t need that metric system ours is all right

Let the world have their base ten system and we’ll keep ours

Who cares about a satellite or two we’ve lost on Mars

And in the early 80s , Congress knew that they’d been beat

The metric system folded it went down in defeat

Meters, liters, kilograms were put out on the bench

Cause we won’t use a system designed by the French

CHORUS