It’s interesting that the white character in this comic from 1976 is named Nate. Much later, Nate Bargatze will have a similar theme in this now well-known SNL skit:
On a serious note, it is always worth pondering the end of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Speech:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
These days the versions of “Nancy” that I see are the current Jaimes series and the retro original Bushmiller. And so the Sluggo in this strip is to my eyes just weird looking.
A guy named Jesse David Fox does a podcast called “Good One” where he interviews a comedian (occasionally a comic actor but more often a stand-up), centering around having them analyze and describe the evolution of one of their own favorite bits. This is a nice idea but I listen less lately, as the podcast has become long winded and unwieldy.
However, he has been trying out doing a video version, and the one I saw and quite enjoyed was with Nate Bargatze, discussing the evolution of this same famous skit. Including preliminary versions, and a couple of sequels that SNL aired.
I don’t understand the SNL skit. The metric system didn’t even exist in 1775. Every single soldier in the Continental Army (and on the other side for that matter) was very familiar with the mile, foot, inch, gallon, furlong, hogshead, and pound.
Powers: Right, and there weren’t black soldiers, either, probably. But that’s not the point: the point is the absurdity.
For those with elderly eyes like mine, the Doonesbury might be more readable at https://featureassets.amuniversal.com/assets/37fd50c0f4d0013183f7005056a9545d
Same here. I love the Bushmiller ones; Jaimes’s Nancy seems uneven to me, but worth reading. Gilchrist’s Nancy was , to me, the weakest of the bunch from the point of humor, although he was arguably the best artist of the 3.
@Powers: the essence of the SNL joke is that the US has stubbornly clung to our outdated, complicated system of measurement while the rest of the world has moved on. Even in the US, scientific measurements are in metric, lots of products are metric: my bicycles, for example, have nothing non-metric except the pedal spindles (thanks to the Wright brothers for that).
I recall that very briefly, they tried having gasoline pumps indicate in liters.
Yeah, I get that zbicyclist, but what does that have to do with the American Revolution and George Washington? It’s shoehorned in to an anachronistic era.
And of course it relies for humor on the misconception that the U.S. actively decided to be different, rather than simply continuing to use the same measures the Anglosphere had been using for ages.
As for “outdated”, maybe so, but it works well enough for what we use it for. 12 inches to a foot makes it easy to find fractional feet (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6 all work fine). It’s rare for anyone to need to convert from feet or yards to miles. I’ll admit our volume measures can be hard to remember sometimes, but that’s mostly an issue in baking and cooking — where we have decades of written recipes that’d have to be converted to use grams (and we’d have to convince people to use scales instead of measuring cups).
Well, there is something which elevates the sketch above the joke on anachronisms and weights-and-measures — General Washington’s inability to actually respond to the questions posed by the Black soldier.
True!
One place we have gone metric is the liquor store. There is a good American capitalist reason for that.
A very popular size for bottles of whiskey, gin and other spirits is the “fifth”. This is one-fifth of a gallon, or four-fifths of a quart. It is 757 milliliters.
Some smart distiller figured out that by switching to metric he could sell 750 milliliter bottles instead of fifths without changing the price, and short the customer by 7 milliliters (3 fluid ounces).
What I wonder is whether the Founding Fathers attempting to cross the border are coming in or getting out.
Mark: FYI, 7ml is more like .3 fluid ounces; it’s not quite 1.5 tsp. While it adds up, I’d bet the change was to avoid needing two labeling systems more than an attempt to save product. I’d be surprised if fills were that accurate — especially back when the change happened.
When the French had their revolution a few years later, one of the few things they did that actually stuck was reform the measurement system. Not much else of their revolution took, but they did fix that (though even there some things went to far — they tried to decimalize time measurements, too, but that was a step too far).
And calendar reform lasted a while, long enough for Karl Marx to go along with it in titling his essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.
I read somewhere that the U.S. was going to switch to metric weights and measures during the Jefferson administration, but the standard weights and measures specially ordered from France were lost at sea. Is this true?
We did standardize decimal currency early on. Meanwhile in Britain, you can imagine the funny-looking LSD calculators the accountants had to use until the 1970’s. And who knows how they ever were able to use IBM 407 accounting machines.
A bit late from me.
We watched our annual showing of “1776” – which in our house leads to discussions on what is right and what is wrong in the script (same discussion annually) but this year also led to me looking up some of the signers we know little about – Robert hates conversations during movies in general, but during a run to what was called “the necessary” I looked up some info about questions which had arisen between us – and found out what happened to some of the lesser known signers.
July 4th is a major law breaking day here. ALL fireworks are illegal in NYS – including sparklers. Night of 3rd there was a concert at the local county park near us – we did not hear anything. July 4th all heck breaks lose. We used to be away in Lancaster, PA for July 4th for a couple of decades but since Covid have not gone. We were shocked at the fireworks being set off. Not small items – bit aerial ones.
Across the street and to the north of us there is a major aerial show – over the houses there, same – though slightly less – on the matching street to the south of us. Over at the special ed school property there is such a large show that we had figured maybe it was an official show – it is not.
And best of all – that first year of Covid – there were 2 men in the middle of our street – a 4 lane main road – shooting off fireworks – again aerial display type fireworks – in the middle of the road (right on the double yellow line) with the vehicles driving past them.
All this terrified me and made me wonder how our house (and the other ones around us) are still standing and intact with all of this going on.