Yearly review

On this day last year I was very surprised that the day had come around again so quickly already, which makes it even more shocking this time as it seems to have arrived even faster.

Today I'm alone, because Whitney is away in California. Previously this wouldn't really matter because I would have little to celebrate on this day apart from the way that some people left Britain a few hundred years ago and gave the rest of us some more room, but this is the first time I've been a Lawful Good US Resident of the country when the date has come round. So with that new title, I hope you won't mind if I offer some outsider's suggestions to make my adoptive country even better.

• It's the 21st century - it really is time to adopt the metric system. We got fed up with Imperial quite a while ago and have done our best to get rid of it, and everyone else in the world but Burma and Liberia know what metric is now. You can tell me it's 'unnatural' when you grow two extra fingers and six more toes.


• Change the way that you write dates - the one you use just now just makes no sense and is all out of sequence. If you want to really leap ahead, look to the Japanese and Scandinavians and use YYYY-MM-DD - you can sort it naturally numerically and everything.


• Speaking of the Scandinavians, stop bleating so much about socialism. A bit of it does you good.


• Chow fun and sushi are both lovely, even if they sometimes kill me a little - top marks for adopting these from their respective countries.


• I've actually got used to having denominations as low as $1 get a banknote to themselves, but you could do with varying their look a little because they take ages to sort through. I'm not saying they should become the Skittles-like rainbow explosion of the Euro notes, but a bit more of a difference would be nice. (And not just changing the $10 to orange. This doesn't help me.)


• You finally sorted your President situation. It's about time - well done.


• Start pronouncing the "h" at the start of "herbs". Honestly.


• While I'm on the subject, the same goes for the "l" in "solder".


• I like the size of your wall sockets, but they could do with an on/off switch (see diagram)


• Come up with some new television. Do you really need more than one programme about people with slightly large families, or about choosing a decent chef/fashion designer by process of elimination? Keeping this format and applying it to a slightly different profession like hairdressing does not count.


• The above suggestion of not filling the airwaves with entirely interchangeable garbage might result in the number of TV channels having to be reduced - to prevent adding to the already decently sized unemployment pile, train everyone involved up as medical assistants instead of plucking those off the streets with the irritating career adverts that the defunct channels used to run. That should sort out that shortage at the same time.


• Related to both the last two points, please stop talking proudly about your prescription medicine for your bladder/herpes/fungification in your adverts. I really can't describe how little I want to know about it.


• Consult with a British-Indian about the recipe for korma. Yours is very haphazard just now.


• Pizza delivery is good, keep it up.


• You've actually made some things that might even be called improvements to the language with things like altering the unwieldy and unspellable "manoeuvre", but I really can't accept discarding the noun forms of "practice" and "licence". Not after it took me so long to remember which way round the endings went.


• Also, make your mind up about whether it should be "centre" or "center".


• There's a type of cereal that you really might want to consider starting importing. See me for details.