davidn | 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.

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As it happens I have a note of each denomination just now, so I tested the textures. They are:

$1: Bit scratchy
$5: Bit scratchy
$10: Bit scratchy
$20: Bit scratchy

Perhaps I just made it up... or the difference might be more apparent to someone with a more developed sense of touch.

I think there have been complaints that there isn't enough differentiation in the textures, so it's very difficult to tell them apart even if you're used to relying more on your sense of touch. Considering that the texture of the notes changes with use anyway, it's not the most efficient way of making them less samey.

Maybe I'm still bitter that during my one visit to the States, I was short-changed by a whole $10 on the first day (I was 16 and that represented about 2 1/2 hours wages from my summer job) because I couldn't tell the notes apart quickly enough to realise that I'd been charged too much for an ice cream. During said summer job, I'd actually met American tourists who had been so confused by our money that they had to hold out a handful of it and ask me to take the right amount, so I was annoyed that their country didn't reciprocate my honesty.

Yearly review

Re: metric and money

Re: metric and money