hi y'all,
well, jr. and me are back at home in florida and glad of it. but on our trip from fort carson, colorado, we stopped in louisianna to see my cajun cousins and eat some good cajun cooking, the first i have had in over 7 years. after our 3 day visit we left baton rouge and headed out on the interstate 12 highway. we stopped at a gas station in hammond, la. to fill the tank of jr.'s ford explorer. it was down to about 1/4 of a tank and could hold about 22 gallons full. we pulled into a station called 'racetrack' and up to the middle pump. jr. got out and swiped his bank card into the pump and i proceeded to pump the gas while he went into the store to buy something to drink. while pumping the gas, i noticed the digits on the money were not matching the gallons i was pumping. i had almost 10 gallons of gas, but only about $3.00 u.s. dollars in purchases and was still pumping. the price per gallon was supposed to be $2.69. so i looked at the price on the pump's meter and to my surprise, it had been set to $0.269 u.s. dollars/gal. or about 27 cents/gal. . well, soon the manager came out to stop the other person in front of us after i had finished pumping and finished getting my automated receipt. too late, all paid for, $4.07 for 15.1 gallons of gas. now talk about dumb cajun luck. guess someone is going to lose a job now plus a big paycheck because a lot of gas must have been pumped before that mistake was found. and here is an image of the receipt to prove my story.
a bientot,
cajunsr.

p.s.-you bet i'll come again when they hire this guy back.

Many years ago, before we went metric, it was usual to price cold meat (such as ham, salami, haslet, brawn) by the "quarter", meaning a quarter of a pound, 4 ounces, 112 grams.This is what one often buys. The modern equivalent is 100 grams, known mysteriously in Italy as "un etto" .

But there was one assistant in Woolworths in Oxford who believed that the price was for a pound. So if ham was priced at 2 shillings (that is, 2 shillings a quarter) and you asked for 8 ounces, you had to pay 1 shilling instead of 4 shillings ! This was good value. I think she was a schoolgirl, empoyed only on Saturdays when they were busy, and not only on the cold meat counter, so you had to watch out for her.

By the way, you may have learnt at school that 10 hectograms = 1 kilogram. This hectogram is the Italian "etto" (ettogrammo), the only place I have ever in my whole life seen the hectogram anywhere ! This demonstrates very well that however much you try to standardise things logically, traditions soon take over, based on what people are comfortable with.

Woolworths in Oxford closed down several years ago.