In the pub where I used to bend my elbow and wet my nose with some regularity, a "schooner" had always meant a pint--16 fluid ounces. Then, one dark night, I discovered that they had replaced all the schooner glasses. They seemed a tad smaller. A friend spirited one of the new schooner glasses out of the place and subjected it to tests with a calibrated measuring cup. He reported back that the new schooner glasses held 15 ounces, not 16. Same price, of course. And things just continued to deteriorate from there.

I gave a mighty snort when I first heard the McDonald's commercials bragging about the massive amount of "meat" in their "quarter-pounder" (actually, a blend of some beef and miscellaneous animal by-products, and a quantity of wet cardboard). When I was still in knee-pants and toting school books, the standard hamburger patty consisted of seven to eight ounces of ground beef.

And I won't even mention the swift escalation in prices.

When I think of the perfidious and grasping nature of some members of my species, I am given to glare, snarl, and gnash my teeth!

Don Firth