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" When will America convert to the metric system? Meters? We don&amp;#039;t need no steenking meters. Not in America, buddy -- and not in Liberia or Myanmar, either. Everywhere else, sure. Go ahead, measure like sissies. Be our guest. Thomas Jefferson tried to ram it down our throats. Jimmy Carter tried. It didn&amp;#039;t work then, and t&amp;#039;ain&amp;#039;t ever gonna. Know why? AF&amp;#039;ll tell ya why: Because it&amp;#039;s French. France&amp;#039;s 1789 revolution -- a pissant imitation of ours to begin with -- wasn&amp;#039;t good enough. Oh, no, the French wanted to come up with a system of measurement &amp;quot;for all people, for all time.&amp;quot; So they hired a pair of astronomers to figure out the distance from the North Pole to the equator and decided to make a meter equal to 1/10,000,000 of that. And they couldn&amp;#039;t even calculate that correctly: To this day, their meter is two tenths of a millimeter off. But that&amp;#039;s Frenchy for you -- thin crust and hot air. Thing is, they&amp;#039;re slippin&amp;#039; it in on us. Medicine and sody pop, cars, bikes, even booze -- all going metric, or already gone. Free trade, global marketplace, blah blah blah. We sold out, buddy. We give &amp;#039;em an inch, and those snaky bastards take a kilometer. How much money can a homeless man make begging? And what is the best method of begging? Patrick Deyorrah, a panhandler on upper Broadway in New York City, tells AF that he rakes in around ten bucks a day. According to Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, that&amp;#039;s about the same average daily take as a beggar on the streets of Washington, D.C.  Methods vary, but like any business, begging is about building relationships, however brief. Marjorie Mayers, author of Street Kids and Streetscapes: Panhandling, Politics, and Prophecies, says that &amp;quot;one of the codes of panhandling is [that] when you act like an asshole, you ruin it for everybody. Not only financially, but from the view of human interaction between one person and another.&amp;quot; AF recommends a big smile combined with a God-loves-you attitude -- even if you&amp;#039;re not begging. What is dust? And are dust mites real? Dust is many things. Many, many things -- ash, fibers, fingernail filings, food crumbs, glass particles, oil, soot, hair (both human and animal), paint chips, plant parts, pollen, skin cells (also human and animal), fungal spores, soil, stone particles, wood shavings -- most of them disgusting.  Dust mites? You really don&amp;#039;t want to know. If the dust is disgusting, then how foul are creatures that dwell in it? Fine -- dust mites. You can&amp;#039;t see them, and thank heaven. They live by ingesting your dead skin cells. You lose one to two grams of skin a day -- more than a pound a year -- and that&amp;#039;s their sustenance. Your mattress and pillow? A dust mite deli. Your sofa? Denny&amp;#039;s, and the Grand Slam breakfast is you.  It gets worse. They don&amp;#039;t bite or sting, but while the young dust mites are nibbling your dead flesh, you&amp;#039;re inhaling the dried and crumbled bodies of the old ones, along with their old feces, which contain an enzyme that can cause allergic reactions, even asthma. Specialty stores sell finely woven sheets designed to prevent dust mites from inhabiting the mattress, but their efficacy is debatable.  Meanwhile, sleep tight, and don&amp;#039;t let the bedbugs...ah, fuck it.  What is the big deal about wearing socks to bed? I&amp;#039;ve heard the complaint from one lover (for whom I complied and removed them), but I&amp;#039;ve also overheard it in conversation. Socks, eh? Is that what you youngsters are calling &amp;#039;em now? Wait -- you&amp;#039;re serious? Actual socks? On your feet? And this is a problem? Look, AF understands the objection if you&amp;#039;re wearing socks to bed when the reason for going to bed is to make mad love. In that circumstance, leaving your socks on may convey a lack of passion or abandon -- or hygiene. At best, it&amp;#039;s odd, in a dorky fashion; at worst, it makes you seem as if you&amp;#039;ll be rushing off as soon as you finish. On the other foot, if you&amp;#039;re talking about a cold night with an established bedmate, wearing socks to bed should be nobody else&amp;#039;s business but yours and your dust mites&amp;#039;. Got a question? Send it to Answer Fella via esquire.com/talk. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/advice/a216/esq1103-nov-afella/>