With the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is time to cast off the relics of the past; buggy whips, the monarchy, shoes and of course the Imperial system of measurement.

Who among us can really explain why we still use this. It is cumbersome, unwieldy and downright confusing.

I believe that even such traditional measurements as 'funk' should be metricized.

Under the imperial system, we had a number of inconsistent ways of measuring funk. A person could be 'cool,' 'fly, 'groovy,' or 'hip' and no one really knew what the terms meant. Does a person who is 'hip' have more funk than a person who is 'fly?' most of us would have to look that one up in a dictionary to be sure, or look it up on a conversion table.

I propose that we start with a metric scale of funkiness.

If we take the smallest increment of funk possible (the baseline from the 1977 David Bowie and Queen hit "under pressure") as our starting point and use that as our basic unit of measurement, I am certain we will arrive at a workable system.

Let us name this unit of funk the "Fünkit." Since we have already determined that this unit is indivisible, we will never have to deal with pico-Fünkits, centi-Fünkits, milli-Fünkits or vanilli-Fünkits.

Usually the human maximum of funk is about 30 kilo-Fünkits (or 30,000 Fünkits) , however in exceptional cases, (such as George Clinton) levels have been reported in the mega-Fünkit (1,000,000 or more) range.

The previously synonymous acts of acquiring funk 'gettin the funk on down' 'gettin down and funky' or 'gettin the funk on up' shall be consolidated into the new clearer more concise term 'funk manipulation.'

Since the kilo-Fünkit and the mega-Fünkit will be the most commonly used units of measurement we can abbreviate these to Kfünk and Mfünk respectively.

So next time you see someone on the street, whose hair is blue and is wearing a purple paisley suit jacket don't say "wow! he's cool!" Use the metric system and say "wow! that man has an excess of Fünkits!" or "hey--he must have several Mfunk!"

-Olav