Potrzebie Miar i Wag

While I'm on the subject of "Mad Magazine", I might as well mention that then I did a project in my Senior year, which was submitted to the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, well, no, first to the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, which is now called the Intel Science Talent Search or something, but it's a nationwide competition, and it was called the Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures. This is a Polish word that was very popular in "Mad Magazine", and I decided to base a system of weights and measures that was going to be better than the metric system. It was based on the thickness of "Mad Magazine" number 26, or something like this, and that was taken as one potrzebie of length. And then we had, you know, a kilo potrzebie was 1,000 of those, and a fershlugginer potrzebie was a million- and a farshimmelt potrzebie one millionth. We had units of time, weight, everything, in the system, and it won honorable mention in this Science Talent Search, and also was, I did some demos at the Academy of Sciences; it won an award in Wisconsin. I submitted it them to "Mad Magazine", and they published it; they paid me $25, for it, and it came out in, during the spring of my Freshman year in college, and this was my first technical publication, so it is listed on my vita, you know, and publication number one is the Potrzebie System of Weights and measures, and it was published later in paperback in one of the "Mad" reprints, and it, and I used it as a basis of running for student government in college, and it failed miserably, you know, I didn't get elected.