As reported by Reuters today, a man from Mexico is having surgery to help him hopefully lose weight. The guy weighs 1200lbs, so a surgery is definitely in order. I’m not here to rag on the guy. He obviously has some sort of problem and I hope for his sake that they find a way to fix it.
No, what I’m here to discuss is this quote from the article: “I can’t walk. I can’t leave my bed,” the 40-year-old Uribe, who weighs the same as five baby elephants, said in a recent telephone interview. The bold is mine for emphasis.
Since when did we start measuring things by baby elephants? I wasn’t aware that the NIST had approved baby elephants for official measurement of weight. Not wanting to miss out on a changing trend, I decided to move quickly to help standardize this revolutionary weigh (pun intended) of measuring things.
According to Wikipedia a baby elephant weighs around 250lbs. If we calculate out the information given to us by Reuters, they surmised that a baby elephant weighs 240lbs (assuming equally distributed baby elephant weight). At any rate, for the sake of argument I’m going to set the Baby Elephant Standard to be 1BEs = 240lbs.That’s right, we’re going to call Baby Elephants BEs. 
It makes sense, right?
Anyway, this new way of measuring things should come in really handy. I’ve already figured out that if you’d like to order a 1lb burger at your local burger shop, you need only order a 0.004BEs burger. See, now isn’t that easier?
Curiously, a full grown large African Elephant weighs 58BEs (approximately). The most interesting statistic there is that an elephant grows to be 58 times its birth weight! A person of 0.83BEs only grows to be roughly 20 times his birth weight (and that’s if he’s a heavy baby).
This is a shout out to Dumbo and all of the other famous baby elephants out there for all the hard work they did in Baby Elephant awareness! If Dumbo hadn’t toiled so many years ago in the circus to make us all fall in love with him, the Baby Elephant standard of measurement may have never been born. Let’s just hope the humane society doesn’t get involved and shut the whole thing down.For the record, I in no way endorse the illegal trafficking of baby elephants. As a new pillar of our measurement system, we should treat them with the utmost respect and humility.