I’m not sure how many of you were children in Europe in the 1960s, but perhaps some of you remember a character from French TV (but dubbed into many languages and shown all over Europe) who was a sort of combination supervillian/educational tool: the Ruler Woman. She wore a shimmery dress and carried a Magic Meter Stick that could turn anything into a simple outline. She’d do this to wreak havoc and teach the metric system, or both.

Eventually, they pulled her from the air when she Magic Meter Stick’d a nuclear plant outside of Lyon and the subsequent story of the massive cloud of radioactive gas killing thousands just didn’t play well, causing many kids nightmares and generous bed-wettings that persisted for months.