Chocolate weighed in Schwarzeneggers: Official

Regular readers will be aware that a couple of years back we at El Reg established a set of standards designed to supersede the wholly inadequate imperial and metric measurements which had for so long battled for international supremacy.

For example, length, volume and weight are now quantified in linguine, grapefruit and Jubs, respectively, which we're sure you'll agree make a lot more sense than inches, cubic centimetres and ounces.

From time to time, however, we do expand the list to include new, case-specific measurements, such as water flow in elephants per second, stored data in CDs to the Moon, and icebergs in Manhattans.

Accordingly, we're delighted today to embrace the Schwarzenegger – a handy unit for expressing the weight of improbably large chocolate bars.

According to the Daily Mail, a US chocolatier recently produced a gargantuan bar tipping the scales at 12,000 pounds, which is equivalent to "51 Arnold Schwarzeneggers".

As you'll already have caclulated, the "Arnie", as we've chosen to dub it, is therefore equal to 235lb (106kg), or more properly, 25.23 Jubs.

Now, Schwarzenegger is a big bloke, but he's not as big as the bloke which the BBC said last week could be hurtling from space at a speed of up to 240mph – which is "10 times quicker than Usain Bolt", or 0.0036 per cent of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum, in case you were wondering.

To clarify, the Beeb advised readers to keep a sharp eye out for bits of NASA's rogue Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite as heavy as 158kg, or "equivalent to a very large person".

Well, by our reckoning that would probably be better put as "equivalent to a bloody enormous person", an individual so large he or she could certainly be snapped from space by any NASA satellite which happened not to be tumbling uncontrollably from orbit.

The BBC's failure to correctly describe its hurtling lard bucket means the "very large person" won't be making the Reg standards approved list.

Similarly, the Guardian's attempt to establish the "medal" as a measure of the weight of steel will not be coming soon to a set of scales near you.

In this piece on Stratford's Westfield shopping mall, the chattering classes' rag of choice reckoned said cathedral of consumerism consumed "40,000 tonnes of structural steel" in its construction – "equivalent to the weight of 80 million medals".

The paper was later obliged to clarify that that's actually "80 million Olympic gold medals", but we'd already lost interest in working out how many medals to the Jub and had wandered off to the pub. ®