Ingsoc Acres

The Register has a lot of fun with this report that the EU has abolished the acre as a legal unit of measurement. The extended gag of treating anyone who is bothered by this as a paranoid Colonel Blimp living in the past while making mountains out of molehills is worth a smile until one notices that this abolition of 800 years of English history came about via an EU directive without any debate or consent by the people, their parliament or their monarch.

It involves violating something called sovereignty and subverting an institution called democracy and suddenly the joke isn't so funny and that molehill isn't so small.