I am meeting a friend at a restaurant, half football field behind a McDonald. Interesting way to locate a place, as each McDonald became a landmark for direction and a football field for a distance.
I am not sure that people would necessarily recognize the size of a football field outside of a stadium, being sober, quiet and at street level. I even doubt that too many people would know the dimension it represents. I hear the field being the reference for a linear dimension and it seems logic that it relates to the length, which is 300 feet, although if we include the end zones, we increase the distance to 360 feet, but no one seems to know which number to consider. I would think it takes some imagination to project a distance into a football field, not knowing exactly which measure it is, although it gives a chance to make everyone right!
Same for a stone’s throw as it refer to someone throwing a stone, which at that point has to do with his or her momentary ability to throw as far away as possible… and measure the outcome. The first writing reference of this kind of distance was made in England
The amusing fact is that stone throwing became a sort of sport of tossing over water. Here, an exceptional distance was established and recorded by the venerable Guinness World Records to 250 feet and mind you, 51 skips. This represents about 83% of a football field without the end zones; not bad!
Tree, standout architectural component, picket fence of a certain color... all of that is now replaced by McDonald as the location marker. Another surprise is that we have now an “Economist’s Big Mac Index” calculating people’s purchasing power of …Big Mac as a reference point to compare Countries!?!
After this, I would be afraid to ask: What’s next?
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