Well this is a first

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For the first time in six years I agree with President Stompy Foot.

It’s either a miracle or the end of days.

The president has been quoted as saying that the world is a messy place and always has been. He’s right. Further, the president has said that our awareness and feeling that things are very bad is due in large part to social media.

Again, I agree. 

I’ve recently come to believe, (recently being a relative term) that our connectedness actually leads to an overall feeling of hopelessness and perhaps even depression.

I’ve written in the past about my reasons for closing my social media accounts and also choosing not to watch the news. I’ve been known to go for weeks at a time not even reading the newspaper or online news sources. Honestly, the saturation of our world with all the evil that people do could make you long for a fifty mile wide meteor, or a plague. 

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Sure, you’re likely to end up just as dead as everyone else but at least you’re likely to be able to witness a bunch of really evil people getting their comeuppance.

Really, would any of us shed too many tears if a meteor obliterated Washington D.C.? I didn’t think so.

I’ve written before that I wouldn’t mind seeing something similar happen to the evil fucks in the Middle East. I could easily picture myself lying on my deathbed seeing the talking heads reporting “The Horror”, and questioning why no-one was able to detect or stop the awful rock from space, then laughing myself to death.

A scenario as I’ve described is however, unlikely to happen.

So we continue to focus on our twitter feeds, and keep up with people we’ve never met on Facebook or LinkedIn, or Instagram, or any of the myriad of other distractions brought to us second by second on our computers, tablets and phones. Some of us are so distracted and focused on our phones that we’ll walk into fountains in shopping centers. Then we’ll try to sue the mall for our public humiliation claiming that there should have been a taller rail… To protect us from our OWN stupidity.

We’re too connected.

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Who hasn’t been on the phone, or at the doctor, or in a dentists chair, then had someone calling repeatedly? I recently had a professional do EXACTLY that. I was in a dentists chair and my phone began ringing every 30 seconds. It was the same person calling again and again refusing to accept that they’d have to leave a message.

Eventually the dentist put the tools down, and told me to answer my phone. I simply turned the damn thing off. I was so angry that had I spoken to the person trying so desperately to contact me… I would have been far less than professional.

 As the dentist smiled and resumed his work, you know, the work I was paying professional wages to have him do, all I could think was “I’m not going to deal with the person or his company in the future.”

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As I read about president stompy foot’s comments this morning, I couldn’t help but think that he’s damn lucky we’re so distracted, fractured, upset and confused by social media and the cacophony of noise in our lives.

If we weren’t, we’d have nothing better to do than pay very close attention to him and his cronies in Washington. 

I doubt any of the people in the government could stand that kind of scrutiny.

Root Canal!

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Finally after nine months trying to figure out why my lower jaw would hurt like hell intermittently, I collected enough data to be able to tell a dentist “This tooth right HERE!”

Last December I found myself having some mild  tooth pain. It wasn’t localized to a specific tooth, but was coming from the general location of a tooth that I knew had many cracks.

In truth, this particular tooth was being held together with spackle, bondo, and a prayer. This spackle job had been in place five or six years… at the time it was a hell of a lot cheaper than a crown.

Unfortunately, the dentist (who is no longer my dentist) saw this tooth and leapt to the conclusion that I needed a crown to stop the pain. I asked the fatal question “Are you sure?”

The dentist reassured me with a brusk “yes, yes” then ran off to the next patient.

In hind sight that should have been a clue. Additional clues were evident in the number of papers I was being asked to fill out prior to the work being done. Limitations of their liability, signing away my right to an attorney and limiting my avenue of complaint to binding arbitration, ability to pay, how I would be paying, if my payment failed then what was my mothers number & address. Where was my father, how could he be reached, and so on. Many of these documents were being shoved at me while I was in the dental chair.

Under normal circumstances, I’d have gotten up, walked out, then found another dentist. For some reason I didn’t. I don’t know why… so what happened next is completely on me.

$2000 later I had a crown in place of the bondo tooth. 

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Then the trouble began. 

Turns out that the dentist installing the crown had for some reason been impatient and hadn’t ground it to match my bite properly.

This meant that instead of the pain I’d been feeling decreasing, it increased, involving the whole lower jaw. Now that I think about it, failure in matching a filling to my bite is how “bondo tooth” came to be in the first place. 

I tend to grind my teeth at night. I really grind the hell out of things if there’s an annoying anomaly in my mouth. So bad filling equals badly cracked opposing tooth. This was another instance of a dentist who flitted in and out letting his assistants do all the work.

I think I begin to see a pattern here.

I’m going to implement a new rule for selection of my dentist, If the dentist is too busy to work on my himself, they’re too damn busy to have me as a patient.

It makes no sense to me that the dental assistants would know my mouth better than the dentist. I was thinking that if each time the dentists sees me, I’m essentially a new patient, how good is the care going to be? The dentist isn’t likely to notice trends or subtle differences where minor intervention would save me both pain and money.

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In any case, after two weeks waiting for the new crown and my jaw to settle down and stop hurting, I’m talking to my Mom who tells me exactly what the problem is.

I go back to the dentist, get the other partner and he resurfaces the crown adapting it to my bite. About a week later, the pain is no longer so bad that I want the apocalypse to happen. Now it is at a level that I could kill a few people and get off by claiming bad dental work drove me to insanity. 

In December I had other things going on in my life. Family stuff, the holiday, you know the insanity of the season…

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The pain continues dropping and I figure I’m good to go. Then suddenly the pain is back, then its gone, then back. This cycle continues but I’ve got other issues like going to the East Coast to help out my family with some stuff going on there.

I do the East Coast thing, the pain comes and goes and I eat aspirin when it’s really annoying. The really sick part of all of this is that I have good teeth. I seem to have problems with my teeth only after some dentist tries to “Fix” a problem.

I come home, finish some writing, and like most guys just dealt with it.

After the sixth or seventh trip to the dentist about the same thing, you just start to accept that there are no solutions, and that pain will be a way of life till you die. As men we all do it, we don’t want to be babies, we just grit our teeth (if we can) and muddle through.

“GGrrrrrr! I’ve got BIG Fuzzy Balls!”

Its cool we all do it. Ever see someone try to “Walk off” a broken foot? Yeah that’s one tough fucker! Guy respect points +1000, Women respect points +5, Overall smart points -10,000

That’s what I did, I just tried to “walk it off”. I was tired of being reminded I was getting older.

I’m sick of bad medical care and have been considering cutting the expense of medical insurance that is for the most part fucking useless. I don’t have dental insurance, and without an income, the only way to pay for some idiot dentist with no solutions is to charge it. 

(My M.D. being the exception to the rule of generally bad medical care. That guy is awesome and has earned my respect. I trust him with my life. There’s also a great surgeon I know, again awesome and he has held my life in his hands.)

Then my entire jaw lit up like the Kuwaiti oil fields at the end of Desert Storm, and it didn’t stop for two solid weeks.

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I knew I wasn’t going back to the previous dental group Tweedeldum & Tweedledee weren’t going to get a chance to see me.

So I spent the next week researching dental offices. I’d already tried the personal referral route and that was a bust, so I thought I’d give the egalitarianism of the internet a crack at it. 

My search parameters were simple, The dentists should be close at hand, not an hour or more away. The dentist should speak ENGLISH, not mangledlish. The office should be bright and clean. The dentist should have NO dings, or outstanding complaints against him or her with the ADA, or any medical board. The dentist should come highly recommended by a wide variety of patients from multiple sources, (yes, I even read the shit on yelp).

In the end I narrowed my selection to one. The dentists and all his staff were shown on their web site. The office shown in the background appeared clean and bright. Overall, the recommendations were good, the only exception being that someone thought the prices were too high. That’s a complaint WE ALL share so I discounted that particular comment.

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I set up an appointment. That was easy and they didn’t try to up sell me to cleanings and full mouth x-rays. I had a specific issue and they respected that. The lady directed me to a couple of PDFs on their web site and asked that I fill out the forms contained in the PDFs then bring the packet when I come for my appointment.

“Here we go,” I think. I’m expecting 20 pages of liability clauses and perhaps having to run a contract or two by my attorney before I show up to this appointment.

What I got however, was two very simple pages. One is basic patient information and the other was a standard medical history. How refreshing!

Between the time I made the appointment and the time of the actual appointment my jaw stopped hurting. I think, “Cool! All I have to do is have an imminent dental appointment and I’ll be just fine.”

As the pain faded, I noticed that it localized to a region of two teeth. Finally! Now I had something to actually tell a dentist. “Doc, it’s one of these two teeth, yank ‘em both!”

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The day of the appointment I show up with my forms typed up (the office staff loved me for that). I sit in the chair and a dental assistant takes notes as I explain the problem. She says OK, I’m going to take a couple of x-rays of the area so the doctor can see what we’re up against. Cool, I have no problem with that.

The Doc comes into the exam room, he’s about my age. He’s also got a good demeanor and as he’s asking the assistant what going on he glances at the x-rays. Before he’s even finished asking the question he’s pointing at one x-ray and saying that looks painful. He says to me “Good news is, I think we know what the problem is, bad news is you’re probably going to need a root canal. I’m going to do a couple of quick tests.”

I ask how much this is going to hurt.

He replies it’s not going to hurt him at all. He was right!

I like this guy!

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He explains clearly what he thinks is going on. But goes on to tell me that he’d like for his specialist to take a look before we start drilling away.

I can respect that. And it’s a FAR cry from the previous dental episode. So this afternoon I’m going to have a root canal, or perhaps not depending on what the specialist says.

It’s expensive but it looks like I won’t need a crown the way they’re planning on doing the root canal if needed.

I’ll update this afterward or tomorrow. Hell, I might even put their phone number in the update. 


 Here’s the update!

As dental procedures go, this was an absolute breeze. I didn’t have to pony up the cash for a crown, because they preserved the tooth as it was.

Basicly the procedure was this:

They numbed me without numbing my entire jaw and all points in between. It really was “LOCAL” anesthetic.

Then the root / nerve specialist drilled straight down into the tooth. This was an incisor and the root is in the center, and generally straight.

Once the nerve was exposed, the specialist said, “yep, this baby is a mess,” then opened the tooth up more so that he could dig all the nasty stuff out.

I remember a smell like antiseptic then some more digging around, and something else that smelled antiseptic. 

Then there was this syringe with a tube on the end. There was some more pressure then some kind of curing process.

It’s hard to describe because I had a dental dam in place and as the specialist was working he by necessity was blocking my field of vision.

Then there was something else I saw only briefly that looked like a fuzzy post, followed by the syringe with the tube on it, and more pressure. 

Then I was done.

They took a digital X-Ray, to check their work and the root canal itself was done.

Really! Just that simple.

I moved to another work bay and the dentist took a look at the X-Ray then put a filling over the opening.

Within two hours, I was normal again, the numbness was gone, there was no real pain. I took an advil that night and haven’t looked back. I’m supposed to go to a follow-up appointment this week just to make sure everything is ok. 

This is the way it’s supposed to be, simple, straight-up, and people that have confidence.

They did have me sign a form saying I understood that things are not always as they seem and that there could be complications that necessitate a change in treatment and perhaps additional costs.

All told, I’ve been presented with three pieces of paper. The previous dentist hit me with nine or ten forms, some of which had to do with indemnification and limitations of liability. One limited my legal options to binding arbitration. 

Which leads me to ask, a couple of questions.

1) Why is there such a big difference between the two places?

2) What was the other dentist so afraid of? Didn’t they have confidence in their work, or abilities?

OK, so it was three questions.

I can tell you this, I think I’ve found my new dentist.

As you wish…

Hamas Rejects ‘Final’ Ceasefire: “Death for Allah is our most exalted wish”

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Sometimes… You just wonder, sigh.

Some of the earliest tales from the middle east are about Djins. From these tales, come stories of Alladin, and culminate in America in the all time favorite show “I Dream of Jeannie”.

Djin in the original tales weren’t nice. In some tales, they were said to be from an elder race which predated humans. The world had been taken from them and given to mankind… they weren’t happy about it. So they became tricksters and yes, they would grant your wish but at a terrible price.

If you wanted an exciting life, you could find yourself falling out of a plane in a war zone without a parachute. Sure your life would be very exciting for all of about 7 minutes or so.

When I saw the headline and Hamas quote, all I could think of was an old movie where a Djin was released from it’s imprisonment. The creature kept granting the most petty, venal, and childish of wishes. Each wish ended very badly and the creature would always say, “As you wish” with a smile.

This headline tells me a couple of things. 

1) Hamas is not the least bit interested in protecting its people.

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2) Hamas is an illegitimate government and needs to be eradicated from the face of the Earth.

I hope Israel grants Hamas wish.

It occurred to me this morning that Israel has less reason to show restraint.  

In the past, America could request Israel go to the negotiation table.  We were after all supplying the Israelis with defensive weapons and ammunition.

Since president Stompy Foot started interfering with ammunition shipments to Israel, I suspect it’s changed the landscape of the conflict.

Now, Israel has a limited amount of time before Iron Dome runs out of missiles. Once Iron Dome fails, Israel will be vulnerable to Hamas missiles. 

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Were I a commander in the IDF, My recommendation would be to begin an all out assault. After all, my country’s only option for survival would be to utterly destroy my enemy, before my enemy was in a position to harm my people. In other words, I could no longer afford to be magnanimous with my warnings or kind about how I selected targets. 

My orders would be to bomb and destroy my enemy’s positions where ever they were without question.

Rocket launchers in a Mosque? Destroy the Mosque and all it’s surrounding compound. Launchers in a UN sponsored school? Sorry UN I thought you’d become an active combatant.

But Israel has another impetus to take the gloves off. It’s economic, with Europe turning it’s back on Israel  and refusing to accept some Israeli imports, and Pro-Palestinian assholes here in America attempting to interfere with shipping, what incentive to Israel have to listen to anyone? The way I see it, none.

Especially when reports come out of Gaza that indicate Hamas is manipulating the story and painting Israel as the bad guy. Those reports are in fact being buried or ignored by the World press. 

Israel has already been accused, tried, convicted, and condemned of a crime they have yet to commit. There’s little reason for them NOT to go ahead and initiate an operation called “Scorched Earth” or to borrow from the series Spartacus operation “Kill them all”. After the smoke cleared they could legitimately get away with “Ooops!”

The beach front property would make an awesome tourist area.

Hamas should really be much more careful about what they ask for.


Here’s a video that says kinda what I said but in a much nicer, funnier way