Dental damn

This could very well make me insane, but when I walk out of a dentist’s office after a cleaning, my teeth always feel cold.

Like, sweaterless in winter cold. Two weeks in a meat locker cold. Swimming with polar bears in a pair of boxer shorts cold.

And furthermore, cold.

Actually I guess it’s the gums that would give me that oh-so-frigid feeling; I’m footloose and cavity-free, so no exposed nerves on these pearly whites, no siree. That doesn’t make the chilly sensation any less concerning, though. Was the inside of my mouth so coated with a germy accretion of junk that removing it was like stripping naked in the middle of a blizzard? This is but one of the questions that plague me when I leave the dentist, air whooshing freely around my sparkling incisors.

What makes a dental visit so disconcerting -- even if you’ve got a clean bill of oral health -- is that it forces you to think about things you wouldn’t ordinarily think about. I mean sure, we brush regularly, and some of us even have the discipline and steel-eyed will to floss, but these are actions we perform automatically, without really pausing to consider the reasons. When you visit a dentist, especially one who knows how to guilt-trip, there’s a real chance of succumbing to panic. I should be doing more, you think to yourself. I should be scraping my tongue. I should be swishing with mouthwash, or buffing my molars with a Zamboni machine.

Let’s talk about flossing for a second, OK? It sucks. Everyone’s gotten the lecture about it at some point, and every dentist worth his salt has advocated this activity as a means of preventing gum disease and tooth decay. They’re absolutely right about this. If you want to maintain a healthy mouth, you really should be flossing. Yet it’s one of the most difficult routines a person can possibly initiate. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly why -- it’s not physically taxing, no heavy lifting or aerial acrobatics, and it doesn’t take an especially long time, usually just long enough to make it through the first act of an “Everybody Loves Raymond” rerun. There’s no paperwork to fill out, no “Flossing 101” courses to take at the local community college. There’s no excuse not to do it.

Unless, like me, you’re adept at rationalizing bad behavior. If that’s the case, then the argument against flossing goes like this: It’s a pain in the everloving neck. It’s icky. You sit there for 10 minutes with a wet, limp piece of string, idly removing clumps of carrot cake from betwixt your bicuspids, and at the end of this soul-crushing ordeal you’ve essentially got a slimy food necklace studded with day-old ravioli meat and Lucky Charms marshmallows. Sure, you can thread the floss through those little plastic handles they sell at the pharmacy, but that’s like putting a diva dress on a duck. The packaging may be prettier, but it still quacks.

Try explaining that to the hygienist when she’s shoving that tiny mirror down into your ribcage.

There are few feelings of powerlessness more complete than being in a dentist’s chair. It would be one thing if we could voice some kind of protest, but our mouths are occupied, so the most we can do to communicate is grunt, howl or make obscene gestures with our hands -- which has the potential to shock the dentist, always a bad move when they’re scraping plaque with a metal pick. Nobody wants to leave the office with a third nostril.

And then there’s the uncertainty. Mouths are tricky things, and while everything may seem hunky dory, there’s no telling what the doc may find: Abscesses, cavities, renegade wisdom teeth, Rolex watches, blood diamonds, Egyptian pottery and old VHS tapes may be lurking in the dark. You’re stuck in this weird limbo, not knowing whether you’ll leave without incident or receive some crushing diagnosis, the discovery of a shameful flaw in your otherwise pristine piehole. With my luck I’d be the first person in history afflicted with some as-yet-undiscovered oral disease. “Why Jeff, it appears as though your molars have grown tiny feet!” Great. Now I’ve got to floss my teeth and my mouth-feet.

Despite these grumblings, a dental visit doesn’t have to be all bad. I had to have my wisdom teeth removed one summer when I was in high school, and I thought it would be a terrifying experience -- all the needles and gas and subsequent room-temperature yogurt. Horror stories have come out of that operating room, so maybe I got lucky, but my extraction adventure was a bigger hoot than riding the monorails at Disney World. A woman in a white coat stuck a needle in my arm, a man with a blue facemask put a plastic implement over my mouth and nose, and after breathing deeply …

Well, that’s just the thing. I don’t know what happened next. It wasn’t like waking up after sleep, because when that happens you get the sense that time has passed, that the world has kept on spinning beyond the thin film of your shuttered eyelids. Not the case here. I was instantly transported from an operating chair to a couch in a dark room, staring at a television screen showing a cartoon of a talking tooth. I think the tooth was giving me instructions on how to recover over the following several days, but I couldn’t hear him, because I was laughing so hard I was asphyxiating myself. Turns out, you see, that I was higher than Willie Nelson.

Which is pretty much how I felt for about two or three days. So if you have a dental procedure coming up, folks, fret not -- there’s always the possibility that you could stumble out of that room most righteously stoned.

And if your teeth are super cold, you may not even notice.

Peeping Toms

It’s a little scary what a person can do with Google Earth.

There are two ways to utilize this creepily all-encompassing satellite imaging service. One is to type an address into your web browser’s search bar and use Google to navigate a specific selection of streets. Usually people do this when they’re about to visit that hot new sushi place for the first time, and want to know what it looks like, where to park, and whether there’s a nearby Arby’s in case they realize raw fish is disgusting. It’s a handy tool.

Fore hardcore users with way too much time on their hands, there’s the downloadable Google Earth software. It’s free, and I highly recommend it to all government spies, peeping Toms and would-be stalkers. It’s the same concept -- navigable satellite imagery -- magnified by a thousand. The first thing you see when you fire up the program is our beautiful blue planet rotating in the black expanse of space; zoom into to any location on the globe, or type in an address, and you plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere, hurtle toward your virtual destination, and there it is: Paris, or San Francisco, or Tupelo, Mississippi, ready for your digital exploratory impulses. You zoom in and out, rotate the map, and even view the terrain from the ground in 360-degree photographs taken by roving Google vans. It’s the world on your screen.

And it’s disconcerting.

I say this as an enthusiastic user. While many people do productive things during their free hours -- tending gardens, say, or learning a language -- I spend an unhealthy percentage of my non-work time fussing with gadgets and taking virtual tours of places I’ll never visit. Sure, I could buy a plane ticket to Rome, peruse the Piazza Navona and walk the cobblestone streets until my feet turn into useless lumps of throbbing flesh. Or I could make a few clicks and chill at the Vatican while sipping hot chocolate on my sofa and picking at the eroding soles of my Daffy Duck slippers. There’s a certain liberation in gazing at humankind’s wonders while scratching at manly body parts in a completely inappropriate fashion.

Despite all that, it sometimes strikes me how absurd it is that a simple laptop can grant us this kind of power. In a public setting recently, I overheard a man chatting on the phone about a house he’d just bought, and during the conversation he happened to mention the street address. With my computer handy, I punched the address into Google Earth and rotated the camera above his new home, taking in its pine-ensconced backyard, and the curlicue driveway that resembled the spit of hair on Superman’s forehead. In a stupor of drunken privilege, I shocked myself with the following thought: “This is wrong. It’s a total invasion of priva-- ooh, a rosebush! But no, this is wrong.”

Thankfully there are limitations to the technology. The satellite images aren’t in real time -- often they’re a few months or even a couple of years old. You can’t look inside people’s windows (the resolution won’t allow it), you can’t grab anyone’s license plate number (they’re blurred out), and the areas that are viewable are generally limited to public places that you could readily see if you up and went there yourself (like Disneyland!). In other words, you can’t spy on your girlfriend’s apartment to see if there’s a light on in the window. I’ve tried.

What you can do with the program is more than enough, and maybe a touch too much. I won’t go into all of the potential mischief one could get into, because that would be irresponsible, and it would also cut into the sales of my companion guide, “101 Ways to be Creepy as Hell.” Suffice it to say that the only person who should be allowed to zip from Sydney, Australia to Montreal, Canada in two seconds flat is Superman. And only then if he has a chaperone. Hawkman, get on that.

Invariably, when having conversations about the encroachment of technology on privacy, someone will say, “Big Brother is watching.” It’s a reference to the George Orwell novel “1984,” which envisioned a future besieged by omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation. Great novel, but people reference it far too readily. The surveillance camera in the burger joint’s drive-through lane isn’t “Big Brother watching.” It’s pimply Chad Fitzsimmons watching to make sure you don’t defile the plastic clown.

Google Earth is a different matter altogether because it democratizes the use of satellite imagery for potentially indiscriminate purposes. The images may not be live, but they’re uncannily accurate. Buildings pop in three dimensions; streets and alleyways wend and curve with to-the-centimeter specificity. It’s a great tool for snipers. And muggers. And snipers of muggers.

It’s not Big Brother, but it’s within shouting distance, so maybe it’s time to start thinking about what the limitations should be. Because the technology is doubtless going to grow. It has already. When I first downloaded the program several years ago, the only buildings that appeared in three dimensions were the iconic structures of the major metropolitan cities -- your Sears Towers and Prudential buildings and Arcs de Triomphe. Everything else was just a flat satellite picture taken from space, no matter how much you rotated the angle. Now, when you zoom in to about a pidgeon’s cruising level, you see that not only are most of the buildings rendered in 3D -- including the single-story homes in no-name backwaters -- but even the flippin’ trees are standing tall, in true pop-up book fashion. This is likely due to some kind of algorithm, which is a word I use when I want to sound smart.

So to stem any privacy issues arising from the inevitable technological advancements, here are my recommended limitations: Don’t ever make the images live; don’t ever make it possible to zoom in on objects smaller than a two-car garage; and please, for the love of Pete, don’t send another Google van by my house until I’ve had time to get my car repaired. There’s a nasty dent in the rear fender, and I’d hate for Mom to find out.

The great deflate debate

It was a beautiful early spring day in Portland’s Monument Square. I was sitting on a slab of concrete eating a turkey sandwich when I saw him: A Channel 8 photographer with an SUV-sized video camera slung over his shoulder and a searching look in his eyes, like he was trying to find Waldo hiding in the bustle. I recognized that searching look. He was trying to hunt down viable interview subjects.

You wouldn’t think a shy person would be itching for 10 seconds in the spotlight of a local channel’s evening news broadcast, but hey, that’s what’s makes me such an enigma, baby. (In my own mind at least.) My smile widened when he approached me and asked if I’d give a moment of my time. When I assented, he pointed his ’droid-like contraption at my face and fired off a few questions.

About Deflategate. Which threw me.

I’d thought the whole controversy was over. Yet here we are, a year and a half later, and people are still getting into contentious debates about this goofy controversy. Britain just voted to leave the European Union, we’re in the midst of a presidential contest between an oafish gorilla and the Wicked Witch of the West, but people are still red-faced and apoplectic about how much air pressure was in the footballs during a 43-8 snoozer. I gave the Channel 8 guy what we wanted, but the whole encounter left me confused. Do people still actually care about this stupid issue?

Yes. Yes, apparently they do. In fact, during last week’s debut episode of sportscaster Bill Simmons’ new HBO talk show “Any Given Wednesday,” a passionate and acid-tongued Ben Affleck delivered a profanity-laced tirade, claiming the NFL’s four-game suspension of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady amounted to a “ridiculous smear campaign.” Rumors are circulating that Affleck was drunk during the appearance, which I suppose isn’t outside the realm of possibility. I mean, he’s from Boston. C’mon. But New England die-hards generally don’t need liquor to get their hackles up over all things Brady. He’s like a Norse god, inspiring equal parts respect and defensiveness. Not to mention shrines of worship.

In case you’ve spent the past 18 months liposuctioning the fat from overweight seals at an Antarctic research facility, here’s Deflategate in a nutshell: In January 2015, the Patriots slaughtered the Colts 43-8 in the AFC Championship game, sending Brady and company to yet another Super Bowl. At some point during the game, a Colts player noticed the balls were somewhat limp and floppy. (The game balls, you perv.) Accusations flew that Brady and the team had arranged to have the balls deflated as a way of making the grip better. The NFL imposed a four-game suspension on Brady, he appealed it and won, but now, thanks to a circuit court ruling, the four-game suspension is back on, to be served at the beginning of the upcoming season. Brady also has to sing “Buttons and Bows” while wearing a dinosaur costume during an upcoming taping of “America’s Got Talent.”

All caught up? Excellent. Oh, and I was making up the “Buttons and Bows” thing. But now I want to get a petition started.

Full disclosure: I’m a big Pats fan. Have been since I was knee-high to a garden gnome. I was four or five when they made their first Super Bowl appearance against the Chicago Bears, and the only I thing I remember about the ordeal is my mother clutching the sides of her head and yelling at quarterback Steve Grogan to “Just throw the damn ball already!” They got spanked in embarrassing fashion, and though I couldn’t tell a defensive lineman from a bratwurst sandwich at that time, I still felt … well, deflated. Even to a toddler they looked like carnies scrambling to clear the remains of a circus tent after a tornado. I dreamed that someday they would be great.

The seeds were sown for lifelong fandom, so my opinion on Deflategate is far from objective. Maybe Brady did it. Maybe he didn’t. I’m not a judge. But I do have judgement, and my judgement tells me there are far more pressing matters in the world, even within the narrow confines of professional sports. You’ve got guys stabbing themselves in the groins with sword-sized needles so they can ’roid up their muscles and bike the Tour de France in the time it takes to finish a Ramones album. Baseball players in the ’90s were so juiced on junk they’d smash screaming home runs that could puncture the solar panels of low-orbit telescopes. Olympians can now pole vault over airborne Learjets.

But wait, everybody! The air pressure in this ball is low! Cover your children’s eyes! Oh, my aching exclamation points!

Sorry. Had a bit of a moment there.

Look, cheating is cheating, and it’s obviously wrong, no matter the degree. If Brady was the mastermind of a vast ball conspiracy, he should be punished for it -- sorry, superfans. Whether enough evidence exists to prove his guilt is something I’ll leave to more interested parties; I’m generally too busy gluing macaroni collages in my subterranean lair to give a rat’s fat behind.

Let’s have a little perspective, though. We’re on year two of this “controversy.” Year two. Peace accords among warring nations have been forged in less time. I understand there are people who take football seriously, but it is, after all, a game. It’s only real value is in the lessons it offers about teamwork and sportsmanship. Any player not holding up his end of that particular bargain should pay a price, but Brady’s price has been paid, if he ever really owed it to begin with. It’s well past time for fans and the media to move onto more urgent matters, like which Hollywood actor is next in line to play Spider-Man.

Now I’ve got a homework assignment for any budding young scientists out there. Take this column, compress it down into a 10-second soundbite, travel back in time and hand me notes to use during my impromptu Channel 8 interview. I’m not happy with my response, and I could use a do-over.

Gone fishin'

Technically I’m a pet owner. But since those pets happen to be goldfish, I get to play by a unique set of rules.

Unlike a dog or cat owner, I don’t have to be remotely responsible. The only thing required to keep these suckers alive is sprinkling a dose of flakey fish food over their luxurious habitat, a 10-gallon tank with more fake plants than a dentist’s office. My two bug-eyed companions, Cuff and Link, go absolutely ballistic when this happens, scrambling over themselves with a coffee drinker’s hopped-up frenzy, then settling back down into their normal routine of not doing much at all. I watch this happen for a while, I make absurd baby noises they either can’t hear or don’t care about, and then I leave the room and read books about flesh-eating mutants. A swell arrangement, all told.

Fish are the microwave dinners of the pet world. They’re not a hundred percent satisfying, but man, are they easy.

Maintaining a viable aquarium is a simple task even for a knuckleheaded college kid, which was my job description at one time. For 21-year-old me, “responsibility” was still just a word in the dictionary, as I spent much of my non-studying hours trying to decide whether Southern Comfort was delicious or the most vile swill this side of Milwaukee’s Best. (It’s the latter.) Pulling good grades was about the only task to which I could be entrusted; something as hassle-free as a houseplant would have withered and died under my absent-minded care. Heck, if I’d had a fern it would have picked itself up by its roots and walked out in frustration, marking the first time in evolutionary history that a plant developed the capacity to show disgust. There’s a TV show in there somewhere. Remind me to pull some notes together.

But there were fish. Oh, were there fish. Big ones, little ones. Colored, monochrome. Cute, butt-freakin’-ugly. I plowed through a great deal of those suckers during the first couple of years the aquarium was operative, mostly because I was trying to keep tropical fish and I was bad at it -- at least when it came to the early stages of the fishes’ lives. Could have been the pH level, could have been my dime store heater, but whatever the reason, I’d score 10 fish and in less than a day half of them would be floating at the surface, bobbing like buoys in the wake of an ocean liner. It’s depressing when you’re responsible for a life and you fail at it, even if the life in question is worth about $1.29 to a pimpled pet score cashier.

The fish that remained, though -- they’d live for years. I was doing something right, and that something involved little more than sprinkling flakes on the surface and fogging the glass with my gawking. Sometimes I wonder what fish are thinking -- if they “think” at all -- when someone puts their nose to the glass and peers in at them. Do they understand that there’s a giant mammal head just inches away? Do they notice anything else that’s on the table, like the half-empty packet of AA batteries, or the Green Lantern action figure twisted into a lewd position? It’d be interesting to know what’s going through their minds.

Which is one of the drawbacks of fish, really: You can’t communicate with them on any meaningful level, aside from knocking on the aquarium lid and scaring the everloving bajesus out of them. You can communicate with dogs. They understand a fair amount of words, and they know how to signal when they want food, attention, the blood of an evil groundhog, etc. Cats are tricker because they’re schmucks, but you can learn to read the signals; some of those signals, like rubbing against your shins and making you trip face-first into the china cabinet, are a little clearer than we’d like ’em to be.

Fish just swim. They don’t cuddle or purr or pass gas while lying next to us in bed, filling the room with an eye-watering fog that could melt the chain mail off the back of a Medieval knight. They exist, and that’s that. Their greatest liability is also their greatest strength; what they lack in their capacity for closeness they make up for in ease of sustainability. That’s why, as simple as their care was 12 years ago, it’s even simpler today. I’ve learned responsibility, I can fake maturity, and when I come home from work I toss out all those life lessons and revert back to a post-adolescent stupor -- dumping flakes onto the water’s surface to watch Cuff and Link battle it out like a pair of half-starved sumo wrestlers slapping bellies over a prize cannoli.

Despite all that, keeping fish as pets is a curious arrangement. They’re a species we regularly scarf as a main course at Applebee’s, yet the ones too small to be filling we keep alive for a cheap spectacle. We spend more time tending to their habitats than we do to the fish themselves. And we name them as a formality because it’s expected. Cuff and Link are cute monikers, but they never fetch my slippers when I ask them to.

I think what it boils down to is that life likes to be surrounded by life, even if it’s elementary life, like fish or carnations, lizards or hyacinths. Not to get all hippy-dippy, but it’s commonly accepted science that all life can be traced back to a common ancestor -- meaning we’re all connected, even if in the most tangential of ways. The strictest of isolationists can still find something to like about a golden-scaled buddy zig-zagging through the hollow center of a plastic shipwreck, emerging with a lilt to his lips that looks suspiciously like a smile.

In five minutes I’m off to buy them a giant skull for their swimming pleasure. It’s about the closest I can come to spoiling them.

Good fortune

When I arrived at work the other day, there was a fortune cookie waiting for me on my desk. Because I’m a paranoid, suspicious person (and a government spy masquerading as a giant nerd), I looked around the office warily, half-expecting to see an evil henchman peeking around a corner, snickering and stroking a pointy goatee. I considered the possibilities. Could be a tiny bomb, I reckoned. Or a clever delivery system for nerve gas. Surely no one would be sweet enough to just give me a cookie out of the blue.

I should have better faith in people. There was just a fortune inside, nothing more.

What an embarrassing fortune, though. The tiny slip of paper in the cookie’s hollow center read, “It’s never to late to learn.” As aphorisms go, it’s not a bad one; learning is one of my favorite activities, next to trampoline acrobatics and voluntary electroshock therapy. Yet something about it bothered me.

Take another look: “It’s never to late to learn.” Notice any spelling or grammatical errors?

Yep. The first “to” should be spelled “too.” Apparently it’s too late to learn how to differentiate between homonyms.

Every once in a while you get a fortune that’s silly, weird, or a plain ol’ head-scratcher. That’s part of the appeal. Nobody wants a boring old fortune, something trite and yawn-inducing like “Follow your heart and you will be happy,” or “Be thankful for what you’ve got.” Statements such as those have some truth to them, and they’re generally a good way to live one’s life, but they’re also fairly obvious and barely worth mentioning. What we want -- or what I want, anyway -- is to open up one of those cookies and be taken aback. Bemused. Flabbergasted.

Here’s a real, honest-to-goodness fortune that gets at the heart of what I mean: “A wise husband is one who thinks twice before saying nothing.”

Now that’s how you construct a fortune, my friends. Funny, original, and with a dose of wryness that suggests it was written by a human, not a warehouse machine following some uninspired algorithm.

This one is so sarcastic that I have to bow down to it in awe: “If you can read this, you are literate. Congratulations.”

Snap! Who’s writing these quips, David Letterman? Somewhere, somebody’s job is to write these things, and so help me I will land this gig, even if I have to scale Everest and slay a centaur with a ping-pong paddle.

Everyone knows, of course, that you’re generally given fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants; they come with the check, and distract you from the fact that you’ve just spent a double-digit sum on noodles that’ll leave you feeling hungry again in an hour flat. For this reason, people may assume that the crunchy treats have a Chinese origin, perhaps dating back to the glory days of Confucius and Mah Jong. Not the case. Like the Chinese food to which we’ve grown accustomed, fortune cookies have an American origin, and they’re based on an old Japanese recipe -- which means, culturally, the cookies have deeper ties to Super Mario Bros. than the Great Wall. And yes, I just snuck in an esoteric Nintendo reference. I’ll be expecting my Pulitzer in the mail.

Iconic as they are, then, it would appear that fortune cookies are frauds. Some people actually consider them slightly racist, playing on the stereotype of wise Chinese people dispensing sage advice and prognostications. I think that’s taking it a bit overboard; they’re inauthentic but essentially harmless, minus the sugar and the risk of accidentally scarfing a piece of paper. What bothers me about them is the inconsistency of the fortunes themselves.

For every gem like the ones I reference above, there are 10 bland, boring bromides. It makes the whole experience a crapshoot. Here’s how a typical outing at a Chinese restaurant might go: You take your seats and immediately locate your birth year on the Zodiac placemat so you can giggle with your friends about being a rooster like Tom Selleck. You drink tea that’s too hot and order the L21 because it’s got the most carbs, and you’re looking forward to passing out in front of that evening’s Lifetime Original movie. When the meal arrives, you spend 10 minutes fussing with the chopsticks, then abandon them in favor of the fork once you get to the rice, because dammit, you’re not a circus performer. The check comes on a small plastic tray, and on top of the tray, you see it -- your fortune, buried inside a cookie that looks like smiling duck lips mummified in sugar. From here, things can go in one of two directions. Either you get something memorable that will make you and your dining companions grin in merriment, or you get a lemon, a let-down, a sweet-crunchy disappointment.

There’s always a small moment of anticipation before you open it, not unlike those Christmastime forays to the advent calendar. If your luck’s running dry, you get something like this:

“The early bird catches the worm.”

Ugh. Consider my gag reflex duly triggered. If, on the other hand, you’re in luck’s good graces, you might get something like this:

“Two days from now, tomorrow will be yesterday.” Or, “Two can live as cheaply as one, for half as long.” Or, “Give a person a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a person to fish, he always smells funny.”

All real, and all great.

As I’m wont to do, however, I’ve saved my favorite for last. Stumbling on it while Googling, I was charmed by its self-awareness; it’s not the funniest nor cleverest fortune I’ve seen, but it’s undeniably true:

“You will read this and say ‘Geez! I could come up with better fortunes than that!’”

And I totally could.