Majcher.com

Man, I got nothing done this weekend.

On Friday, I did a little bit of work - writing some unit tests in anticipation of code - and then took Bernie to the dentist's office to have her wisdom teeth out. We got there around 2pm, and all four were supposed to take about two hours. Well, there were complications - her upper popped right out, but her lower left tooth had gnarled its roots around the jawbone so badly that the denist gave up after a couple of hours, put a sedated Bernie in a wheelchair, and took her down to an oral surgeon's office to finish the job. Things went fine, though - the surgeon pulled out some bone fragments and junk and we finally got her home, only a couple of hours late. So, Bernie's been recuperating with the aid of vicodin and ice cream, and I've been keeping her company and making sure that she doesn't run out of either. She was pretty swollen and uncomfortable for the first 24 hours or so, but the swelling has gone down, and she's off the dope and doing fine. A few more days, and she'll be back to her normal non-chipmunk self.

Our living room entertainment for the weekend consisted of a few movies and a new game. We finished watching Whoops Apocalypse (the television series, with Barry Morse and John Cleese, not the movie which came after, and which I know little about), Claire's Knee (which sucked - French, what do you expect?), All About My Mother (Spanish comedy/drama, which I paid little attention to), It Happened One Night (a "screwball comedy", starring Claudette Colbert, who resembles Bernie a little bit, and Clark Gable, who does not resemble me at all), and The Thirteenth Floor (a little bit of Dark City, and a little bit of Matrix - flawed, but didn't suck). The rest of the time, I was either preparing cold or warm mushy food, or playing Twisted Metal: Black - which is probably one of the best twenty bucks I've ever spent on a game. Terribly fun, playable for short bursts or hours at a time, and now in the "Greatest Hits" collection, which means that it's cheap. Joe Bob says check it out.

Next up, more work, and some sleep. Maybe.

Wait a minute. I almost forgot. I wanted to bitch about the sorry state of dentistry before I packed it in.

Isn't this 2002? Is this not the long-awaited and much heralded "twenty-first century"? How long have we been at this tooth and gum thing, anyway? We live in a fairly technically advanced, well-put-together society; we're not common animals here. So why do we still go after rotten teeth with drills and pliers and other various metal instruments of destruction? And then, why do we just spackle the holes over, or stick some manufactured tooth-alikes into the empty sockets, when things are just too far gone to leave things as they are? Don't they have, like, lasers and nanotech for that now? Shouldn't there be some sort of injection, or bacterial culture that we can give everyone at birth to prevent tooth decay? Why are we still hammering on teeth like monkeys? Where's the science, man? I mean, sure, some dentists are better than others - I had a horrible guy this year drill me without novacaine, and then deride me for being a wuss when I complained. (Mikhail Berdichevsky, on Geary St. in San Francisco - see a Russian dentist, run!) But even the "modern" dentists we go to now use the same mechanical and destructive solutions to the inevitable problem; teeth go bad, drill and patch, or yank 'em. Seems like there's a better way. But what do I know?

Okay, now I'm done.