One Good Thing

Went to the dentist yesterday.

No cavities.

This might not seem like much to whoop whoop about, but when you have a raging sweet tooth like I do (and the four fillings and two root canals to prove it), why, this just makes you want to break out a box of Jujubes to celebrate.

Washed down, of course, with some See’s caramels. And by the way, can we all please just finally admit that See’s chocolates are better than Godiva, Josef Schmidt, Scharffenberger and the all those other high brow confectioners?

Their packaging might be more elegant, but their product blows. I’ve tested this rigorously, and it simply is true. Plus I like the little old ladies in white dresses and nurse shoes who always give you a free sample.

One Bad Thing.

That awful fluoride rinse the dentist gives you at the end of the cleaning, the one which you must swish around for sixty seconds.

Then, afterwards, as a sadistic little bon bon, you aren’t allowed to eat or drink anything for another half hour. That’s right. Let it linger on the palate. Not that you’d actually want to consume anything right away, as that poison wrecks your taste buds for at least two hours. The variety my dentist gives me is called “bubblegum.” That’s not marketing latitude. That’s not poetic license. That’s slander. That noxious liquid is to bubblegum as vinegar is to wine. Fluoride flavoring is one corner of science that has been sorely neglected. We can invent computers to tell our cars where to drive, send cameras up our butts to look for tumors, and pick up pieces of gravel on Mars, but we can’t make a fluoride rinse that doesn’t taste like battery acid.
This is a national embarrassment. Just watch. The Canadians or someone will beat us to this. Far as I’m concerned, the fluoride scandal is all the proof I need that the American Century is definitely over.