Deeper roots

As follow-up to my post about root canal, it turns out that looking like you’ve channeled Winston Churchill with a swollen-up bulldog jaw, and a whole lotta pain, are not what’s expected post-procedure.

Even though the pain has abated somewhat and the swelling has gone down a bit, when I called my dentist, she said to come in yesterday afternoon. She cleaned out the area and gave me stronger prescriptions for antibiotics and pain meds.

These antibiotics require that you take them with food, which will make a nice change, as I’ve not really eaten anything since about last Friday. (Just as well, because they are freaking horse-pills. Evidently you can't concentrate this stuff, you just have to pile it up higher and deeper.) I started out with sushi, which I got while the pharmacy next door was filling the scripts.

Let’s hope this time around it works, because I have been seriously too stupid to even drive for the past week.

  

Charging laptops

Something to fill in the column inches while I’m waiting for the swelling in my jaw to go down. I was in the digital office accessories aisle of Target (trying to find a plain old B&W workhorse inkjet printer, which is apparently a 21^st Century pipe dream) and came across this:

Now, I understand that Targus products are probably all manufactured and assembled in countries where English is not the first language of the workforce. And it’s conceivable that the digerati who need to carry multiple-device chargers with them aren’t the most discriminating when it comes to, you know, literacy.

And I suppose that the few pennies that would have been added to the retail price by having someone somewhere along the line point out, “Uh, so—you laptops out there, we’re talking to YOU” would have screwed up all the price point calculations.

But it’s basically just another omen that Civilization As We Know It is headed straight for hell.

The root of the matter

Slight break from my usual pithy, witty commentary. I’ve been rendered completely useless for the past few days due to a dental situation.

The pain started last Wednesday; by the time I determined it wasn’t going to go away on its own and called my dentist on Thursday, the earliest appointment I could get was Monday.

So I spent four days trying—unsuccessfully—to get ahead of the pain. And, although my dentist assured me that the worst was over with the root canal, it turns out she wasn’t entirely accurate. Despite being on painkillers and antibiotics, my jaw is still swollen up, I can’t talk and if someone offered to shoot me now, I’d take them up on that very kind offer.

Seriously—I hadn’t thought I could be in this much pain for this long. I didn’t need so much as an ibuprofen when I got my knees carved up like jack o lanterns a year ago; but let one little tooth go rogue, and I’m a sniveling wimp. A crying, sniveling wimp.

Considering how unproductive this has rendered me, I’m wondering if this is the real explanation for the dinosaurs dying out: it wasn’t a giant meteor attack or ice age. They all needed root canal and couldn’t survive the lack of dentistry.

Doggone Prius

Am I the only person around who thinks this is a really mean commercial?

I mean—wearing out that poor, little dog?

Political theory

I know, I know—saying that politicians are morons is both redundant and obvious. And adding the modifier “Republican from a former Confederate state” is an even further waste of breath.

Especially since “I am an ignorant buffoon” is pretty much the one message that they seem capable of staying on.

By way of example I give you just a few who have risen from the slime of butt-ignorance to make pronouncements recently.

There’s Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, who’s evidently a physician and who sits on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee with Missouri Republican Todd Akin. Haven’t heard whether Broun is able to swallow legitimate and illegitimate categories of rape, but he does have his own whackjob beliefs on science. To wit: evolution and embryology are “lies straight from the pit of hell.”

Broun was videotaped at a banquet of presumptive supporters at a Baptist church making these statements. (Republicans don’t seem to have twigged to this whole technology burst that pretty much guarantees that anything you do or say is likely to end up on the Internet, do they?)

Now, I find a few things interesting about this. One: he makes declarations like that and then calls himself a scientist; what’s up with that? I’m wondering if his medications need adjustment? And—speaking of things medical—who would seek treatment from a doctor with such a tenuous grasp on scientific thinking for the past, oh, 70 years?  

But, wait—as they say all over the cable spectrum, there’s more.

Not too far away from Georgia we have Arkansas, and a state representative who has written a book asserting that slavery was a “blessing in disguise”, and a state candidate who has written a book advocating the deportation of Muslims. All of them. Not sure where, but just outta here.

I swear I am not making this stuff up.

(Frankly, I have to question whether anyone who’d publicly take such patently idiotic positions has ever read a book, much less possesses the ability to, you know, write one; but I know that even in Arkansas you can hire someone to run the word processor. Or kill the poultry to make the quill pens, if you want to revert back to methods that were in vogue at the same time as ideas that went out of general favor 150 years ago.)

While I find all of these positions worrisome, what’s even more troubling to me is that there are plenty of people out there who will go to the polls (not looking like Latinos and therefore de facto not in danger of being removed from the electoral rolls) next month and vote for them.