...cause relative hell is breaking out around here and my root canal is tomorrow. I think. (It's actually settled down to a near manageable roar for most of the time and I'm going to chat quite seriously with the guy about the necessity of it all before he goes in.)

1) If you ever wondered what an exploding lawnmower crankcase looks like:



I have still yet to find a trace of that shrapnel. Granted, it's not as amusing as an exploding space toilet falling from the sky, but it's still pretty damn impressive in a Mythbusters sort of way.

----

2) I've stopped reading the obituaries. Kath was cremated and there's not going to be a bigass Amigone-style production. But. Steve is making arrangements to rent a park pavilion sometime over the summer, and we're gonna have a picnic to celebrate an incredible life. When we heard that, Eleanor and I had the same thought: "That's so Kathy."  The kids are bearing up pretty well, considering, and this kid thanks all of you for your kind words, prayers, and hugs.

----

3) This week's weird alternative newspaper ad:




Oddly enough, I only just came across my first reference to this phenomenon in a fairly decent spy novel I've been reading, but even with that I wasn't prepared for it to be marketed in quite these words.

My only questions are, (a) how does this get around the state's smoking ban, and (b) is it coincidence that this place opened right around the time that Spitzer left office?

I finished mowing the back forty, in two fairly equal installments of twenty separated by 24 hours and a ton of rain, and then headed to the front yard late Sunday afternoon to murderize the dandelion crop which grew out there since the maiden voyage of our 18-year-old Sears Craftsman side-discharger early last weekend.

It got all of about six feet along the edge of the driveway before the mower let out that "oops, you hit a rock or something" sound and stopped, only this time, the engine continued engining for several seconds afterwards.

I tipped the mower 90 degrees to the left to clear the blockage, which there warn't any of, and then plopped it back down on the grass, only to find a distinct puddle of motor oil underneath where the tippage had been.

Turns out the "oops" noise wasn't anything I hit. It was an inch-square disintegration of the side of the engine's crankcase. Further inspection revealed no evidence of either the missing cast-iron side itself or anything on that part of the lawn which might have led to its demise.

Worst of all, I'd just filled the fucker with petrol, in these times running about a whole dollar's worth.

We're pretty much committed to buying a push-mower to replace the thing. No gas, no every-April oil changes, and about a day's worth of cardio without having to go to the gym.

I should also note, for the sake of history, that as I filled its tank with gas, I found myself singing an old song in the obligatory Yiddish accent that I often sing while working with a gas can:

My faddah owned a candy store,
Business there was bad,
He asked my muddah what to do
And this is what she said....

"Take a can of gasoline,
Pour it on the floor.
Make a scratch
With a match....
No more candy store."

In hindsight, I'm lucky I don't have singed eyebrows- or woise.

I was in church from before 11 until just past 3, having serious discussions of John's gospel and recommending Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian Life to a classmate.

By 5, I was back here, dropping more F-bombs on the Internet than even Sue Simmons, and rewriting blasphemous lyrics to smarmy 60s hymns.

Hey. Gotta have SOMETHING to confess next week, huh?

----

You learn the most surprising things reading the obituaries.

Our friend's info has not been put online yet (it seems these things are just as slow as they were in pre Interwebs dayz), but there was one there for a Cheektowaga dentist who died last week, Dr. Ronald Chmiel.

His name, you probably won't recognize, but his story, you might, because I wrote about his part time avocation in one of my earliest posts here, not quite four years ago.

Chmiel owned the radio station at 107.7 FM now known and loved by many here as The Lake, but in its earlier days it was a freeform alt-rock station known as WUWU. The airstaff referred to him as "Dr. Teeth" and generally stayed out of his way, but when he tried to implement a format change sometime in the late 80s, the jocks revolted, drove 70 miles out to the transmitter in East Buttfuck Wethersfield, and started a pirate broadcast until the cops showed up to shoo them away.  Some of those radio personalities now work for the local NPR affiliate, which shows how radicalism can help as well as hurt you.

Rest in peace, Dr. Teeth. At 107.7 Wethersfield-Heaven.

Vocabulary word of the day:

Since Google was good enough to awaken me with this....



in celebration of the 125th anniversary of the birth of Walter Gropius, I figured the least I could do, still here in my mourning clothes, was pass along Tom Lehrer's tribute to the 1964 death of Walter's most famous lover.




Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read. It was that of a lady named Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, who had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe. And, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which is what made it so interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry: One of the leading composers of the day, Gustav Mahler, composer of Das Lied von der Erde and other light classics; one of the leading architects, Walter Gropius, of the Bauhaus school of design; and one of the leading writers, Franz Werfel, author of the Song of Bernadette and other masterpieces.

It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years!

It seemed to me, on reading this obituary, that the story of Alma was the stuff of which ballads should be made, so here is one:

The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna,
You'd never be free of her spell.

Her lovers were many and varied
From the day she began her - beguine.
There were three famous ones whom she married,
And God knows how many between.

Alma, tell us,
All modern women are jealous,
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

The first one she married was Mahler,
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav,
And each time he saw her he'd holler,
"Ach, that is the Fräulein I must have!"

Their marriage, however, was murdah.
He'd scream to the heavens above,
"I'm writing Das Lied von der Erde
And she only wants to make love!"

Alma, tell us,
All modern women are jealous.
You should have a statue in bronze
For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz.

While married to Gus she met Gropius,
And soon she was swinging with Walter.
Gus died and her tear drops were copious,
She cried all the way to the altar.

But he would work late at the Bauhaus,
And only came home now and then.
She said, "What am I running, a chow house?
It's time to change partners again!"

Alma, tell us,
All modern women are jealous.
Though you didn't even use Ponds,
You got Gustav and Walter and Franz.

While married to Walt, she'd met Werfel,
And he, too, was caught in her net.
He married her but he was carefel,
'Cause Alma was no Bernadette.

And that is the story of Alma,
Who knew how to receive and to give.
The body that reached her embalma
Was one that had known how to live.

Alma, tell us,
How can they help being jealous?
Ducks always envy the swans
Who get Gustav and Walter,
You never did falter
With Gustav and Walter and Franz!

Our friend Kathy died last night.

She leaves a home filled with those who loved and will always love her, and friends and family who already miss her more than these words can express.

When I turned in last night, the moon was not quite full, but angled in the sky so that it practically shot a beam onto my pillow.

Not all of you believe this- I'm not sure even she did- but my only tear-filled thought at that moment was, "Welcome to your new home. Keep watching over us."

Current Mood: sad

Tonight, I got as far as the front vestibule of the Regal- to swipe my card for the kid's Fandango.dot.commed tickets and kiss her goodnight. I then headed off to the gym for some put-off cardio, and there, on the Faux News crawl, was this fair and balanced headline du jour:

Housing posts surprising rebound in April

What the headline didn't mention was that the construction surge was from a big jump in housing starts for apartments.

You know, where people go when they get foreclosed out of their houses.

Not to mention that, even in better times, it's hard in places like this to build any kind of new housing in, oh, February.

Up next: O'Reilly cusses out a teleprompter.

----

The most shocking thing about the similar meltdown by local New York news anchor Sue Simmons the other night?

Is that she and Chuck Scarborough are still the nighttime anchors on Channel 4. Hell, she started Live at Five, and Chuck had just transferred to NBC from the 1974 Robert Redford lookalike contest, when I still lived down there. As in, before about three-quarters of the current Flist was even born.

----

I shouldn't laugh, much less mention something called the Darwin Award, but.

It qualifies:

Lackawanna man examining lottery ticket hit by train, killed.

Hurley's right, man. Those numbers are bad luck.

----

Finally, on the subject of Lost:

Never was a show so aptly named, at least relative to my own comprehension of it.

Earlier today, a Friend here bemoaned the demands that the beauty industry puts on people of her sex and/or gender. She ended it with the following reading from the Book of Threats:

If I ever meet the person who wrote 'I Enjoy Being a Girl,' I swear I will beat him to death with a purse. Filled with change.

Boy can my wife relate.

Shortly after leaving for work today, she finished putting on makeup. In the process, a mascara brush slipped and wound up going right into her eye.

Haven't seen the damage yet, but on the phone she sounds like one sore, unhappy camper.

Needless to say, this crimps into our plans for Narnia-going tonight, unless Regal's got some kind of Helen Keller discount plan.

----

My computer's been all wonky most of the day, as recent additions of mp3s and podcasts and such are pressing the hard drive close to its limit, especially anytime I do any heavy-duty data transfer from, hypothetically, one DVD disk to another.  So much so that I once again turned to Nero, this time to backup all those space-hoggers before deleting them.

A process that began ::checks:: 05:25:18 ago. For each backup DVD of data, it compresses (an hour, easy), verifies the compressed data (45 minutes), burns it (a veritable speedfest at 20 minutes or so) and then verifies the burned data (another half hour). Times two, going on three and probably there's gonna be one 20K file I'll need to cram onto a fourth.

Worst of all? Probably six months from now it'll be all full up with all NEW shizzle.

----

Know how much I bitched earlier in the week about Neil Gaiman (as it turned out) wrecking my friendspage? Well, there's an even bigger idiot doing it today:

Me.

Tech note of the week: When transcribing someone's voice post, do not try embedding an HREF code. The link won't show up, but it will span the entire width of your computer screen if it's something typically CNN-hideous with 18,000 trailing characters in the URL. And it also turns out that you can't edit your own transcription of a VP.

Sorry, Jenn'n'friends. I had to do it, though, because "being picked up by the Cubs" is a far different allegation than the "being picked up by the cops" heard by the original transcriber. Worse, in most cases;)

On the same day that the largest state in our nation came to its senses as to matters of monogamy?

Came word, which I'd long anticipated, that the anti-choice fundies were finally going public with their opposition to any form of birth control, as they slid down the slippery slope of Roe v. Wade to get to the broader precedent of Griswold v. Connecticut as its Constitutional basis. Their ultimate objective is banning anything beyond Vatican Roulette as a means of preventing pregnancy.

Yet my politics as to such matters pale in comparison to my happiness about the lineup set for this summer's THURSDAY AT THE SQUARE:

GREAT BIG SEA ON 8/15!

Arright, that particular show will be at Erie Canal Harbor rather than the Square, and will cost ten whole bucks for a tickee, but still. Alan, man!

The free show lineup:

May 29: Galactic (with the New Deal)

June 5: The Disco Biscuits

June 12: Yonder Mountain String Band

June 19: The David Sanborn Group

June 26: Martin Sexton (with the Mike Doughty Duo)

July 3: Jakob Dylan and the Gold Mountain Rebels

July 10: Jimmie Vaughan (with JJ Grey and Mofro)

July 17: Mickey Hart Band featuring Steve Kimock and George Porter Jr. (with Tea Leaf Green)

July 24: Gin Blossoms

July 31: Spirit of the West

Aug. 7: Zappa Plays Zappa (with the Whigs)

Aug. 14: Mike Gordon (with Samantha Stollenwerck)

Aug. 21: Saliva

Aug. 28: Candlebox

Sept. 4: Big Head Todd and the Monsters (with Indigenous)

I likes me my Sanborn, the occasional Zappa and a bit of Big Todd, and on the right day I might show up for pseudo Wallflowers or posthumous Dead, but dude! GBS for a tenner!

Since I've been real bad about keeping up with birthday wishes this year, and since apparently the entire middle-aged adult population of America was having sex every night of each August from 1981 to 1985 (except me), I'm gonna try catching up with the backlog, in interactive form.

( Happy birthday to you. Yes, YOU. Or her, as the case may be.... )

Long day. Began with a variety of sleep deprivation, continued with an extended effort to reconcile a client's two-year-old account with somebody, and ended, I thought, with me leaving here around 1:30 today to take some other clients to a fairly copacetic downtown meeting.

I returned home to the sight of dead lumber on the nearest corner. The Town finally came and cut down two once majestic street trees, damaged in the '06 storm, that were on our side of our next door neighbor's front lawn. One of them had looked stumpy and sickly, but the other one seemed to be in full bloom and, considering how it was continuing to rip up the sidewalk in the path of its roots, also seemed to be a pretty hardy bugger.

Now it's firewood. 

Much of this has to do with municipal fear of liability lawsuits and eligibility for FEMA reimbursement rather than, say, how the tree actually is.  Once again, the lawyers shout down the arborists, and once again, I feel like I'm on the wrong side of the divide.

----

I knew none of this two days ago when I reported that my impending root canal was, at worst, only the third worst news I'd had that day.

Number two concerned the accounting problem that still persists.

Number one, by far, was and is the news from further round the corner.  A dear friend of ours, and mother to one of Emily's BFFs, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor in 2007. Late last year, she made the decision to stop fighting it, since the fight was taking what little life was still in her life.  She has defied all prognoses to date, but late Monday, I wound up detouring past her house and saw Rural Metro outside- unusual, since another ambulance company ::waves at Rachel:: gets our town's 911 business.

Not, apparently, its Hospice business. That's where Kathy was headed, where she remains, and where she is not expected to last the weekend.

Steve, Kaitlin and Shane need your prayers. So do Ray, Eleanor and Emily, only not nearly as many.

::hugsalltight::

Since Faux News can't spend all its time trying to drag out the Democratic primary fight, you occasionally see some other filler on their screen. (This is at the gym, where you have no choice but to watch it on the big screens.)

Communities Seek Bans On Sex Offenders Operating Ice Cream Trucks

That's harsh. Who'd be left in this world who'd want to drive one?

Besides, there's already a more effective treatment plan in place: subjecting the pervs to aversion electroshock therapy which prevents them from getting aroused. Why do you think they call them Mister Softee trucks?

...or, in this case, the bright side of having nasty dental work sheduled:

in the five minutes or so before my reggular dentist got me in? I picked up a very outdated Entertainment Weekly.

... which happened to report that the first season (at least) of Lou Grant was now available on Hulu.

I aDORED Lou Grant.  All through college and the beginning of law school, even as my own career choices took me away from the former and into the latter.

It was well-written and well-performed and I've missed it all these years, and I'm now watching an S1 episode Monday night at 10, which is as it should be.

And this particular episode doesn't even have much of a contribution from Animal, who I perhaps loved the most.

Okay, everyone, repeat after me: Ohhhh, Mister Grantttttt....

Got an emergency appointment this afternoon to deal with the continuing storrrreeeee of the crown that's gone to the dogs.

More pokes and prods. Blowup x-ray of the contenda. Continuing uncertainty.

Finally, a referral to the endodontist downstairs (the first floor, no, NOT the "root cellar").

One look at the picture and, yep. It's a goner. Or rather, a week from tomorrow, it will be.

Knowing what (and ::gulp:: how much) has already made it feel a little better.

And this news? No higher than third on the list of Bad Things Wot I Learned today.

I'm off to work out and get drunk. Yes, ossifer, in that order.

Okay. The Orphanage (or, more precisely, El Orfanato) is a damn good thriller. Not a lot of blood, gore and guts, but plenty of suspense, character development and, in my case at least, confusion over WTF I Just Saw.

Much of the plot involves people seeing, hearing, sensing things that, in an objective universe, really aren't there. The otherworld is playing a childhood game with their heads.

Which, therefore, adds quite another layer to this film's arrival via Netflix.

I must have requested it, but for the life of me I can't remember why. Did I read a good review? Did one of you speak highly of it? Did the wife or kid hear about it and promptly disavow any knowledge of their action?

Or do Los Muertos Want. To. Play. A. Game?

Any feedback will be welcome. Especially seeing how I'm stuck in this office, since the doorknob is missing;)

As the price of a gallon of gas continues its ionospheric climb, in complete spite of all ordinary laws of supply (which is fine) and demand (which is down), I've just come across the best explanation I've ever read about why. It's still a little on the dense side, but I commend it to anyone with even a basic understanding of economics and politics. Making it even more timely is that, in the days since its publication last week, news is out that Congress is finally investigating this obscene manipulation of commodity pricing, only to face opposition from the very barons who are profiting beyond all measure from it.

Follow these excerpts from the article (italicized portions are from the Asia Times article, unitalicized are mine):

First, the role of the international oil exchanges in London and New York is crucial to the game. Nymex in New York and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Futures in London today control global benchmark oil prices which in turn set most of the freely traded oil cargo. They do so via oil futures contracts on two grades of crude oil - West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent.

There's a third, newer, exchange in Dubai, but it's largely controlled by the Nymex one. More important is this: until the recent run-up, these two exchanges tended to work on their own product, Nymex trading on the West Texas standard and London's ICE setting the market on Brent.  The domestic market was regulated by the most important agency in the government you've never heard of: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which

had been mandated by Congress to ensure that prices on the futures market reflect the laws of supply and demand rather than manipulative practices or excessive speculation. The US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) states:

Excessive speculation in any commodity under contracts of sale of such commodity for future delivery ... causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the price of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.

Further, the CEA directs the CFTC to establish such trading limits "as the commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden."

So why hasn't the CFTC stepped in to exercise these powers over unwarranted speculation? Because at the end of 2000, the American people got laid. Kenny Boy Lay, to be precise:

Until recently, US energy futures were traded exclusively on regulated exchanges within the United States, like the NYMEX, which are subject to extensive oversight by the CFTC, including ongoing monitoring to detect and prevent price manipulation or fraud. In recent years, however, there has been a tremendous growth in the trading of contracts that look and are structured just like futures contracts, but which are traded on unregulated OTC [over the counter] electronic markets. Because of their similarity to futures contracts they are often called "futures look-alikes".

The only practical difference between futures look-alike contracts and futures contracts is that the look-alikes are traded in unregulated markets whereas futures are traded on regulated exchanges. The trading of energy commodities by large firms on OTC electronic exchanges was exempted from CFTC oversight by a provision inserted at the behest of Enron and other large energy traders into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 in the waning hours of the 106th Congress.

As a result of creating financial products that worked like futures but strictly weren't, Enron and its ilk were able to avoid regulation within the U.S. trading market which may have forestalled the increased rush of speculative money into oil once real estate and the dollar started to tank. That got us from $1.50 gas to $2.50 gas during Dubya's first four years. But in 2006, it got worse, and, sure enough, so did the price:

Then, apparently to make sure the way was opened really wide to potential market oil price manipulation, in January 2006, the George W Bush administration's CFTC permitted the ICE, the leading operator of electronic energy exchanges, to use its trading terminals in the United States for the trading of US crude oil futures on the ICE futures exchange in London - called "ICE Futures".

Previously, the ICE Futures exchange in London had traded only in European energy commodities - Brent crude oil and United Kingdom natural gas. As a United Kingdom futures market, the ICE Futures exchange is regulated solely by the UK Financial Services Authority. In 1999, the London exchange obtained the CFTC's permission to install computer terminals in the United States to permit traders in New York and other US cities to trade European energy commodities through the ICE exchange.

The result? Whereas the two exchanges had previously operated with their own pools of capital and risk, and to some extent kept run-ups on one from instant impact on the other, now both exchanges moved subject to the same pressures, and free of government regulation in the U.S. The modern-day Kenny Boys are laughing all the way to the bank as the ceiling keeps going higher and higher for no explicable reason within the ordinary laws of economics.

So finally, FINALLY!, someone in Congress decided to look at something other than their own re-election or some bullshit suspension of gas tax.  Buried deep among tons of pork in the farm bill is a significant restructuring of the regulatory powers of the CFTC.  Needless to say, one of the biggest benefactors from the Enron loophole- the barely-regulated London exchange- is shitting a brick over this development and has put out the usual "let the market do its job" position statement.

Yeah, guys. Doing its job for WHO?  I find it interesting that one of the major players in this whole game, cited in the Asia Times piece as one of the few with any understanding of what's really going on, is JPMorgan Chase Bank. You know, as in J. Pierpont Morgan, one of the robber barons from a century ago who got his nuts trusts busted by Teddy Roosevelt when they got just a smidge too greedy.

Removing the Enron loophole is a good start, but I still think it's time to revisit my own modest proposal from two years ago about banning tradeable futures contracts altogether. Because if the futures market got limited to those players who have a direct stake in locking in a contract price, and kept out those who were just looking to make a quick buck, I bet we'd be back to $50 a barrel gas faster than you can sing the Texaco Star Theater theme song.

I was once the second most powerful person in my country. So naturally when it came time for me to apply for the top job, I took it as my destiny. I needed some experience, so I moved to a highly visible position where I put in almost eight years on the job, expecting all the time that I'd be promoted as soon as the time came.

Next thing I knew, though, some other guy was stealing the spotlight, taking what was rightfully mine, and now he's running victory laps around the floor of the United States Congress and beginning his general election campaign. People are booing me at my own campaign events, and I just sank another 5 million into what little chance is left of my promised promotion.

That's why I carry the American Express card, because I know that no matter how bad things get, I can still shop, eat and stay at millions of fine establishments in this great country.

( Read more )















The American Express Card™. Don't leave the race without it.

(You can never go wrong starting a post with The Clash. I'm just sayin'.)

The following is modified slightly from my original version of it on a comment elsewhere on LJ, in response to the question, "what IS the address to get a free credit report, I know it's not that f-r-e-e-creditreport thing and besides I HATE that commercial."

You and me both:

♫That commercial's stuck in my goddam head
I hope he rolls his subcompact and he winds up dead
Cause he gives out the name of a misleading site
That tries to charge you once you sign up and that just ain't right
F-R-E-E isn't free
Go to ANNUAL credit report, baybee

You can do one now, or two or all three
But they'll all give you most of the information you need.

The truly free site doesn't give you your score
But there are places you can buy that which'll never be more
Than the fifteen A MONTH that these assholes will billya
It's a scam you don't need when your debt's already killin' ya.

F-R-E-E- isn't free
It's ANNUAL credit report, baybee♫

The timing on this was just too delicious. This morning's NPR Weekend Edition did a piece on Simone De Beauvoir, her ties to existentialism and, particularly, her relationship with its famed co-founder Jean-Paul Sartre. Coming just a few weeks before the premiere of the most awaited (with great disappointment) remake of the current film season, it seemed the perfect time for a remake of my own.

We'd toyed with a graphic-novel version of this concept when I was in high school, but since as you'll see I can't even photoshop for shit much less draw, I present, in script form, the anti-blockbuster of the summer season:




STARRING

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

as "Agent 86"

And

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

as "#99"

ALBERT CAMUS

as "Chief"

----

OPEN ON Chief's Office in CONTROL HEADQUARTERS

CHIEF
The President says we are performing unacceptably. Forty years of fighting, and KAOS continues to exist.

JEAN-PAUL
Of course it continues to exist. Existence is the only thing that does exist.

99
(rushing hurriedly onto the set)

Chief! Jean-Paul! We just received an urgent communique from Agent 13.

CHIEF
Where's he hiding himself this week?

JEAN-PAUL
What difference does it make? He could be anywhere. He could be nowhere. Only through embracing his nothingness can he achieve....

99
Oh, Jean-Paul! We'll argue about that later. Right now, though, it's KAOS!

JEAN-PAUL
Exactly my point.

CHIEF, 99
(unison)
Shut up, Jean-Paul.

CHIEF
What is KAOS up to?

99
They're planning a massive attack on our public health system, depositing rats all through our sewers and water pipes to spread the biggest case of bubonic plague in more than a century!

CHIEF
What an evil idea.
(beat)
Wish I'd thought of it.

99
The only way to stop them is to buy a plague antidote from KAOS for one trillion dollars.

CHIEF
We don't have that kind of money!

JEAN-PAUL
We didn't choose the amount.  We didn't choose anything. We were thrown into this existence without even a good script. We had nothing then. We may as well wish we had a trillion dollars now.

99
I accept that existence precedes essence, but only the Otherness of my gender's social construct can get us out of this dilemma.

CHIEF
You mean you'd be willing to...

99
Seduce Siegfried? Why not? I've been banging this idiot since the 1940s.

JEAN-PAUL
It'll never work!

99
::bares her breasts::

JEAN-PAUL
But it's certainly worth a try.

FADE TO NOTHINGNESS

The six missing from that equation are the "four on the floor" from my 70s orthodontia and the two pearls pulls of wisdom I've had done in the past few years.

No matter. One tooth alone has an insurmountable lead right now. Only trouble is, we're still not sure which one it is:P

I went in at 8:30 this morning. He poked, prodded and ultimately pictured me, deciding his best guess was a cavity in the wisdom tooth right below where I've been feeling all this pain. It can radiate, he said.

He filled it. Something's still radiating, dammit.

He said give it a few days. Could be bite-related or who-knows-what related. Otherwise, we're looking at a black spot on the pictures that is likely gonna be one peck of trouble to fix.

Then there's the stuff from a few weeks back which seemed nasty at the time but isn't giving me trouble at all. He smoothed that off a bit, but we're looking at a crowning next month before THAT goes to the proverbial dogs.

Somehow this seems an appropriate use of my stimulus payment, non?