Teeth and Gravity

Posted on Tuesday, May 29, 2012, under , ,

Today K. and I come to a conclusion that dental floss is an amazing invention. She made this excellent Chinese soup with veggies and scallop, the latter of which has shredded itself during the cooking process, and many of the said shreds eventually found new home between my teeth. K. asks who invented dental floss. How the heck should I know? So I google it of course.

Did you know that first dental floss goes as far back as early 19th century? In 1815 a dentist from New Orleans recommended his patients should clean teeth with silk floss. It took some 60 years for it to be patented. We’ve come a long way from silk floss, haven’t we.

Q: Which character in Ulysses used the dental floss?
A: Not clear. It’s a toss between the editor and Myles Crawford.

“He took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant unwashed teeth.” (p. 107)

Must stop singing arias in the loo while brushing teeth. This evening my bass shook up the windows upstairs, apparently ('His voice is so deep it provided the lining for his shoes' - Matthew Caley) . Upstairs, K. couldn’t hear the TV. No big deal, with the Sex & the City banalities on. She could have sex in this city instead I told her. If only she wanted to.


Nighty-night all… and don’t forget to floss!

A wee bedtime poem for your healthy teeth.

Zero Gravity

Zero gravity. Rice floats on the way in
to a cavity. Floss won’t do. Still, a safe touchdown
with twenty seconds of fuel to spare. Armstrong
does the right thing by doing the wrong thing,
picks up a few odd rocks, off-camera.

Decades later some long-sufferer
puts two and two stones together.
The world finally gets it, for what it’s worth:
the less lucky Moon had once been Earth. 




















A view of Earth from the Lunar Orbiter, 1966

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1 Reply to "Teeth and Gravity"

  • i-pod keroro on 3 June 2012 at 07:40

    Hi Branko. Come va? In english wikipedia I have seen a strange thing... the Socialdemocratic party in coalition with the LDP in 1996. Eppure in the page of the Socialdemocratic party there are written "The party was founded in 1996 by the leftist legislators of the defunct Japan Socialist Party (JSP), which was Japan's largest opposition party in the 1955 system."... Do you know the answer?