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
