The Pork Tooth

I have a tooth on the right side of my mouth that acts like no other.  When I eat pork, remnants get stuck around that tooth.  No other kind of meat gets stuck there.  If I am eating chicken, say wings, meat gets in there but it comes out with a flick of the tongue.  Not pork, its molecular size seems to be perfect for the gap between the teeth.  I can flick and suck all day long and that pork is staying where it seems most happy.  It does not matter if it is chops, tenderloin, good ham, cheap ham or even the fused ham which I thought was masticated beyond recognition, some bit of that oinker gets down in that crevasse and will not easily come out. 

My teeth have moved over the last few years which is disheartening anyway.  I also have a tooth that turned sideways.  About five years ago, I hit myself in the mouth with a crowbar.  No, it was not an accident.  The blow hit right on that tooth.  It was fairly straight when I hit it.  During that time period, I was also wearing a CPAP unit while I slept (continuous positive airway pressure) which is a combination of a Darth Vader mask and a NAZI jaw removal tool.  This mouthpiece with an attitude caused my teeth to start moving is many directions.  This is when the tooth started turning.  My hitting it with a crowbar simple cut a hole in my lip and made the tooth loose.  The continental drift was on and even though I stopped using the CPAP deal, the teeth kept moving.  If the gap gets much bigger, the famed pork tooth will be no more.  Broccoli, hamburger or even caraway seeds will get in between those teeth.  What claim to fame is that?

Extracting the meat from that tooth can be a chore in itself.  I will wear my tongue bloody and still not get at it.  It requires a toothpick or a piece of floss.  It is way in the back of my mouth and sometimes I just cannot get at it.  I poke at it with a sharp object, I try the corner of a piece of paper and all I do is bleed.  The fragment feels like the Loch Ness monster is stuck in there.  The pressure on the neighboring teeth starts to build and with the sore tongue and the blood, well, I must get this thing out of my mouth. Once, I thought I got my hand stuck in my mouth while getting at the porcine morsel.  Finally, during a meeting at work, the piece just came out with the nudge of my tongue.  I yelled, "Yes" and everyone looked at me.  I did not care.  My teeth were free to float around and I was finally done with lunch.  I retrieved the fiber that was stuck in my teeth.  It was so small I could barely see it.  It was insignificant.  Damn you pork tooth.

The Constitution: Twentieth Amendment

Section 1. The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.
Section 2. The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.
Section 3. If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.
Section 4. The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.
Section 5. Sections 1 and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification of this article.
Section 6. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission.

This amendment shortens the time for the lame duck stuff.  It tells congress they have to meet in January and simply cleans up some loose ends in the election process.  It is mostly a housekeeping amendment.  All the States ratified it quickly and complaints were few if any.  I have nothing to say about it.  It is not funny in any way nor can any political machine twist the intent of the amendment.  Also, it is long enough to keep avid readers happy.  I am glad the amendment told Congress when to meet, and what time!   Now, more than ever, those children need guidance and a firm schedule.

Drinking Water

Remember when we drank water out of a hose at the neighbor's yard.   Did you ever notice the bottled water unit outside the box store is hooked up to the same faucet that the lawn guys water the planters with.  They have a PVC "T" on it.  For fifty cents a gallon I doubt if they have much more than a string filter on that puppy.  I was at a "Spring Water" factory doing a cleaning service and they had this big pipe coming out the ground and automatically filling five gallon bottles, sealing them and instantly routed them to a truck for delivery to your office.  The United States has the highest water quality standards in the world.  Water quality creates a healthy society enabling great possibilities.  The stuff coming out of the city utility is cleaner and safer that even most bottled water.

Water is the most important resource on the planet.  It is also the best tasting.  If you ever hike in the mountains and get thirsty, water from a quiet but babbling brook cannot be improved on by a shoe company or a research team from Gator country.  Water quenches.  Animals can smell water from miles away.  With the exception of the crocodile, fascinatingly most animals get along at the water hole.  The lion may not stand guard while the antelope drinks, but he will make sure he is not thirsty before a hunt.  

Drinking water is boring. I know, I am trying to write about it.  I am also a biologist and know all the stuff that is in it.  There is almost no bacteria in stream water or city utility water.  The cities add chlorine to keep the bacteria that is in the water and in the pipes from multiplying.  They also add scalers, descalers, fluoride treatment and other tracers for various purposes.  If you are at the end of the distribution line your water will be quite different from the person at the front end of the line.  Regardless, your water will be safer and healthier than most bottle waters and 97% of the water used for drinking around the world.    

Friday Science: Mosquitoes

Last night, the family was attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes.  I initially wrote "the family was attached...... which is actually the same word I think.  The dogs could not stop moving long enough to pee or quite literally speaking, hundreds of mosquitoes landed on them.  The human victims were not spared either.  I have rarely seen such a plague of insects.  I was in Kansas and viewed grasshoppers at a density of about twenty per square meter.  They tell me that during a real problem year there are over a hundred per square meter.  That is on the ground, not in the air.  Every step would send multitudes of three inch hoppers in a scurry and in your face and hair.  Pandemonium would break loose and as I ran maddeningly through the field, thousands and thousands of grasshoppers would take flight.  It was my first understanding of the cascade effect.  Within ten steps I could stir up ten thousand locusts.  There were no sea gulls in sight.

The mosquito population around our lake has been quite low for a long time.  A two year drought-like environment had reduced non-predator water to Nil.  A mosquito larvae had to survive in a very hungry and shrinking lake.  Now, with regular rains, puddles of water all over the place, and lots of long grass to hide from dragonflies, mosquito populations have exploded to billions of mosquitoes.  I estimated that if I stood still, five hundred mosquitoes would land on me and the same was happening to every mammal in the place.  I also have Australian Pine trees on my property.  I am not sure that is the real name but that is what we call them.  They are mosquito magnets and know for being so.  I do not have non-predator standing water, just a few small ponds. A drop of dew on the leaves of grass can be home to a few larvae with no predatory enemy. Dry is the enemy of the mosquito.  Fifteen acres of grass filled mosquitoes is as the Xerxes army was to the 300 Spartans. 

Tomorrow we will mow down the grass around the house, spray malathion in the barn and hopefully complain a little less.  The dragon flies will enjoy a bounty, the martins will rule the skies and the anopheles with its Plasmodium falciparum symbiote will wait for another day.

Erasers

What the hell is that" I yelled.  My son was trying to remove some writing from a paper but it looked like a big black grease mark.  I dove at him before he tore the paper.  His eraser looked new but must have been made of waxed paper. That reminds me, I used to take Bobby's pencils and stick the eraser in my ear and get ear wax all over it.  I would wipe it off and when Bobby tried to erase something, the wax would smear the paper.  This was almost the same thing.  My son's eraser was a piece of junk.  It even crumbled when I tried to clean it.  I then tried the old bite the brass thing holding the eraser to the pencil and bulge out a bit of stuff so it could erase.  Nope!, the pencil was not having any of it.  I ended up tearing the paper and hurting my teeth.

I know there are good erasers out there.  Only on the cheap (I assume imported) pencils are the squibs inferior.  Erasers have a simple and finite job, remove a carbon based dust from paper without tearing the sheet.  Sounds simple.   I think tearing the paper is worse than not erasing completely.  My daughter was an erasing maniac.  Her letters and lines had to be perfect.  With her antics, a  pencil eraser lasted two days at the most.  I bought one of those giant rubber ones that can actually clean dishes and look exactly like a bar of soap.  They never wear out and they must taste good because I think the dog ate.  It could erase even the craziest chicken scratch. 

I hope with the decline of writing in the modern world that erasers do not disappear.  The bite marks on the brass ring was a proud moment in every child's day when that little bit of eraser bulged out.   He extended the life of a pencil eraser and finish his math test without worry of losing points for being messy.  You had to do it without getting any spit on the eraser or it would not scrub well.  Here is an invention.  An eraser for the television, if something is not proper, erase it.  I think Congress needs an eraser the size of the Washington Monument.  It even looks like a giant eraser.  The erasers on pens were longer lasting material.  It would erase pencil as well.  There have been some cool developments for erasers.  The ones that looked like Gumby are cool.  There are drafting erasers (talk about a lost art) that crumble easily but remove the marks from velum astonishingly well.  Those kinds sometime come with a brush attached so you do not blow spit all over the paper. 

This article is about writing erasers, not chalk board erasers.  Huck Shirley, my high school English teacher used to throw the chalk erasers at the non-conforming students.  He never hit me, I was too quick.  He missed four times.   The last attempt, he tried to get me about a week before school was out (I was a senior) and he had me dead.  I saw it coming out of the corner of my eye.  I only had time to cringe in anticipation.  One of the cute Torgenson girls in the seat in front of me lifted her head up off the desk just as the eraser neared and it smacked her in the face.  I was safe, the teacher was embarrassed mostly because he "never" hit an unintended victim but also because Diane was crying.  She was oh so cute.  I never even talked to her, the eraser thing was a perfect ice breaker.