Gold Tooth Display

Went to the dentist the other day to get the permanent crown installed. Flashy, eh? Took a bunch of fiddling to get it to fit right. It fit on the tooth okay, it just took a bit of grinding on the biting surfaces to get to where it didn't feel like there was high point hitting the opposite teeth. Dr. Parent would put the tooth in, I would bite down on some kind of marking film, she'd take it out and grind on it a bit, and then we'd try it again.

I asked her how much material she had ground off during all this and she tells me "microns". A micro is one millionth of a meter. When I worked as a machinist, measuring to the nearest thousandth of an inch was pretty standard. A sheet of copy paper is a couple of thousandths of an inch thick.

Sometimes, if we were dealing with something really persnickety we would go down to the nearest ten-thousandth of an inch, but we were straining our fingers and eyeballs to detect a ten-thousandth of inch difference. A micron is less than one-half of one-ten-thousandth of an inch. Not very stinking much.

So she puts the tooth in and I bite down and it's blatantly obvious that the tooth is not meshing right with the opposite teeth. And it's just microns of material that are causing that? You would think that teeth would have a little more give in them, I mean they aren't mounted solidly to the bone. But I guess not. Of course, if you want to be able to cut something (like meat), you can't leave any space between the two cutting surfaces, i.e. your opposing teeth. Interesting.

But all this is just so I have an excuse to post this:


ZZ Top I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide
I used to really like ZZ Top. I don't listen to them much anymore. I've got all their tunes engraved in my brain. Maybe that's what's wrong with me.

Update January 2017 replaced missing pictures and video, though the video isn't the one I remember. Then again, maybe it's not the video I am remembering, but the image this song paints in my mind.