Crenellated Flotsam

I have a hunch just about everyone gets the whole using dental records for identification cliché wrong.

I could be wrong about its use and the facts surrounding it, but since I wince whenever I hear some character mention using dental records to identify the victim of some disfiguring murder, I think I’m right.

I don’t think they work that way.

In a lot of stories, from crime novels through TV shows to movies, some John Doe is always washing up on the beach or discovered by the side of the road or in the wreckage of a car or building and for some reason, whoever wrote the damn thing feels compelled to bring up searching through dental records to identify the body. It doesn’t matter if they were burned or chewed up by an animal, if there isn’t a wallet on the body, there’s always a nod to checking dental records.

Why this activity, which is never successful, needs to be mentioned in the story is a mystery to me. It’s become a cliché, as if some attentive viewer would object if the procedure was neglected and old find his or her enjoyment of the work obliterated.

The thing is, though, that dental records are only useful for answering the question “Is this John Smith?” and is totally useless for answering “Who is this?”

If you have a body that you think may be some particular person, but aren’t sure, I think it’s reasonable (and maybe even necessary) to have them identify the body. If they can’t because it’s too disfigured, you can find out who the dentist was and then he or she can use dental records to determine if the body is who you think it might be.

What you cannot do is identify some totally unknown person by dental records. You need to have a possibility in mind and then question the dentist.

An attempt to identify some complete stranger through dental records could only be done if there was some nationwide (or greater) storehouse of everyone’s dental records, which is preposterous if not silly and that was updated constantly by every dentist on the planet after every change to their patient’s teeth.

The dental records I’ve seen use templates showing 32 healthy teeth and the dentist draws on them to indicate fillings, missing teeth, and stuff like that. Although it would take an army of clerks to keep updating the files, it would take two or three more armies to somehow classify all these pictures so that all those with fillings in teeth 17, 22, and 6 could be quickly located. And yet, this is what writers expect us to believe is what happens when dental records are used for identification.

I have no idea when the practice started, probably during a war, but it makes sense to check the body’s teeth against a dental record to determine their identity. It makes sense, that is, if you’re trying to figure out if the body is some particular person who is known and whose dental records are handy.

If the writer isn’t assuming there’s some huge depository of dental records, are we supposed to believe a dental chart of the victim is made and sent to every dentist in the world to see if, possibly, it was one of their patients? Does this make any sense to anyone? Since the (invariably negative) results are known quickly, I can only imagine that in this world all the dentists drop whatever they’re up to whenever one of these “please identify” faxes shows up and responds within a matter of minutes.

Yeah, it’s just a writer’s trick and shouldn’t be closely examined, but why do so many writers bring it up at all? Since it fails to get results in every story I can think of, why is it even mentioned? Other than continuing the myth that dental records can be used in this way, just leave it out.

Or, only use it to determine if the body is that of a particular person, the way it’s used in the real world.

If you ask me, the word awesome has pretty much lost all of its oomph.

I guess I can see why it became so popular with the kids, who are almost always at the forefront of changes in lanuguage and usage, but that doesn’t help me feel better about losing another perfectly fine word.

Over my life, I’ve seen quite a few words come and go, change meaning, or take over slang and become popular. Some, like gay, have had their meaning restricted, with no new word popping up to take their old place and meaning, which reduces our language by exactly one word. Others, such as jungle, have become politically incorrect and necessarily replaced by cold, dry, descriptive phrases (tropical rainforest) that have absolutely no emotional response. Sure, I may picture the same thing as before, but tropical rainforest doesn’t bring up memories of drums or all those movies I saw as a kid.

After a few days of rain, we’ve had a couple of sunshine here in Los Angeles. It was bright and sunny earlier this morning, but now clouds have returned and I changed from shorts to long pants. When the sun pops out, I can turn my face toward it and feel its warmth, and trying to fathom the enormous power of something that far away being felt by me and making a noticeable difference astounds me.

The explosive power of the sun is awesome. It gives me pause, causes me to feel awe, in a way no slang use of the word even approaches. A new song or remarkable play in a sporting event doesn’t make me feel that way, but without thinking, that’s the word we use to describe them. Awesome has now become simply filler, much like uh or like, added to speech or writing but adding nothing to the idea being brought forth other than “I like this” or “I think this is good.”

I thought it was bad when incredible became cheapened by use and went from its original “impossible to believe or credit” to doubtful or, worse, unlikely. I hadn’t realized that language needed to change to eliminate the nuances our individual words were invented to convey, but I guess that’s the way it goes.

It’s not awesome, this evolution, it’s erosion.

There’s a lot of things that surprise me, but you shouldn’t take that to mean everything does.

The other day, after my car passed its smog test by the slimmest of margins, I was wondering what I could do to lower those pesky hydrocarbons to, say, a more tolerable level. Being all hip and with-it and all, I did a Google search and the results were different than I expected. That’s the definition of surprising I believe in.

Rather than offering up anything particularly mechanical, my query returned links to pages of people selling or touting additives. “Pour this stuff in your gas tank, drive it out, and pass the test” pretty much sums up the process.

These products, which may or may not work as described or help in the slightest, don’t seem to me to be a way to “fix” your engine. Few details are given, but it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite expressions, the one that comes from marketing: People don’t buy drill bits, they buy half-inch holes.

That is, the results, not the means to acquire them, are what’s important, and I really shouldn’t have been so surprised.

I wonder, though, how these Blue Sky type products work their magic. Do they take all the things that could be contributing to hydrocarbons, burn ‘em up, and shoot them out the tailpipe before you take the test. That doesn’t sound particularly beneficial, even though it may result in you passing the test. How long before they come back? The directions on the Internet say to burn up the tank with the additive, then fill the tank as normal and then take the test, so this strikes me as more of a band-aid than a fix, if you catch my drift.

Still, any problem in this capitalistic society will have solutions provided by people out to make a buck. If we didn’t need paper, a lot fewer people would be growing trees.

The other thing that struck me as obvious within a minute of hearing about it was this recent discovery of pharmaceuticals in the water supply. While I, myself, am healthy enough not to need medicine, I’ve taken enough vitamins over the years to be familiar with green, smelly pee. Extra vitamins, that I bought and paid for, I might add, literally going down the drain.

It makes perfect sense that heart medications, birth control, antibiotics of all types, anti-depressants, cholesterol drugs and all the rest would also have enough extra stuff in the pills that there would be some waste. When you buy from a printer I think you get plus or minus ten percent of the quantity, and every carpenter or painter knows to get about ten percent more than they need. Just to be on the safe side, you understand.

Now, no one knows what the long term effect of taking all this mystery, unwanted medicine will be, but I sleep easier knowing I won’t be having any babies. I don’t think I’m getting as many anti-depressants as I might want, but it’s comforting to know that I’m getting a few molecules of heart medicine with every bowl of soup.

The steroids don’t bother me at all. They’ll just pass through my system and into the next person’s. If our digestive system had any way of handling those things, Roger Clemens and bicycle riders wouldn’t have to get shots in their butts.

So things which might surprise me at first really shouldn’t. If they do, they don’t do so for long, but that’s because my mental faculties are getting all this free medication!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before this great thing I heard or read somewhere about memory and how someone said something about how some things are remembered because of utilitarian reasons, some for no reason at all, and others, maybe, because we make a conscious effort to remember them.

I’m not sure, exactly, because the quote and whoever said it must have fallen into the second of the three because I sure didn’t make any effort about remembering it for future citation. Still, it’s true, and things in the second class are the best, anyway.

I can’t help it. I’m intrigued by how inconsequential shit sticks in my mind for years and years.

I’m not sure if I remember it because I heard it so often growing up, or if it was just one of those things my mom said once, but quite often at three in the morning I remember my mom scolding me about “wishing my life away.” I don’t remember the exact wish of mine that incited that remark, but it may have been the typical “I wish I was grown up” thinking I believe lots of kids do. The only time I can honestly remember wishing time would pass quickly was once on July 4th when I was bored setting fire to snakes and staining the sidewalk and wanted to see some real fireworks.

I think of it often at three in the morning, though, when I wish it was five so I could get out of bed at a more reasonable time. Not that five is a such a good time to wake up, but it beats three, hands down. Three is just plain weird.

All of which has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the Fs referred to in the title. I was going to dazzle everyone with my knowledge of anatomy and talk about frenums (knowing full well that the plural of frenum is actually frena) and, then, show my insight by talking about how knowledge is frequently confused with simple memorization of terms.

I still think that, mostly because whenever any expert is consulted, they far often are only conversant with the specific and accurate names for things, which we all take for conclusive evidence of their wisdom. In fact, I think use of jargon or technical terms is pretentious, and mostly used to disguise or obscure insecurities, but I think that about lots of things.

In any case, the point is, using and insisting on technical terms, to me, is the exact opposite of knowledge. It’s an old saw, but it’s true, that being able to teach is the best indicator of knowledge. If you can’t make a lay person understand what you’re talking about, you don’t know it very well. Hammering people with technical terms only makes you look like an ass, and not a very knowledgeable one at that.

Then, California wildfire season sprung on us, and everyone in the LA area who watched TV was treated to newscasters rambling on and reminding us all of two things:

1. Most newscasters, when not given copy to read, are indistinguishable from any other great looking person
2. Extra points are given any newscaster who mentions Foscheck

It can’t be easy to fill several hours of broadcast time when there’s, honestly, very little to say. Many of these news anchors, and I suspect they do it just to piss me off, spend an inordinate amount of time treating the reporters in the field as if they were absolute idiots by warning them repeatedly to “stay safe” and checking that they’re wearing their goggles and masks.

Now I’ll grant you that the reporters in the field have no more to say about wildfires than they do hurricane winds and rain, but I guess it’s their lot in life to stand about outside when any sane person would be inside and offer inane comments about the most glaringly obvious of observations. Maybe they’re all hoping to get a job with Fox News, I dunno.

In any case, I got my two Fs in, and even talked a bit about memory.

It’s pretty simple, really. What I have against lawyers is that they don’t want me in their world.

Years ago I was watching the OJ Simpson trial and in the beginning, during the questioning of one of the police lab workers or something, a very innocuous question was asked by a member of the defense team. I don’t remember it exactly, but think I do, and it went something like this:

“Did you do your best possible job (when you handled the evidence)?”

That’s when I realized that, if they don’t want me dead, most people want me off their planet. It’s a very good question, and one I’d hate to answer under oath. I can’t recall ever, in doing anything, not doing the “best” possible. As far as I’m concerned, there’s always room for improvement.

Not one thing is ever done perfectly, not when I add in hindsight, so I’d have to honestly answer “no” to that and similar questions. And that answer, I’ve learned, implies that I’m a total slackard and ambivalent. Lawyers, and others, would eat it up.

Since I can always imagine doing things better, not one thing has been done to the best of my ability. Not one. Nada. Zilch. Zero. I can always a do a better job, from everything from tying my shoelaces to writing an entry for my blog. Not one has been done the “best,” which to me means perfectly.

Not everyone, of course, would say they want me dead since I can’t be perfect, but I think they’d all agree that I should change. I’m not sure what their answer would be if I told them I refuse to change, so that’s why I came up with that “get off my planet” thing.

In the end, it’s all the same. Every accident is preventable, at least in hindsight, so if I’m ever hauled into court for causing one, I’m dead meat. Lawyers must live in a perfect world, one I’m not qualified to join.

This weekend marks the unofficial beginning of Summer, 2007, which coincides with the end of Spring, 2007. Because of that, I’m going to pose my weather question.

I think I’ve already said that I have questions about the “inches of mercury” used to measure barometric pressure, ones that my personal assistant could answer for me if I’m ever lucky enough to have one. Another thing my assistant could figure out is why we measure rainfall in inches.

Not that we’ve had very much at all this year where I live. The word dry comes to mind, unless we’re talking about my yard, in which case the better word would be brown. Still, the little rain we’ve gotten, as well as the seasonal norm, is always given as a matter of inches.

It goes without saying that when we receive rain every container in the yard fills up with about three times the amount the officials say we got. I suppose I could get around that and get a result more in line with the proper number if I had a tube about a foot tall with a one inch opening, but I don’t. As it is, the buckets and coffee cans out there all give me a wildly inflated figure and get me excited about just how much rain we’ve gotten.

But that doesn’t have much to do, at all, with my question.

Water, and by extension, rain, is a liquid last time I looked. I guess counting up the inches that have fallen is a measure of volume, but doesn’t water already have a built-in measure of that? Don’t we, for every thing other than rain or snow, measure volume in cups or quarts or shots? If we want to be scientific or European, we could use liters or ccs, and I think any of them would be a better way to measure rainfall than the way we do now. Inches, to me, measure length.

Liters of rain per square meter, or cups per square yard, would be a sensible way to measure rainfall, and I guess that’s why we don’t do it. One of the first things my personal assistant would be charged with is starting the march to get everyone on board with adopting the Russell Standard for Precipitation Measurement.

Unless, of course, someone else has come up with this idea already.

No, I’m not talking about that. Besides, that’s for married people and I think the frequency’s weekly, though last week must have upped the ante, what with the holiday and all.

My sister tells me that dogs like routine, but if they do they’re not alone. People do, too. Here in America we’ve grown used to changing the battery in our fire alarms twice a year when Daylight Savings Time comes and goes, we bathe on Saturday night and have roast on Sunday, we change the filters in our heaters monthly and brush two times a day.

We have set routines for all these things and perform them without thinking, which may explain their popularity. Most everyone I know likes being mindless as often as possible, and having a structured routine lets us accomplish mundane tasks without giving them much thought.

It’s easy enough to launder my clothes when they get dirty, what with automatic washers and dryers and store-bought detergent, but I feel a little left out of the mainstream. The ads for soaps and things show kids playing, and I can’t remember the last time I got grass stains on my knees. They’ve gone the way of stubbed toes.

Nor do I work in an oil field. I can’t recall ever having iodine in the house, but that seems to be a pretty common stain from what I’ve seen, as is blood. The number of times I’ve had my clothing ruined by blood is precisely one, but it’s much more common than my personal experience would lead you to believe. I understand that.

At some point in my twenties or thirties I realized that I didn’t work up as much of a sweat sitting in my office as many people did at their jobs. Not only didn’t have stains to remove, I barely soiled my clothes at all. Still, after each day’s wear, I washed them so I could safely wear them again.

I still do, usually, but winter brings with it a number of problems. Unlike summer, I routinely change my clothes several times a day now. I wear clothes to bed and leave them on for the first hour or so of waking, coffee-drinking life. During the day I wear one set, and it’s sometimes shorts, depending on my activity, but once the sun goes down, I change again into heavier, warmer clothes.

I pull layers on, and remove them, and I’m never sure how much “wear” I’ve given a particular sweatshirt or pair of jeans. Have I crossed the threshold of acceptable use? It’s one thing to wear a pair of jeans all day, but when that’s broken up over a couple days for a couple hours each, can I keep wearing them?

I ask, mostly because I’m very much aware that not only do I have to remain on the right side of society, but I don’t want to wash my clothes too much. It only took me a few times cleaning out dryer lint before I put two and two together and realized that if I washed my clothes often enough, they’d completely disappear. If they were losing that much fabric each time I washed them, it was only a matter of time before they’d be laundered into non-existence.

Yesterday, in what may be a record for my neighborhood, some kids were out playing with water wearing bathing suits. Incredible. Tomorrow, rain is forecast, and yesterday was hot as a pistol. Some people may point to these changing weather conditions as reasons for illness, but I’m not convinced about that. What I can suggest is you only get to wear a bathing suit once before it needs laundering.

Think of it as underwear, but, sometimes, cuter.

Last night, in Madison Square Garden, Dr. Robert A. Indeglia picked James, an English Springer Spaniel, as “America’s Top Dog.”  The Westminster Kennel Club selects a new genetically modified dog each year for the title, and this year’s is pretty damn cute.

We Americans usually focus on celebrating genetic modification in the summer, what with all the dog and horse racing going on and the county fairs, so this award pretty much stands on its own. We hold it, too, in what’s as unnatural a setting as we can find, but I never hear of any protests by the hippies.

This year’s winner was one of my favorites, but that’s not hard when two of the competitors are poodles. Now, don’t get me wrong: I like poodles fine enough, just not when they’re shaped with clippers.

The dogs in the show are as unnatural as the setting. There isn’t much talk about genetic modification, but we all know it’s there. Nature never built any English Springer Spaniels, or Dachshunds, or even Dalmatians, we humans did that. We’re rather fond of pushing together different things together to see what we get, and it doesn’t much matter if it’s done in a breeding pen or a scientific lab.

For some reason, though, if some kindly old farm woman in a calico apron is grafting a branch of one plant onto another, or her husband chews on a weed while wearing overalls and watches his favorite rooster mount his fattest hen, we’re fine with that. In each case they’re trying to manipulate nature to produce a better result, but we get in a tizzy if a geneticist does the modifying directly inside the cells.

There’s a difference, sure, but not a difference in kind.

We humans can build mules out of an unholy alliance between horses and donkeys, and everyone’s cool with that. We’ve made so many hybrids, someone’s come up with a top ten list of them. When we’re not content with seeing what happens when we mix different species, we go up a level and see what we can come up with members of different genera. You can buy one of the results of this, triticale, at Whole Foods.

Humans just can’t leave well enough alone. Nor, should we. We have fancier tools now and better ways of using them, but once we stopped our nomadic ways we began genetically manipulating our environment. Doing it with a pipette is no different than doing it with branch and twine or a penis, only more efficient.

It may seem horrifying to move some DNA from a trout to a tomato, but they share over half the same genes, anyway. Every living thing on this planet does, which either argues for a common ancestor or a lazy god. Also, it makes discovering life on other planets even more interesting.

Someone, and I’m looking at you, Teresa Patton and Ruth Dehmel, did a great job constructing James. Congratulations!

I could be a damn fine philanthropist if I had the money to give away. Everyone, it seems, wants to make money off or from me.

I went to Home Depot, which this entry is marginally about, to pick up a bag to hold my gardening implements. There’s no sense in them being mixed up with my other bags, the ones for carpentry, wood working, automotive repair, or power tools, so I’m now the proud owner of a cheap bag that will hold whatever flavor of pruning shears I bought, my little hand hoe, and my weed eradicators. Also in there is a noxious mixture for use in removing stumps, but that’s another story.

What surprised me when I went to Home Depot wasn’t that I was immediately accosted by someone asking me what work I needed done: I’m used to that, but it’s not as flattering as when some damsel in distress seeks me out in the aisle to ask for advice. I guess I look the part of a knowledgeable handyman, which I assume comes from the work boots I often wear.

No, what surprised me at the market was the stalls set up in the parking lot. Much like the little suitcases full of Rolex replicas or DVDs, people were selling all kinds of things. Not tools, which I would expect, but belts, hats, and probably food dehydrators. They were all my friend as long as they felt I would give them money, and in that they’re just like everyone else on this planet.

When I was done filling my six bags of backyard growth I slumped in front of the TV and caught an ad for Home Depot. Kismet. They were enticing me to buy a new refrigerator, one that would save energy.

Now, I’m the first to admit that I used to be quite the little hippy, and even today I hold many of the same beliefs I did then. The thing is, this razzle-dazzle refrigerator was, I think, offering energy savings as a rationalization, as an excuse for consumption.

There’s some research to be done, and when I get all that money the funds I don’t give away will be used to hire a personal assistant. One of the things he or she will get to do is work with numbers and look stuff up for me. I have no idea how all this works, but to get this entry posted I’ll make some up so my entry makes sense.

If I can save a couple hundred bucks a year in energy costs, that’s a good thing. What I’m afraid of, though, is that replacing an existing refrigerator with one of these fancy ones is making things worse. I’m not doing the planet any good at all if I get a new refrigerator to save a barrel of oil a month in creating energy for it because I have a hunch that it will take more than a lifetime’s oil savings to manufacture the damn thing and ship it to me.

Sure, there are those who will say that “every little bit helps,” and they’re right as far as they go, but not in any big sense. A few years ago I went to that website and learned I was using something like four planet’s worth of resources. That sickened me, and I think I’ve managed to cut that way down and am now using a state or province less, and I’m talking a western state and not one of those piddly east coast ones. What disturbs me, though, is that we so easily look at immediate gratification and listen to sales people.

I have no idea how many barrels of oil it takes to dig up the raw materials and turn them into a refrigerator, but my personal assistant would find that out for me. I also have no idea how many barrels of oil I’d save in a year with a more energy-efficient one, but that would be good to know. I do think, however, that Home Depot will sell no few number of these new appliances, and the majority of those who buy them will smile, thinking they’re doing good things for the planet.

Saving a smidgen of energy with something while being responsible for using much more to make it is a fool’s argument. Yes, brushing your teeth during your Saturday night bath is better than never brushing at all, but saving a little bit of energy every day doesn’t make much sense if it takes more than you’ll ever save to make the damn thing in the first place.

I must be wrong about this, but I’ll be damned if I can see my logic error.

At my last job when I wasn’t busy grumbling about how we were counting kisses to measure love, a metaphor I was very proud of, I responded to a lot of suggestions by saying “Just because you can, doesn’t make it a good idea.”

I was thinking of that the other day when, for the first time in years, I was at a gas station filling up my car, which took 5.94 gallons. When I was first driving, not only did we have the old pumps with the analog display like the odometer, but the gallons advanced much quicker than the dollars did.

Those old pumps, which couldn’t display prices over one dollar a gallon, were accurate enough to have kept the American motorist on the road for the first fifty years of driving, I’m guessing, but when we advanced to the computer-controlled, digital pumps, we suddenly realized that we could needlessly measure the gasoline dispensed. As if that helps anyone.

I’ve long been a fan of slide rules, which got me through high school. I have no idea whatever happend to the large ones in my math classrooms that were nearly as long as the blackboard, but I’d like to think they ended up somewhere. As calculators and computers have replaced them, I can’t help thinking back to how much of the world was engineered and built to “slide rule accuracy,” a term whose loss I regret nearly as much as “jungle.”

Slide rule accuracy, as I understood it, meant three digits. That’s not very many, but somehow it worked and, just as importantly, was always a number I could understand. We can now easily calculate things out to ten or one hundred digits and, having that ability, do so. The thing is, I’m not convinced that it honestly adds anything of value.

Do I really need to know, to five digits, the percent of my expenditures that go to food? I have to admit that 27.847% gets rounded off by me to 25%, or one quarter of my expenses. That’s a figure I can understand, one that makes sense to me, and one that gives me a ballpark figure I can live with.

I noticed this obsession with needless accuracy when I got my first digital watch. Instead of telling me the time, I read 11:47, and then had to visualize that before I knew that it was quarter to twelve. Few things are more annoying than asking someone with a digital for the time: they’ll read off the digits instead of saying “it’s almost noon,” or some such answer that actually gives you what you need to know.

I can no track my gasoline usage to one-thousandth of a gallon. Last time I checked, that was 3.78541ccs, or, as I like to call it, three and a quarter. I’m guessing that’s about a thimble full, and is unneccassirly complex. It does permit me, however, to calculate my mileage to thousandths as well, or five and a half feet.

I think that’s silly.