Scenes from Cold War Dentistry

During my wonder years in Worcester, Massachusetts during the 50s and 60s, my dentist father became my “Uncle Tungsten” (homage to Oliver Sacks).  For me, his dental practice was a key supply chain node for my unventilated home chemistry experiments. While still in primary school, I got to know mercury first-hand (literally) via the “Mexican jumping beans”  that he brought home—mercury inside taped pill capsules. Their random saltations were entertaining, but no match for the tactile thrill of cutting open the caps and fondling quicksilver as the Lord intended it to be fondled.

More frustrating were my failed attempts to ignite asbestos squares filched from his office lab. In a more positive light, I secured all sorts of neat ingredients for my chemistry set, like the winning combination of iodine and magnesium powder. (see below) 

 

The “office” offered opportunities for physical as well as chemical changes. As an eight-year old, I gave little Stevie Rubin a ride on a dental chair in an unoccupied room. He insisted on going to the top. When he reached the summit and I flashed an extractor, he interrupted my father and legit dentistry in the next room. (The lesson here is never to climb Mount McKinley without a well-conceived plan for your descent.)

Public Policy Diversions

In Worcester, my father was a hapless proponent of fluoridation, tasting defeat in referendum after referendum. “But Leo,” my maternal grandfather queried, “hasn’t losing those contests been good for business?” Worcester remains unfluoridated in 2015. Dr. Strangelove's Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) would have approved:  No adulteration of precious bodily fluids in Worcester, a.k.a. the Heart of the Commonwealth.

Dentists in Worcester and, for that matter, all 49 states (Hawaii was still a territory), did, however, taste public acclaim in  September 1959, when the American Dental Association, including my father, gathered at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for their 100^th annual convention. According to  Peter Carlson, author of that road movie of a book,  K Blows Top, it was the largest assemblage of dentists in history, more than 30,000 strong.  

As the convention convened, the  ADA’s president received letters from New York mayor Robert Wagner and State Department chief of protocol Wiley T. Buchanan demanding that the dentists give up the Grand Ballroom on the 17^th so that Wagner could host a luncheon for Khrushchev.  The ADA’s president was defiant and Wagner and Buchanan caved.

Stubborn Dentists Won’t Be Yanked, proclaimed the Chicago Sun Times.

Khrushchev's hosts moved the luncheon to the nearby Commodore Hotel and the dentists emerged as Cold War heroes.  For many who had rightly viewed 1950s dentistry with dread, it was deeply satisfying to imagine the profession’s perio probes, water picks, and hatchets trained away from them and toward Mr. Khrushchev. 

 

Thought Experiments in Noticing

[click on photo to enlarge]

We were both gazing out the same office window, but it was my friend, a behavioral scientist, who in a blink, noticed the striking contrast in washed versus unwashed stained glass windows 50 yards away. Previously, neither of us had suspected stained glass.

The Quartet

Looking up from my morning coffee, it was me—not my three confederates—who noticed this unlikely quartet. The two guys—behemoths at around 6’5”—didn’t acknowledge each other; their unlikely juxtaposition must have been random, not due to networking via basketball or pro wrestling.

Each was framed by a significant other to his outside, adding symmetry to the intrigue. But it was a funky symmetry. The woman on the right looked like a reasonable match in altitude for her companion. But the woman on the left must have come up short by a full foot and a half, lending credence to the adage that love and a good step ladder conquers all.

The range of human height is one of many odds and ends that fit neatly into a normal distribution, with most of the data points clustering in the middle 2/3 of the curve. Typically, the distribution’s tails go only so far, dictated by unspectacular constraints of human height.  Much of my caffeinated response, then, must have been about the overall configuration—the added combination and permutation of its curious elements. I suspect I won’t be seeing anything like that again soon, especially since the principals never exchanged LinkedIn invitations.

Noticing Pays

From the Daily Hampshire Gazette October 1, Amherst Massachusetts:

A North Pleasant Street woman contacted police at 6:23 a.m. Thursday to report she could not find her husband at home, even though his keys and wallet were still there, and could not reach him by calling and texting his cell phone. She called back a short time later to let police know she had found her husband sleeping in a bed.

Miscellany

In her book, On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz takes separate strolls around Manhattan with an urban sociologist, a geologist, a physician, a sound designer, a dog, and six other experts. In their company, she notices a wealth of different things. The moral: seek out fellow travelers with different perspectives; different skills from your own. Inspired, I have a date this afternoon to tour local infrastructure with my urologist.

Half the Quartet returns for an encore

 

The Dalai Lama: Cancellation, Arbitrage, and a Gender Bender Announcement

Before its abrupt cancellation, the Dalai Lama’s prospective 44-day Fall American “tour” had created sellers markets on many college campuses. On my own, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. on September 16^th for his October 25th appearance at the university’s Mullins Center. By the afternoon’s end, all 7,500 tickets had sold out at $10 a ticket to students and $32 to the general public.

To avoid abuse by resellers, tickets were restricted to two per customer.

Still, legit resellers like StubHub and TickPick.com* managed to secure a raft of tickets. The online reseller Tickets-Center.com was offering nosebleed seats beginning at $100 and choice seats topping off at $6,000 within eye contact of His Holiness.

Like it or not, there will always be arbitrage at such high-demand events. The legally sanctioned resellers are necessary evils. In other words, anyone who patronized them for D.L. tickets got their money back—a fate far happier than returning a ticket purchased from a street scalper to the Mullins Center for its original value. (The night after the tickets went on sale, a friend saw two scalpers in the center of Amherst offering their wares for $500 a pop.)

Nothing Succeeds like Succession

It was exhaustion and advice from his physicians that convinced the Dalai Lama to gong the tour.  For any octogenarian, health and mortality are concerns. To these, the Dalai Lama must also add the challenge of succession, i.e., Who will be the next Dalai Lama?

To that end, it’s been refreshing to learn that His Holiness values the prospect of a female in that role. And one who is very, very attractive to boot.  

I would chalk up the very, very attractive job description to the Dalai Lama’s much-valued impish sense of humor.  But not the XX chromosomal pronouncement.  “The female biologically [has] more potential to show affection … and compassion,” he affirmed.

And escaping the press entirely in that story: The Dalai Lama may well be implying a next-life gender shift for himself. In Tibetan tradition, the same great soul returns as the Dalai Lama incarnation after incarnation. When a Dalai Lama has passed, an interregnum ensues until a recruitment cadre identifies a child who in turn identifies the D.L.’s former personal effects and other touchstones. So we now have proof positive that when the present Dalai Lama calls himself a feminist, he is walking that talk.

*Brett Goldberg of TickPick notes that his company is not a reseller but a clearinghouse where buyers and sellers negotiate. That means, he says, that the company does not secure the tickets if an event gets cancelled. It's all between the buyer and seller.