Tuesday 29 March 2011

Rod Hull and Emu on The Tonight Show

So I went to Triple A Farm today to interview some Emu farmers for a story I am writing. It was great fun and also reminded me of a skit I used to see on television when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure it was on the Hudson Brothers. This guy had an emu puppet, and sometimes the puppet wasn’t nice, but I remember it being REALLY funny. So of course I You Tubed and found Rod Hull and Emu from an appearance on Johnny Carson. Enjoy the clip and notice that all three people featured in this clip have passed on to the big comedy venue in the sky. I am particularly grateful to the people that save these clips and upload them for all of us to enjoy.We should all be grateful for digital memories! How many of you remember this emu puppet?

Tuesday 1 March 2011

There’s A Reason It’s Called Dental-phobia.

My tooth hurt. A lot. That meant I would be going to what I feel is one level up from hell itself, and that’s the dentist. Since there were no available appointments in Carleton Place, I would have to go back to my dentist in Barrhaven.

I take care of my teeth so I DON’T have to go to the dentist. I believe that if my teeth aren’t broke, they don’t need fixing. I can tell you with great certainty that I am not alone, because let’s face it, sometimes dentists are scary.

Enter my unavailable dentist’s father, a super-happy dental guy who has been poking at teeth for probably half his life. I swear that after he x-rayed my sore tooth, there was a gleam in his eye as he said those two dreaded words to me. . . root canal.

Gulp.

After the lecture about if I had been getting regular check ups he could’ve caught the cavity before it killed my tooth, he told me to come back in a week and he would fix it.

I hate lectures.

It’s a week later, and I should’ve known there would be a problem when I walked in, and Dr. Evil Dentist hollered before I could sit down that I was one minute late and he had to get me in that chair and get me frozen.

I was already frozen with fear.

I apologized for wasting his 60 seconds and popped my bum in that chair before another 5 seconds was missed.

I’d brought my MP3 player with me to listen to music while my mouth was torn asunder. I figured I’d be distracted and could turn up the volume when the drilling in my skull became too loud to bear. I thought it was pretty darn smart of me to bring it.

Dr. Dentist wouldn’t let me fiddle with my headphones until he had jabbed that numbing  needle into my gum line a few times. It was a better use of time. After all, we had 60 seconds to make up for.

Ever heard of a dental dam?. It’s a piece of balloon that they put around the tooth for a clean working environment. Dental dams are great, I guess, if you like choking on and tonguing latex.

The worst part is that I have a small mouth. Quit laughing, people. Figuratively, I have a huge mouth. Physically, not so much.

So when Dr. Dentist peels my top lip back over the top of my head and skull to the back of my neck and uses a crowbar to get my jaw open wider, I feel like the corners of my mouth are going to tear open and leave me smiling like the Joker for the rest of my life.

God be praised for skin elasticity.

Let it be known that I am still not allowed to put on my headphones and float away on a musical cloud of phony comfort.

Dr. Dentist prefers to give me a John Madden play-by-play as he works on my tooth; what’s inside, how the roots grow and die. If I could talk, I would’ve told him that if I wanted to know my tooth that well, I’d go out and buy the biography.

Here’s the scary part. After the drilling, the scraping, the buffing, the poking, the stuffing, the incessant lecturing, the gleam in his eye returned.

He said, as if in a bizarre Apocalypse Now scene that :Yeah, there’s nothing like the rush of a good root canal in the morning.

He says he’ll never quit dentistry. The bead of sweat hanging from his chin sent me into a panicked state and I would’ve run screaming if I could.

I couldn’t look away from that one drop of sweat, knowing that at any second, it could fall on me.

I was approaching a good anxiety/panic/nervous breakdown attack before the nurse reached over and wiped his chin. I tasted latex and bile.

Ten minutes later I was out of there. I cried a little, because it was a mentally damaging 45 minutes.  I guarantee you that I will let all of my teeth fall out and wear George Washington’s teeth before I will visit that dentist again.

No dentist should ever take that much joy in his work, in my pain. It’s just creepy.