I had a dental appointment earlier this evening to do something or other to an area between two back molars. This involved some drilling and physical effort on my dentist’s part; he all but had to put a knee on my chest to get the leverage he needed to install something that felt like the world’s largest popcorn hull between the two teeth.

Then there was some mysterious tinkering with liquid ceramics (huh?) and catalyzing hardeners and half a hardware store’s worth of grabbers and wrenches and long pinchy hemostatmajiggers.

This process is repeated several times. Every time he sets the ceramics (or whatever the hell that stuff is that he injects that hardens up real quick) he uses some gizmo that looks like a small blow dryer. He says it hardens the goo with ultraviolet light (huh?).

What it amounts to is that he sticks a dental phaser in my mouth, set to “Annoying Whine.”

And now I see via ***DDtB that something like the fictional Classic Star Trek phasers are not that far-fetched. Law enforcement and military applications galore.

Eesh. Meanwhile, my mouth is feeling better, but I probably shouldn’t have had the sesame seeds in my rice for dinner. I forsee flossing in my future.