Professional magician Jonathan Levey (http://www.maxmagician.com) pulled some floss out of a hat for this week’s Use: magic tricks.
The magic trick, called “Gypsy Thread”, involves cutting a piece of floss into several smaller pieces, then magically fusing these together to restore the original piece of intact floss. Watch carefully to see this trick transpire before your very eyes. Pay close attention!
It was almost inevitable. Evil people have used water bottles filled with inflammable (or flammable, if you prefer) liquids, carbonized their underwear, and burnt their shoes on commercial aircraft, generally with embarrassing and painful results for the would-be bad guy. Recently, according to a CNN report, the U.S. government warned that sinister toothpaste tubes were a possible way of damaging aircraft flying to the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. This would be funny if it wasn’t so scary. And the picture? – not what you imagine. My question is: Edward Snowden, can Sarah Palin see you flossing from her back porch?
Floss every day. That’s what your dentist tells you, but what she (or more rarely, lately, he, because there are fewer men engaging in the profession than ever before) doesn’t say is how to dispose of the used floss. Not in the toilet, according to a the people who manage Toronto’s sewage treatment. It lodges in the equipment, causing breakdowns and crashing the system. So be a good citizen, floss every day, and then drop it into the garbage can. By the way, the image is a photo of graffiti featuring floss, in, where else? – Brazil. (Notice: This is not a paid ad.)
Today’s blog is a bit gruesome, but no ugly pictures with this one, Stephanie. As reported in The Los Angeles Times (May 28, 1997) Gail Brooks, a quick-thinking nurse, saved her boyfriend’s life after he had his right arm badly bitten by a shark while spearfishing in the Bahamas. She used dental floss, which everyone there carries when swimming (just in case), to tie off an artery in his arm in order to control the bleeding. Her boyfriend was brought to a hospital in Miami, where he was in serious but stable condition.
You too can be a hero – carry floss wherever you go. You never know when it might come in handy.
If a monkey can learn to floss, so can you. Macaque monkeys in Thailand have been observed by researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University Primate Research Institute flossing their teeth with strands of human hair. Not only do they do that, but they also teach the good habit to their children, by exaggerating and slowing the movements involved when they see they’re being watched. Why the monkeys choose to use human hair is a mystery. Do they pull hair from their handlers heads? Maybe they like the smell of human hair after it’s been shampooed. Maybe they couldn’t get to their pharmacy or other source to buy dental floss.
The National Flossing Council (did you know they existed?) awarded the Floscar in 1999 to the best movie featuring dental floss in the last 25 years.
The latest (and possibly the only) call for voting for the award, emceed by Arnold Scharzenegger, took place in 1999. He promised to include flossing in his then upcoming movie, Terminator 3. Not having made it through #2, I don’t know if he kept his promise.
The 5 finalists were:
Kingpin (1997) Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid
L.A. Story (1991) Steve Martin and Victoria Tennant
Pretty Woman (1990) Richard Gere and Julia Roberts
The Eiger Sanction (1975) George Kennedy and Clint Eastwood
Austin Powers (1997) Elizabeth Hurley and Mike Myers
And the winner was….mandatory pause while we tear open the envelope….. Pretty Woman, with 27% of the votes cast.
Frank Zappa, the great, quirky songwriter-musician, wrote the song Montana in the early 1980s. It’s performed by his band, The Mothers Of Invention, on the album Overnite Sensation. In it he sings about moving to Montana, where he would raise a crop of dental floss, wax it, and sell it in small white boxes uptown. His aim in the song was to become a dental floss tycoon, responding to the great demand for the product. He may be alluding to some other product which might be more lucrative, but that’s just a guess. Look up his band’s performance on YouTube and learn to sing along. And floss.
According to writer D.E. Finley, Brazilians take much better care of their teeth than most Americans (and Canadians too, I suppose, although I don’t have any observational evidence to back up that assumption.) Brazilians seem to spend an inordinate amount of time after each meal flossing their pearly whites, which really are, it seems, exactly that – pearly white. Even public washrooms dispense floss, and dogs in pet shops have their own toothbrushes (which are wielded by their caretakers, not by the dogs themselves) along with poultry-flavoured toothpaste. The only drawback with living there is that with perpetual summer, it’s hard to stay fit enough to squeeze into the Brazilian dental floss swimsuits.
Every year since the 1980s, engineering students across Canada, and lately even from the U.S. take part in a bridge-building competition, constructing a model bridge using only toothpicks, Popsicle® sticks, dental floss and white glue. The bridges are then subjected to the CRUSHER which applies a force to test each bridge’s strength. The 2010 winning bridge supported an astounding 2733 kilograms before breaking.
Annual bridge-building challenge by Concordia University Civil Engineering Students
Post#6- Floss with Nicotine Added- Yum!:
In 1991, a U.S. patent (#5,035,252) was issued for dental floss containing nicotine, which would kill two birds with one stone: improve oral hygiene and provide a substitute for cigarettes without the risk of cancer that comes from smoking or chewing tobacco. The introduction of nicotine chewing gum and the nicotine patch seem to have taken the wind out of the sails of this product. I haven’t seen any ads for this great idea. Can you imagine people getting up from their desks and pulling out a length of floss every half hour, just after getting that wild look in their eyes? Or, if co-workers objected, would the addicted ones gather outside in winter and floss their cold teeth? I wonder if they would need a prescription from a physician or would it be the dentist who would give it to them? Would they still have smoker’s bad breath and yellow fingers?
1001 Uses For Dental Floss 