There’s a report from the early 1950s of a
one-ton spill of the stuff. It burned its way through a
foot of concrete floor and chewed up another meter of
sand and gravel beneath, completing a day that I’m sure
no one involved ever forgot. That process, I should add,
would necessarily have been accompanied by copious
amounts of horribly toxic and corrosive by-products: it’s
bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the
clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door
prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch
the fireworks.
Wash your hands with soap. Do this in the kitchen, not in
the bathroom, even if you just came out of the bathroom.
Even if you spend your entire day submerging your hands
in a sterile bubble, wash your hands in front of your
sweetheart. Do it now.
A comment about that article, from its author: “That post still gets 1500+ hits a month from people searching for variations of “fruit salad recipe.” I get at least 1 email a month from random strangers who appreciated getting more than just a recipe. :)”
RAZ: You were a counselor and you dealt with all kinds of
grief, people who were dealing with it. I mean, you are
writing about a divorce, and you’re essentially revisiting
it over and over and over again, as you tour through the
country.
Do you think as a counselor, you would give somebody this
kind of advice, in a sense, to sort of revisit what
they’ve been through?
Warm, outgoing and prone to the positive, Ms. Eisen has
worked much of her life. Now, she is one of 6.3 million
Americans who have been unemployed for six months or
longer, the largest number since the government began
keeping track in 1948. That is more than double the toll
in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.
Roger Ebert can’t remember the last thing he ate. He
can’t remember the last thing he drank, either, or the
last thing he said. Of course, those things existed;
those lasts happened. They just didn’t happen with enough
warning for him to have bothered committing them to
memory — it wasn’t as though he sat down, knowingly, to
his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a
last word into Chaz’s ear. The doctors told him they were
going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and
talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren’t they? On some
morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert
took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.
Let me again point you to one of the best blogs online, Roger Ebert’s Journal. A little about it (also from the great Esquire article I linked to up top):
… five hundred thousand words that probably wouldn’t exist
had he kept his other voice. Now some of his entries have
thousands of comments, each of which he vets personally
and to which he will often respond. It has become his
life’s work, building and maintaining this massive
monument to written debate — argument is encouraged, so
long as it’s civil — and he spends several hours each
night reclined in his chair, tending to his online oasis
by lamplight. Out there, his voice is still his voice —
not a reasonable facsimile of it, but his.
The thing I like best about Ebert’s reviewing is that he identifies what a movie sets out to do: Dumb summer romantic comedy. Or, Make an artistic statement. And onward. He reviews the movie based on its own goals, on its own terms — has the movie given up on itself and settled for mediocrity? Or worse, is it hostile towards the audience? Or has it overreached as it strove to do something new? I think this is how I would try to review movies… it seems fair.
Once you learn what is expected of you, the tooth cutting strategy for placing silver fillings actually makes sense. All lines should be crisp, smooth, and flowing. You must cut in such a way that you prevent the tooth from cracking and avoid drilling into the bloody and full-of-nerves pulp. You must also cut in such a way that the silver you place does not crack when your patient bites food. Finally, you must make sure that the silver stays put in the tooth.
Those goals are formalized into a set of millimeter measurements, degrees, and clearance tests. I’m finally familiar with those requirements. However, I’m so nervous when I cut these teeth (well, when I cut their plastic counterparts in pre-clinic). Over the course of a 2 hour practical, you can do enough damage to fail in 3 seconds. Try it, count backwards from 3: 3… 2… 1… ok you just failed your practical. That’s nerve-wracking!
And then there’s the mirror factor.
When you cut into someone’s top teeth, you have 2 options. OPTION 1: you can bend way over and around and look directly at the tooth as you cut. This will result in you having to get your neck fused. This has happened to more than one doctor in our school. OPTION 2: you do all your cutting by looking through a mirror.
So, I’m sitting there literally sweating and my heart pounding as I try to guide this drill, upside down and backwards, over and through this tiny little tooth. I’m trying for option 2, but I’m thinking… I’d rather have terrible posture right now and pass… and then figure out how to do it ergonomically later.
It’s conflicting… do you do what’s best for you now (option 1), with the risk of developing bad, potentially debilitating, habits? Or do you try to do it all at once: good posture, passing grades? It feels impossible. And so you practice at 6:30pm on a Friday night, sitting there all alone in lab… and the 500,000 rpm drill catches, slipping around the mesial buccal cavosurface angle of the proximal box you were cutting… and that’s it. That tooth isn’t going to pass — time to get another on which to practice.
These types of posts are not exactly what I had in mind for tumbledry. I’d like to look back on old posts and see how I was feeling, not necessarily what exactly happened. A journal primarily of emotions and secondarily of events is going to be much more fun to look through in 10 years.