Quote for the day: Genuine, custom-packaged authenticity (pay with your credit card)

"In a world of proliferating choice (consumer choice, that is), we are less prone [than we used to be] to feel we are deprived of an identity we value. In fact, it is likely that someone is trying very hard to understand what we feel is authentic so that it can be packaged somehow and sold to us in the form of a rebellious T-shirt or self-help book." ~~ Donovan Plumb, "Critical Adult Education in Canada in the Time of CASAE," New Directions For Adult & Continuing Education, 2009(124), 5-14.

Things you don't want to watch in the dentist's chair

Televisions over dentists' chairs seem to be just a given thing these days (can you imagine, says one who thought dentists offering headphones and CD's a few years ago were innovative). Ours, for some reason, never seems to bother turning on the captioning, but you can usually catch enough of what's going on if the cleaning machines aren't making too much noise.

On various occasions I've watched people voting on wedding dresses, trying to decide whether to renovate or move (maybe if we just moved the doorway?), and blathering about celebrity life. I thought the most appropriate episode was a home-improvement show that demonstrated drilling into a concrete patio...while I was getting a tooth drilled.

That was until today. Today, again getting drilled and filled, I was treated to an episode of "How It's Made," featuring Statue Restoration, Tripods, Polish Sausages, and Welding Guns. I especially enjoyed the art restorer who mixed plaster with glue, and dabbled it into all the broken places on a statue of the Madonna, at approximately the same time as the dentist was mixing up whatever dentists mix up and dabbling it into my broken places. And cooking it with what didn't seem that different from a Welding Gun.

As for the Polish Sausages, we won't even go there.