Yeah, it’s almost the weekend, so time to take stock. Here’s something I learned this week, which made me unaccountably happy.
I have been earwormed by Brimful of Asha – a 1997 song by Cornershop, which celebrates Indian cinema, the spectacle of dance and the joy of the singing, and in particular Asha Bhosle, who ghost sang thousands (literally) of songs to be lip-synced by the female leads:
And I never knew who Sadi Rani was. But Wiki has the answer:
Isn’t that nice?
So what mundane, pointless fact have you learned this week, something which left you happier than before you knew it?
Oh, Brimful of Asha. I found that song a couple of years ago and liked it. But, I forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder.
I guess for me I learned what castrato is.
I learned that the term “white-collar crime” was first defined in 1939 by sociologist Edwin Sutherland, who pointed out that the reason people believed that only the lower classes committed crimes was because the bad acts committed by people of higher status were not called crimes, and in some cases were not even illegal.
I have read dozens of books about financial fraud and other white-collar crimes, but did not know the origin and history of the term until this week.
I learned that dentistry has taken a leap forward. My wife recently changed dentists, going to a new clinic just down the street. Turns out, she needed a crown. Now, any time I’ve needed a crown in the past, it went like this:
-Go in, dentist takes an impression with some foul goo in a metal torture instrument.
-Dentist then shoots you full of pain killer.
-Dentist grinds the old tooth down to its nub.
-Dentist puts on a temporary crown
-You go home, wait for a couple of weeks until some remote lab gets around to making the permanent crown.
-You go back and get the permanent crown installed
Well, my wife went into the dentist at 10:00 this morning. It’s now 12 noon and she has a new crown.
-Went in at ten, the dentist did some sort of computer scan
-Dentist grinds out the bad stuff and sends her home for an hour while the new crown is created
-She goes back in and they install the crown
-Done
Two hours vs two weeks or more. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the cost.
Yesterday I learned that the Ancient Egyptians wrote extensively about another civilization that they regularly interacted with, called Punt. Historians still debate where Punt was located.
During the Ottoman empire, the city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece) was populated in roughly equal shares by Turkish-speaking Muslims, Greek-speaking Christians, and Spanish-speaking Jews. And they all got along reasonably well.
I learned this week that all of the preparation and monitoring of someone during heart surgery is utterly mundane to the cath lab staff.
They had a multitude of EKG pads, defibrillator pads stuck on me just in case, nerve monitoring, in-artery blood pressure monitoring, and ultrasound blood flow monitoring at my feet. All quite normal and boring to them, for which I’m quite grateful.
I learned that “naci” is Hungarian for nazi, Hungarians work many more hours than Americans, and they have their own version of D&D called Magus.
I love that song! Though I prefer the peppier Fatboy Slim version. I heard it a long time ago on the radio while stuck in a traffic jam and it made my day, but I couldn’t find out what it was until I heard it again years later when there were better tools for finding songs.
A coincidence: I haven’t thought about the band Cornershop in 20 years and can only remember one song, namely “Brimful Of Asha”, but I religiously check out the new album releases every Friday on allmusic.com, and today the new Cornershop album came out and is celebrated as their masterpiece in a career of 30 years.
As what have I learned this week? It’s also musically related, I just saw a documentary on Tina Turner, a great, powerful and simply likable woman, and I learned that her husband donated a kidney to her a few years ago. The couple’s acquaintances spoke very gently of the love between Tina and her husband, and I was moved by this deed.
I’ve been positively impressed by dentistry in the past year or so myself but oddly enough getting my crowns has still been mostly the first process you describe above, taking 2 weeks, the only difference being that they didn’t seem to grind out as much as I had been expecting when they started.
But the anesthesia process has become a lot less painful. Before, they’d just go all in and stab you with a huge needle. Now, they numb the gums with an anbesol-like substance so you won’t feel the needle as much, and sometimes I think they even make a preliminary lidocaine injection on the surface before going all in so you won’t even feel the final injection very much.