Monday, March 29, 2010

Movie Reference Monday

OK, not hearing the "funny voices" this morning but will pass along a quick joke that my daughter told me yesterday.

"Do you know how to make Lady Gaga cry?"
..........................................................wait for it...........................
"Pok-her Face". hahahahahahaha

Have you seen any of the Men in Black movies? Remember how at the end of each of the movies they always find a way of pointing out how we think our world is so large but compared to the vastness of space we are just a speck. Yeah, for some reason that is my feeling this morning.

We are in the midst of a slow cycle. Not hygiene, me. Seems like I hit those every 4 months or so. Anyone else have that? You hit a batch of patients that are just healthy as can be (grrrr). No decay, no pain, no crowns. Kind of hard to fill appointments in the restorative chair when the dentist is not diagnosing restorative needs. Too much time on my hands (or perhaps more appropriately, too much time with my hands on a keyboard and not in a mouth).

Maybe I should see about taking a job as the winter caretaker of a summer resort in Colorado.

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

On second thought, it may not be the healthiest decision for my family.


What do you do during down time? Pay bills, read journals, take online CE. . .yep, me too. What do you do when you have used your current supply of money to pay bills, read all your journals, and don't feel like reading another seminar on the benefits of flouride in your dentifrice? Remember it's a Monday so the crossword puzzle only takes 3 or 4 minutes to do. Your teams are all out of the NCAA tournament so you really have no interest in the remaining teams. Your baseball team is the Royals so not much to look forward to there.

What I'm saying is I have time on my hands and that can sometimes lead the voices to start-up the negative dialogue. Instead of peeling away the layers of the onion, I start adding layers. Small issues seem large, minor staff issues feel larger, normal monthly cash-flow ebbs take on epic proportions.

"Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays"

Yes, it seems to be more of a Monday issue than a Wednesday issue but that doesn't make it easier to resolve. 10 steps forward and 1 step back (more accurately just no step in either direction).

So that thought cycle leads me again to ponder the vastness of creation and the minuscule portion of it that I occupy. On January 19, 2006 the New Horizons probe was launched by NASA on a mission to make the closest pass of Pluto ever. This probe is the fastest man-made structure ever launched. It passed the moon a mere 9 hours after launch (took the Apollo missions 3 days to reach the moon). It used Jupiter's gravitational field to accelerate further. It is moving at 52,000 mph, every second it is traveling more than 14 miles. The Earth is roughly 23,000 miles in circumference, that is 2 orbits EVERY HOUR!!!

OK, why does this matter?

Even at that speed, the New Horizons probe will not pass by Pluto until the summer of 2015. That is 9 years. And at that point it is still not even out of our Solar System, let alone the galaxy. The Voyager probes that were launched when I was a child have left our solar system but has not yet passed beyond the gravitational influence of our sun.

The Universe is truly incomprehensible in size and scope. Maybe my current concerns are not that large after all. . . .

Never mind, that didn't help at all, they still haven't discovered small businesses on other planets.

Oh, and as an afterthought. Thanks D.C. for passing a remarkably confusing health care bill via an obscure parliamentary procedure. I'm a Political Science major and an attorney, and I can't tell if this thing is good or bad. All I know is that neither party seems willing to represent the individual, they truly represent themselves and care only about holding on to power (nothing new I know but this is getting silly).

I'm thinking 435 freshmen Congressmen and women and 33 new Senators may be a good start this November - just govern, is that too much to ask. If you couldn't tell there are enough other problems in the world.

Have a great day.


ric

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good stuff as ever, but the bill was passed by a normal vote, not the controversial if still valid “deem and pass” procedure. Just thought you’d want to know. Just don’t ask me to explain the bill!

Rob

toothdoc said...

Rob, I agree that there could have been more obscure ways to pass this legislation. However, that doesn't diminish the tenuous application of the budgetary no-debate rules of the Senate. And I blame both parties, I know the Republicans used this procedure several times as well (albeit not with 1/6 of the economy at stake). I wonder why we could pass Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights legislation, etc - all extremely controversial at the time - with bipartisan support.

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