Good thing this isn't an audioblog

I've been exploring the Finnish public dental system recently, and it's quite good. A trouble maker in the back row started becoming very sensitive to heat, which is apparantly, A Bad Thing - it implies inflammation, which precedes big dental trouble, yea even unto the roots. It also makes hot beverage drinking unenjoyable, which is what finally prompted action. It's just wrong when coffee hurts.

There are two kinds of public dental appointments you can make here. A regular "appointment" which will be honoured at some indeterminate time in the next three or four months, or an urgent appointment, which gets seen to that day, at the University dental clinic. Since it sounded like I'd have an abcess within four months, I qualified for the fast-track.

I don't know if you've been to university dental clinics, but they're not for the gimlet-phobic. Row after row of half-hidden surgery, the air thick with whining and sucking and scraping... and screams. Little, girlish screams, I couldn't contain myself. They had all sorts of new-fangled things - a little electric zapper to check if a tooth was alive, a bitey-downey thingie (which perhaps has a technical name) for testing for root infection I guess, and a funky portable x-ray machine, swinging around the cubicle on a boom. Madness! I had a little photo of my teeth in my pocket for the whole weekend. I was drilled twice in the same tooth, about half an hour before the anaesthetic kicked in, then had the holes temporarily filled, and was given a magic piece of paper, imbued with mystic powers of referral.

The public dental system here was expanded to cover an additional 130,000 adults last year. The public dentists can't handle all this work by themselves, so the public system outsources explicit work to contracted private dentists, in my case properly filling the holes, and dealing with a fracture I have in another tooth (from when I tried to eat a computer-case-screw sandwich. Don't try this at home.) It all seems wonderful, but as usual with public systems, there are inefficiencies. At no stage was I given a general check-up. Should the private dentist notice half my mouth is about to become infected with tooth-plague*, he can't do anything about it. If he deviates from the contract drawn up by the public dentist, the victim has to pay through the teeth, so to speak. So, though by this time next week I'll have had three dentist appointments, I still feel compelled to book another one, for sometime early next year, just to make sure everything is ok.


Kinda boring, but maybe useful for someone that blunders into this in about ten years with a toothache in Helsinki. Hmm, on that note, the dentist's number can be found at www.hel.fi

*I'm very proud I resisted the urge to scamper whimsically down the Zombie-Tooth narrative path that beckoned just there.

End of anonymity

This is a bit coincidental. I was having a discussion with my friend Gilles over dinner about how companies like Google had amassed so much information on all of us by now, that it would soon be possible for these bodies to string our web accesses, thousand unremembered posts, and profiles together into a pretty comprehensive portrait of who we are, what we value, what we believe, what we want to buy. Not a very ground breaking thought, admittedly, but I wasn't expecting a proof-of-concept within 24-hours - witness: Google's blogsearch.

Now I'm not exactly paranoid, but I do equate anonymity and privacy, and so my Blogger profile is only privilege to my first name, and even that isn't listed in my profile. Google operates both Blogger and, significantly, my Gmail account. Which means they know my name. Which means if you can blogsearch my name, you'll find my blog.

Eclectic Electric

I only managed to make it down for the first day, but the Electric Picnic down at Stradbally House, Co. Laois has become my favourite festival.

It wasn't just the great acts like the Flaming Lips or Kraftwerk, nor that my well connected honey managed to score VIP passes; it was just the general groovyness that pervaded the whole affair. An abundance of ancient trees gave the place a natural vibe, and the organisers exploited this with genius, disguising marquee poles with hollow tree-trunks, decorating trees with giant colourful butterflies, and setting up an holistic "body and soul" chillout area in a log-lined hollow (normally used in show-jumping competitions), complete with an alcohol-free "sacred shrine area", parachute-silk hammocks, and even massages - Trey, see if you can get a gig there next year!

Maybe it was because it was held down the country, but there was a calmness about place, people were very friendly, and security was relaxed with none of the near strip-searching that can happen at other gigs. This also meant a fair amount of, er, contraband was wafting around in the air... Potent contraband.

There was variety. An electric music tent, a DJ tent, the mostly rockin' main stage, a cinema tent (also hosting cabaret), a stand-up comedy tent, amusement park rides, market stalls, there really was something for everyone. Even the food and drink was the most varied I've seen at a festival.

Finally, as Wayne from the Flaming Lips said, it's just got the coolest name. Now where's my promotion fee?