They all have something to offer

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Every November, Gail and some of her friends do a scrapbooking getaway weekend in Collingwood. They leave their husbands and kids behind, rent a chalet for the weekend and spend the whole time scrapbooking and chatting, go out for a nice dinner on Saturday night, and one year they even managed to arrange for someone to come to the chalet and give massages and pedicures. They look forward to this weekend all year, and on more than one occasion, Gail has suggested that the guys get together and do something similar (though likely involving golf rather than scrapbooking). We agreed that it was a good idea, but in typical guy fashion, none of us ever got off their ass and actually did anything about it.

Last November when the girls were away, they decided to book the same chalet for us on Father’s Day weekend as a Father’s Day gift. They kept it a secret from us for six months — I found out about it a little over a week ago. On Friday afternoon, six of us arrived at the chalet near the base of Blue Mountain. Jeff’s wife sent up a bunch of food — shrimp, burgers, hot dogs, snacks, a veggie tray, dips, and even breakfast stuff like cereal, bagels, and yogurt. Each of us brought up some of our favourite “frosty beverages”, and luckily someone was smart enough to bring up a case of water. The girls had booked a tee time for Saturday as well, so in addition to our golf clubs, we brought some cards and poker chips, Jeff brought his XBox 360, Mike brought his Wii, and Mike and I each brought our Guitar Hero guitars. As it turned out, the XBox never even got unpacked, and only one Wii game was played all weekend.

Friday evening we fired up the Wii to give Guitar Hero a try. Steve, Mike, Doug and I had played it a lot, Paul had played it a couple of times, but Jeff had never even seen it. Jeff can master just about any video game in minutes, so within a couple of hours, he was trying (and doing well at) the medium difficulty level. We took a break to barbecue some burgers, and then headed out to a nearby driving range, since most of us had yet to hit a golf ball this year. After that, we played some cards for a while, then back to Guitar Hero until one by one, the guys grew sleepy and went to bed.

We had tee-off times set for 9:40 and 9:50 the next morning at nearby Monterra. Steve, Doug, and myself made up the first group, while Jeff, Paul, and Mike teed off after us. We got carts, but because it had been so wet this past week, we had to stay on the cart paths. This was a bit of a problem for me, since the cart paths almost always went up the right side of the fairway, and as a left-handed golfer, my ball frequently ended up on the left side. So I’d end up driving the cart partway up the fairway, walking across the fairway, hitting my shot, then walking back to the cart and driving further up (sometimes not very far) before walking back across the fairway again. Monterra is a very nice course, and although there were a ton of bunkers, I only ended up in the sand a couple of times. I did lose a few balls in the woods and in the water (including three on a single hole), but I played OK. My driving was pretty decent and my short game was better than usual. My putting is usually the strongest part of my golf game, and it wasn’t terrible on Saturday, but just wasn’t quite up to snuff. I had two birdie putts on the day, but ended up bogeying both of them and finished the day with no pars or birdies. I play three or four times a year, usually in scramble-format golf tournaments, so I don’t remember the last time I played a full 18 holes. We were all pretty wiped out by the end of the round.

After golf, we went back to the chalet for some much-anticipated showers (it was pretty warm, but not stifling — pretty close to perfect golf weather, actually), and a little more Guitar Hero before heading back into the Blue Mountain village for dinner at a restaurant called Kaytoo. The food was very good though a little pricey. I had the ribs and found them rather fatty, but the steaks that some of the guys had looked pretty good. The atmosphere was great, however, and we had an absolutely wonderful server named Alison. She took care of us from the moment we sat down, gave us food and drink suggestions, and when we half-jokingly asked her what we could get for her, she said that she was allowed to have shots with customers. We asked what she liked, and she said tequila, so she had a tequila shot with us. I also enjoyed a “depth charge”, aka “Dr. Pepper” — pour beer and Coke into a large glass, then fill a shot glass with Amaretto. Drop the entire shot glass into the large glass and drink the whole thing. I haven’t had one of those in many many years. Anyway, back to Alison — I wouldn’t say she was flirting with us, exactly, but she was certainly attentive. We all knew full well that she was essentially playing us for a big tip — her attentiveness was not because she found the six of us (all fortyish greying and/or balding men) sexy, but because she knew that we’d find her attention flattering and tip her well. And she was right. But we spent almost four hours at Kaytoo, and had a fantastic time at dinner. Alison, if you’re reading this, thank you once again.

After dinner, it was back to the chalet for some Texas Hold-Em, which I inexplicably won. Unfortunately, we weren’t playing for money, so my payoff was simply bragging rights, but hey, that’s worth something. Two people had already gone to bed by the time the game ended, and the rest of us soon followed.

This morning was spent cleaning up, packing up, and playing a few last games of Guitar Hero, and then we headed home. The six of us have known each other for at least fifteen years, and some well over twenty. I lived with Jeff and Steve in residence in first year university (1987-88), and I ended up living with Jeff all the way through university, and with Steve again in third and part of fourth year. Jeff was best man at my wedding, Doug was best man at Jeff’s, and Paul and I were also in Jeff’s wedding party. Paul was the MC for both my wedding and Jeff’s, and Mike played the piano at my wedding as well. Paul, Jeff, and Doug all went to high school together. Notably missing was Faisal, who was also in my wedding party, and with whom I also lived throughout university, and have known since grade nine (1982). Fais was at a conference in Quebec City, so hopefully he will be able to make it next year. These guys are my best friends in the world, and I look forward to many more of these Father’s Day weekends in the future. Guys, we said it a number of times this past weekend — we should have gotten off our butts and organized one of these things years ago.

The Grand Delusion?

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While looking over the videos for my previous posting on atheism, I saw another video that appeals to “college-educated, intelligent Christians” to use their education and intelligence to scientifically analyze their faith. There are a number of questions asked (your standard “If God loves us all, why do bad things happen to good people?” and “Why are there so many starving children in the world?” as well as a clever one I hadn’t thought of before, but I’ll get back to that one later), and Christians are asked to answer the questions while thinking logically and scientifically. Most of the time, there is no good answer other than your standard “God works in mysterious ways” or “God must have a reason for all the suffering”. However, when you make the initial assumption that God is imaginary and then go through the questions again, suddenly there are answers that make sense. Bad things happen to good people by chance. Children are starving in Africa because they live in a place where it is difficult to grow food and the people and countries are too poor to be able to import enough for everyone — essentially, there is suffering and starvation because not enough is being done to prevent it. The “inescapable” conclusion is that God is imaginary. However, the video isn’t done there. It keeps going and in my opinion, goes too far.

This video attempts to demonstrate by use of logic that God does not exist. (Of course, they have done no such thing here, they’ve just shown that if you assume that God doesn’t exist, all of these particular questions have a logical answer. This isn’t proof of anything.) But the video goes one step further and asks why it is important to do this. They say that it’s important because there are millions (if not billions) of people around the world who believe in God, talk to God, and ask questions of God. If God is imaginary then these people, the vast majority of the world, are all delusional. According to some stats I’ve heard, something like 95% of the world’s population believes in God in one form or another. It’s one thing to say that you believe something different from 95% of the world, but quite another to say that anyone who doesn’t believe what you believe is delusional.

Secondly, by specifically targeting Christians with a college education, the video’s producers imply that anyone without a college degree is too stupid to understand what the video is saying. This is untrue and just a touch insulting.

Finally, the fatal flaw in this video is that it ironically uses exactly the same faulty logic that many creationists do. There are things that happen in the universe that don’t make sense given our current level of scientific knowledge. Creationists frequently point at these questions, saying that because we can’t answer these questions, the underlying scientific assumptions we’ve made must be false, and so God must have done it all. These questions are unanswered simply because we don’t know enough about the universe to answer them all. It’s even possible that human intelligence is simply not capable of understanding some of the intricacies of the universe. This doesn’t mean that what we’ve learned already is untrue. This video says exactly the same thing, but in reverse — here are some questions that we don’t know the answer to, and because the answers we currently have make no sense, the underlying premise behind them must be false. The logic is just as faulty here.

The clever and interesting question I mentioned above was “Why won’t God heal amputees?” You hear about so-called faith healers, who heal the sick with just a touch. But every now and again, you hear about someone whose cancerous tumour mysteriously disappeared, or a blind person who can suddenly see, or some other “miraculous” case of a sick person being healed through prayer. In some of these cases, the medical community is completely baffled, and so many claim this as proof of God’s existence. But there has never once been a case of an amputee miraculously regrowing limbs. Why not? We’ve already got the question of why God would heal some sick people and not others, but now it’s more specific — why will God heal cancer patients and blind people and ignore amputees? Of course, the fact that we don’t know the answer to this question means precisely nothing, but it’s an interesting question nonetheless.

The simple truth is that it is not possible to prove that God does not exist. There’s always the possibility that He’s out there somewhere, fudging test results to keep Himself hidden. Why would He do this? I dunno, but that doesn’t mean He doesn’t have a good reason. It is, and will always be, a matter of faith. I have written on numerous occasions before that I am an atheist. But I don’t think that people who are not atheists are all delusional or stupid, we simply believe different things. I’m a Jays fan, but I don’t think that Yankees fans are stupid, we just believe different things — neither one of us is wrong. Well, I guess either God exists or He doesn’t, so either atheists or theists are wrong, but since we don’t (and probably can’t) know which group is wrong, it doesn’t really matter.

The atheist’s nightmare is yummy

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I’ve read two interesting and somewhat related posts in the last couple of days, one on Boing Boing and the other on Slashdot. The first was about how scientists have now actually witnessed evolution in a lab. Scientists have been watching some E. coli bacteria in a lab for twenty years, through over 44,000 generations. They have noticed that around the 31,500th generation, some of the bacteria suddenly gained an ability that E. coli generally doesn’t have (something about metabolising citrate — I won’t even pretend that I understand the details). They managed to “replay” the evolution using saved samples of the bacteria, and found that something happened about 10,000 generations earlier that allowed this mutation to take place. The quote at the end: “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.“

The other is a old video of some nutbag explaining to former actor and current evangelist Kirk Cameron why the banana is “the atheist’s nightmare” because “it is so perfectly suited to the human hand” and therefore must have been designed by God. This is just too funny. Here is another funny video saying that peanut butter proves that evolution is false, because:

  1. scientists say that life can sometimes be created by matter and energy,
  2. peanut butter is matter,
  3. peanut butter is exposed to energy such as light and heat, but
  4. we never find life spontaneously being created inside a jar of peanut butter.

Wow, got me convinced. If that ain’t scientific proof, I don’t know what is. Oh wait, a couple of quick questions — has anyone ever examined every jar of peanut butter ever created for any microscopic form of life that was spontaneously created? Because we know that if evolution is true, then the form of life that might be spontaneously created from matter and energy would be a single cell. Evolution does not say that you might open a jar of peanut butter to find a chihuahua or a platypus inside. Also, peanut butter has been around for about a hundred years, while the universe is billions of years old. Have we waited long enough to say that it’s definitely not going to happen? Not to mention the obvious point that even if evolution is true, the possibility of this happening inside a jar of peanut butter is so low that the fact that you haven’t seen it happen is not proof that it can’t.

Speaking as an atheist, I can honestly say I have never had a nightmare involving either bananas or peanut butter. I ate a banana just the other day and quite enjoyed it. Cut one up, pour a little milk on it and sprinkle a touch of sugar, quite a nice little snack. I had an English muffin with peanut butter tonight when I got home from baseball. And ironically combining both nightmares, I used to love peanut butter and banana sandwiches when I was a kid.

TGV

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We leave for our trip to France in about three weeks. We fly from Toronto to Paris on the 26th of June, stay in Paris for a week, taking day trips to Versailles and Disneyland Paris (warning: heavy flash site), and then we take the TGV* high-speed train down to Bordeaux. We will stay a couple of days in Bordeaux before renting a van and driving north through the Loire Valley, stopping at Château de Chenonceau, ending up in Saint-Malo near Mont Saint-Michel. Eventually we’ll make our way back to Paris, flying back to Toronto on July 12th.

* According to Wikipedia, TGV stands for Train à Grand Vitesse (high-speed train), though I thought it stood for Très Grand Vitesse (very high speed). I couldn’t find anything on the TGV site itself.

While there are going to be many cool things about this trip, one thing I’m looking forward to is the high-speed train from Paris to Bordeaux. The train travels at speeds up to an amazing 320 km/h and will make the 580 km journey in 3½ hours (with a few stops along the way, I believe). Sounds very cool, but it made me wonder why we don’t have high-speed rail lines in North America. I did a little research and found that there is a high-speed (240 km/h) train running from Boston to Washington DC, but that’s it. There are such trains all over Europe, as well as Russia, South Korea and Japan, but one in all of North America. You’d think there would be lots in the US — New York to Chicago, LA to San Francisco, and LA to Las Vegas immediately jump to mind. The most obvious would be New York to Washington, though I believe the one from Boston to Washington does stop in New York so that one’s covered.

In Canada, Toronto to Ottawa and Montreal would be an obvious one, as well as Calgary to Edmonton and Calgary to Vancouver, though getting a high-speed train over or through the Rockies might be problematic.

I would think that if there was a train that could get you from Toronto to Ottawa in 90 minutes or Toronto to Montreal in under two hours, people would use it all the time. Air Canada rates for flights from Toronto to Ottawa range from $49 up to $419 for coach. Of the seventeen daily flights, only two are $49, and most are $169 to $269, so the train wouldn’t have to be dirt cheap to be widely used. Current train rates from Toronto to Ottawa are about $235 for a 4½ hour trip, so if people are willing to pay that, they’d probably pay $100 more to cut three hours off the trip.

With the way that gas prices are going, an energy-efficient high-speed train might be a big-time money-maker for the government, even if it does cost a couple of billion to build — as long as they don’t do something dumb like sell it off to a private company like they did the 407.

Making Movies

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We have a bunch of old videos that we took of the boys when they were younger (the video camera died a year ago and we haven’t managed to get it fixed, since it is now almost 9 years old and would probably cost as much to fix as to replace with a much smaller and better unit). I have a thing called a Dazzle, which I have used to transfer some of these videos to the PC. However, the software that comes with it isn’t so great, so to keep the video quality high enough to be watchable (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “good”), the files are monstrously huge. There was one of Ryan’s first bath in the hospital the day after he was born which is about 32 minutes long, and the resulting .avi file was almost 7.5 GB. In total, there are something like 40 GB worth of videos on our machine and I haven’t yet converted most of the video tapes.

I started looking into backing all of this stuff up (videos and pictures primarily), and I’ll write about that later on, but I figured that there had to be a way to reduce the size of these videos without making them unwatchable. I did a bit of googling, and found that the program I was looking for was already on my system: Windows Movie Maker. In a very simple process, I imported a video file, dragged it to the playlist at the bottom, and clicked “save to my disk”. Then I pointed it at the output directory, gave the file a name (why it doesn’t default to the same name as the import file, I don’t know), and clicked “Save”. Each video takes almost as long to convert as it is long, but once it’s done, it’s way smaller, and I can’t see any difference in the quality. The 7.5 GB file turned into 95 MB. 11 videos of Ryan’s first six weeks went from 11.4 GB to 194 MB. Now, the new format is .wmv, which is Windows-specific, but I’m a Windows guy anyway, so that’s fine.

I played around with the video quality setting in Windows Movie Maker, and found that when I played the small video in full-screen mode, the quality degraded quite a bit. I re-converted them to a higher-quality setting, and the pictures are bigger (now they’re about 5% of the original size, rather than about 1%) and take longer to process, but when you watch it full-screen, the quality is pretty good. If I were to burn a DVD with that quality, it wouldn’t be fantastic, but it’d at least be watchable.

So now that these files are small, I can delete the big ones and start converting more of them without worrying about running out of disk space. I can back them up quickly without spending a fortune on bandwidth or storage (or using a hundred DVDs), and I could even post some of them to YouTube for my family to watch if I wanted.

A couple of sports quickies

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Congrats to the Detroit Red Wings on their Stanley Cup victory. Yes, the game-winning goal was ugly, but the ugly ones count just as much as the pretty ones. The Penguins put up a good fight, but the Red Wings were just too dominant. My finals prediction was Penguins in 6, and it ended up Red Wings in 6, so I really only missed by one. I haven’t watched a lot of playoff hockey this year, but I always enjoy watching the final (i.e. Championship) game of hockey or baseball, even if I don’t care who wins it. I watched the last ten minutes of the third period of game 5, and assumed like everyone else that Detroit would win it and that would be it. Also like everyone else, I was stunned when Pittsburgh scored with 35 seconds left, and resolved to watch the end of the game. The first overtime period was amazing, and I missed about half of the second OT because Gail returned from a Board of Education meeting and we chatted about it for a while. Just before the third OT started, I got sleepy and decided to watch the rest from bed, since Gail was going to stay up and work for a while. I was standing in my room brushing my teeth when the winning goal was scored. Last night I played baseball, so by the time I got home and turned the game on, there were only five minutes left in the third, but Pittsburgh scored with a minute and a half left to cut Detroit’s lead to one, and I thought “here we go again — can Detroit be a minute away from the Stanley Cup two games in a row and still lose?” It turns out the answer was no, but damn, that shot that trickled by Osgood with a second left on the clock was awfully close…

I’ve heard from a bunch of hockey people in the last 24 hours that the Penguins time will come, and very soon. With all the pressure that’s on them now, I kinda hope it does. They were “allowed” to lose it this year — even the mighty Edmonton Oilers were swept in their first Cup appearance in 1983 — but with all these analysts talking about them like it’s a given that they will win Cups in five of the next ten seasons, they better win one within the next two or three years, or their confidence might get rocked, and then they’ll go from perennial Cup contender to “they used to be good” before you can say “Ottawa Senators”.

Hey Ozzie Guillen — I need you to do one of two things, OK? Either (1) grow up or (2) shut up. We’re all tired of your childish little tirades. If you can’t keep your head on straight, just keep your mouth shut. Just manage your team, give the press the standard clichés and that’s it. Thanks.

I was working from home today, and I planned on bringing my laptop into the family room this afternoon and working while watching the Jays-Yankees game, but I completely forgot about the game. I left to go pick up Nicholas around 5:00, and turned the game on in the car. When I turned it on, it was 8-6 Toronto, bottom of the ninth, two outs, B.J. Ryan pitching. I figured I’d hear the end of the game before I got to Nicky’s caregiver’s place, and one way or another, I was right. A-Rod, who was on first, took second on defensive indifference, then Matsui his a single up the middle to score him. Now it’s 8-7, but still 2 outs and B.J. Ryan pitching — no problem, right? The next batter is Jason Giambi, who takes two quick strikes as I pull into the driveway. I decided to listen to the next pitch and hope for a strikeout or groundout and the game would be over. Well, the next pitch was a strike, technically, and it did end the game, but not in the way I was hoping. Giambi hit it over the right field fence for a walk-off home run. Yankees win 9-8. Yuck.

Both Shaun Marcum and Dustin McGowan had breakout seasons last year, and I remember thinking before this season started that if they do half as well this year, and none of the pitchers gets injured, then the Jays pitching staff is looking pretty decent. Well, Marcum and McGowan are both pitching just as well as last year if not better, Halladay has been his normal self (dominant pitcher, complete games all over the place, but he could be 10-3 instead of 7-5 if he had more run support), and A.J. Burnett has been, well, A.J. Burnett — sometimes unhittable, sometimes quite ordinary. All four are at or above .500, and the highest ERA of the four of them is Burnett’s respectable 4.32. If all that wasn’t enough, along comes Jesse Litsch, the former Tampa Bay bat boy, who’s currently 7-2 with an ERA under 3 ½. The Jays quite possibly may have the best starting rotation in the game.

Fire, and the Goblet thereof

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My kids, like millions of other kids worldwide, love the whole Harry Potter world. Well, they both love the movies (though they haven’t seen Order of the Phoenix yet), and Ryan loves the books as well. We started reading the first book to them sometime last year, and Nicholas (who turned six last Saturday — happy birthday munchkin!) tried to listen for a while but quickly got bored, and by the time we were halfway through the book, he’d given up listening altogether. Ryan, however, listened intently right up until we finished the seventh book a few weeks ago.

We watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the other day. I think it’s my least favourite of all the movies thus far (Chamber of Secrets is probably my favourite), but I still enjoyed it. One puzzling thing about that book/movie is the wonderfully-named Fleur Delacour — I don’t remember the book so much, but in the movie, very little is said about her magical ability, just her beauty. Presumably she’s very magically talented, or she wouldn’t have been chosen for the Triwizard tournament. However once in the tournament, she withdraws from the second task, and in the third task, after wandering around the maze looking terrified, she is “eaten” by the maze itself, forcing Harry to save her. Rowling made the main female character, Hermione, the smartest student in her year, and also made all of the chasers on the Gryffindor Quidditch team female, so it seems odd that she decided to make the only female champion the weakest of the four — including Harry, who is three years younger.

Another thing that puzzled me about the Triwizard tournament is the maze itself. Other than trying not to “lose yourself” (as Dumbledore says) and trying to avoid those who have, it’s just a maze. The first task was to get past a dragon (though it would have been more fair if all four of them had had to face the same type of dragon), and the second required them to breathe underwater for an hour and get past mer-people and grindylows, and the third one is just a maze? Sure, it’s a big maze, but that doesn’t require strong magical skill, just a good memory and a lot of luck.

The most puzzling thing, however, is the entire premise of the story. Barty Crouch Jr. kidnaps Moody, one of the most powerful aurors around, and then takes his place using polyjuice potion for the entire school year (fooling Dumbledore, who’s known Moody for many years), and bewitches the Goblet of Fire to spit out Harry’s name, and essentially arranges all three tasks so that Harry will win, and turns the Triwizard Cup into a portkey, all so that Harry will touch the Cup and be transported to the graveyard where the spell to bring Voldemort back will be performed. Why not make something else a portkey and just get Harry to touch it? Why not impersonate Moody for ten minutes and say “Harry, come to my office”, and then kidnap Harry and take him to the graveyard? And why does Cedric come out of Voldemort’s wand during the battle? Voldemort didn’t kill Cedric, Wormtail did.

Fleur’s name is just one of a number of very clever names in the Potter world: her school Beauxbatons, her headmistress Mme. Maxime, the “northern European” school Durmstrang, Herbology professor Sprout, the medium Sybill Trelawney, the werewolf Remus Lupin, and Lucius and Draco Malfoy, to name but a few. The wizard prison Azkaban sounds kind of like Alcatraz — both prisons are on islands, and both had the reputation of being escape-proof. In the seventh book, there was reference to another wizard prison called Nurmengard, and I was actually a little uncomfortable with how close that name was to that of Nuremburg. Anyway, I think my favourite name in the whole series is that of one of the members of the Order of the Phoenix. It’s not particularly meaningful (or maybe it is and I just haven’t noticed), but I just love saying the name: Kingsley Shacklebolt.

Leafs looking for a coach? Why not a GM first?

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According to this article, the Leafs have begun contacting candidates for the vacant head coach position. Now, they also have a vacant GM position and normally, you’d fill the GM position and let him pick his own coach, but they haven’t named a GM. It’s possible that they are close to hiring the GM but just haven’t announced it yet, but in that case, it wouldn’t be Fletcher doing the search for the coach, it would be the new GM.

This only makes sense to me if they have decided that they will not have a new GM chosen before the start of next season. Fletcher can continue as interim GM until then, but they still need a coach. It seems unlikely that they will hire a new GM midway through the season, so Fletcher may continue as the interim GM for a year (though he’s already said he wouldn’t be here that long), and then next off-season they will hire a full-time GM. Hey, whaddaya know, Brian Burke is only under contract with the Ducks for one more year!

I don’t know why the Toronto media is portraying Burke like the saviour of the Leafs. It’s not like he put the Stanley Cup-winning Ducks together, that was mostly Bryan Murray’s doing. Other than the one season with the Ducks, he’s never seen the Cup finals as a GM.

Bottom line: I don’t know what the hell the Leafs are doing. What else is new.

Dentistry is weird

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The man sits me down in a chair, sticks a needle in my mouth, holds it there for about an hour and a half, then takes it out and waits. After a few minutes, he starts to drill. When it start hurting, he gives me another needle, waits a few minutes, and continues drilling. Again it starts hurting and again he gives me a needle. Finally, after he’s drilled away half my tooth, he tells me that I’m going to have to come back again so he can give me more needles and drill some more, just enough to take the root out and kill the tooth. Then I pay for this service, with the knowledge that I’ll have to pay more when I come in for the nerve-ripping-out ceremony.

After forty minutes of needles, pain and discomfort, all of which I paid for, and the promise that I have to come back for more, what do I say to him?

“Thank you.”