mahiwaga

So I’ve been having tooth pain for a couple of weeks now, and I was worried I had a cavity, so I went to see the dentist.

The good news: no cavities.

The bad news: it’s probably dentin hypersensitivity.

The dentist recommended that I start using a toothpaste for sensitive teeth: something like Sensodyne or Colgate Sensitive. The active ingredient of these is potassium nitrate—saltpeter (and the mechanism of action is by desensitizing the nerve endings(!)) but while I was at the grocery, I found Crest Pro-Health Sensitive + Enamel Shield, and its active ingredient is stannous fluoride (SnF₂) (It’s mechanism of action is by plugging dentin tubules or something….)

Which got me thinking about Stannis Baratheon from A Song of Ice and Fire. Given that he is generally portrayed as cold-hearted and callous, I started wondering if GRRM is deliberately alluding to the Tin Man from A Wizard of Oz (“If I only had a heart….”)

Which got me thinking about the Baratheon brothers in general, and how Robert could be the Scarecrow (“If I only had a brain…”) and Renly (given his flight from King’s Landing in A Game of Thrones that left Beheaddard Stark in the lurch, and his general propensity of avoiding direct confrontation) could be the Lion (“If I only had courage…”)

So I’m still converting over old blog posts to Jekyll and I’ve been tagging them, and it occurred to me that using the tag #epic fail is probably anachronistic, at least in older entries.

Turns out using “fail” as a noun (or interjection) (in place of “failure”) was attested to in 2003 (in the Urban Dictionary), although I’m still trying to pinpoint when the phrase “epic fail” began to be used. (Urban Dictionary’s top definition for epic fail is from 2008.)