Witz Pickz: Toothbrush Knowledge and MORE!

You never realize how little you know about toothbrushes until you have to buy one. Even then, you really don't know how little knowledge you have about the subject until you actually brush your teeth. As you stare at the toothbrush rack in Target, facts drift through your mind, your filter down as your brain searches for simply any answers with "toothbrush" in the title. What you get is an array of half-truths or hearsay gathered from all the years you've had on this Earth. Dentists don't help the matter at all. Sure, they occasionally give you some brushing advice or the toothbrush down-low, but then they also GIVE YOU A TOOTHBRUSH. So I learn nothing other than, "If I want a toothbrush, I need someone with latex gloves and a mask to brush my teeth for me." So television becomes the number one memory accessible source of information. Here's what I know about teeth and teeth related subjects based on television:

-Gingivitis is worse than Hitler and sneakier than Osama Bin Laden.
-I'd be way better at brushing my teeth if my teeth were animated and I had a cheek-free view.
-Oral B is the shit. I just know this, I don't know why.
-When I brush, bubbles should appear and bristles should get down into my gums
-Tartar is not a palindrome even though I sometimes think it is.

So armed with next to nothing, I had to buy a toothbrush. I'll explain why I didn't have my old one another time, but it ends with the moral that Southwest Airlines still rules. I looked and a fact struck me, "Harder bristles are better." Ok, seems fair-- no pain, no gain and whatnot. So I search and search but all I see are soft, soft, soft. I finally find a medium, made by Oral B, and decide this is the one for me. It was two bucks, and had a grip, which is apparently a big deal. I'm not entirely sure why these sticks need grips, because I'm pretty capable of holding something firmly in my hand while moving it, but I guess some people lose their handle and end up stabbing themselves in the back of the throat or the gums. So I'm psyched about my grip.

I go home and brush my teeth at the appropriate time. The first time, it hurts, but I think, "Whatever, my gums are weak and unused to the medium-ness of this brush." Bleeding occurs. The next time I brush my teeth, I spit some more blood, but only feel stronger for it. The next time I brush, everything just basically hurts, and I start to get the idea that something is wrong. My girlfriend gets back to the apartment and asks what I'm doing. I tell her that I'm brushing with my new medium strength toothbrush. She looks at me like I'm insane tells me that you're supposed to brush with SOFT BRISTLES. Interesting, because let me tell you something I was starting to realize about "medium bristles." There is nothing MEDIUM about them. It should have occurred to me that since the store, out of forty or so brushes, didn't have a single HARD bristle brush, medium was the new hard. Apparently they've started using Starbucks thinking. small is Tall, medium is Grande, and hard is Venti. Only they went more like, Small is safe, medium is brutally painful, and hard is by prescription only for monsters and SF tigers.

So this morning was my last time using the "medium" bristled toothbrush. I have acquired a soft brush and can only pray that in time, my gums will forgive me. There is a lot of healing that has to happen, both physically and spiritually, but I will take this lesson to heart and can only hope that I can spread the word to more before they make the same mistake. SOFT TOOTHBRUSHES PEOPLE.

Californication:
I don't know why, but I love David Duchovny. Maybe it's because I didn't care one way or the other about him while he was in The X-Files, but now anything he does is impossible NOT to compare to his work on that show. So when he made Evolution, it was David Duchovny of The X-Files in Evolution. When he was in Zoolander, everybody got psyched, because that was Mulder in ZOOLANDER. I think the guy's a great actor, and so I decided to checkout Californication via some online tv-link sites while I sat at home around the holidays. I learned two things. 1) Californication is very well done, the writing is good, Duchovny is excellent, and I like the plot and the characters a lot. 2) You know a show is dirty when you hear someone say, "Girl, you haven't had a wax in months-- you must have some crazy hippie bush goin' on down there!" and you aren't on edge that your parents might walk in and make things awkward. Because a line like that was mild. It was mild and it wasn't graphic. Whereas, while watching the show in my room, with the door closed so cats wouldn't come in and make me sneeze, I was constantly nervous that my parents would hear one of the many many sex scenes and assume that I was watching porn. That's the kind of show it is. David Duchovny got sick of cold, stoic Scully and wanted some of Showtime's finest. So that's what he got-- topless sex scenes, lots of naked butts, and a whole lot of moaning. By the end of the season I was just crossing my fingers that my parents didn't walk in right during the Tag Teaming A Groupie With The Bald Guy From Sex And the City scene. If they had walked in, they would have seen some pretty graphic, but ultimately legitimately placed and plot relevant sex. If they looked deeper, so to speak, they would have discovered some very good dialogue, plot entanglements, and emotionally enticing material. Duchovny's character is a self-loathing novelist, and during one particular plot line, I found myself enraged at the antagonist to the point that I felt I had been personally affronted. That's good writing. And Californication is a good show that will be back for another season. Not that anybody gets Showtime.

DEXTER: WILL BE ON CBS! They are editing episodes for the more egregiously over the top content and will be airing season one soon. This might be the one good thing that comes out of the WGA strike, although seeing David Letterman with a beard and finally understanding his lonely, half-insane, crackpot identity is a close second.

You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem:
This was one of those books that had me saying, "I bet this book was good if I was smart enough to figure it out." I don't think it was a particularly brilliant novel, and it certainly wasn't difficult to get through, but I constantly felt like I was missing some subtext that would have made it great. I mean, I followed the basic metaphor and symbolism, but sometimes you just hope that books are deeper than the meaning you grasp, if only because that initial meaning isn't all the brilliant and the author usually is. Still, after loving Motherless Brooklyn and then failing four times to complete reading Fortress of Solitude, this 250 page read was welcome, interesting, and enjoyable.

Radio Show Tonight!,
Witz