Thursday, 19 June 2014

My Lords and Ladies and Dentists

I treated myself to a new crown yesterday.
What does £495 buy you nowadays? I bet you're wondering.
Well it was so cheap (I know that's what you are thinking ) because of
a 20% discount due to a wonderful dental plan I'm in.

I was rather looking forward to my 20% reduction to £400 but I was
reliably informed that the full price was a suspiciously un-round
£618.
And for this I received one Empress Crown.
No, it doesn't come with land rights or any such duchy-dom.
Not so much as the key to Duke Street or a lowly cucumber sandwich
with.. oh I don't know... Princess Eugenie (is that right?)

It's a pretend tooth, you see.
This is a creature of zirconium.
Yes that's what I thought - the same zirconium you get in cheap
jewellery. The same stuff Ratner said was crap.
There can't be two zirconiums, can there?
Zirconia?
That sounds like something Picard and The Next Generation (No, that's
not a band, Grandma, get with it!) would have gone after - a stone's
throw from Cardassia perhaps.

No, it's the necessary material for a dental crown. Or rather the
bottom bit of one. And not the good type you wear on your head,
during official engagements and bar mitzvahs.

But is a curiosity, I thought, that it is named after a woman.

A dental crown of course is fake, manufactured to be particularly
hard, designed to apply pressure and bite. The sort of thing you can't
get out of your head without some considerable difficulty.

No... it's hard to imagine why they named it so.

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