Dental Institute

Last night I went out with my parents to Pizza Express. To start with I had garlic bread with mozarella cheese, and then I had a Four Seasons pizza (a pizza with a different topping on each quarter: mushrooms, pepperoni, plain cheese and tomato, and anchovies and capers), and for dessert I had a Chocolate Glory gelato (basically ice-cream covered with chocolate sauce and squares of chocolate fudge cake). It was really nice.

Back home I watched an episode of How TV Ruined Your Life which this week dealt with "Knowledge" and discussed how TV dealt with news and factual programming, from the early days of the TV news (when it was just still images, occasional diagrams and voice-over narration, because the powers that be felt like film footage and announcers would trivialise current events) and very soberly presented academic documentaries to the current docu-soaps and celebrity presenters and flashy rolling news, that try to make it really exciting and dynamic. It also managed to take in the moralising on 80s kid's cartoon shows like He-Man and Thundercats, and a bizarre "mocumentary" from 1992 called GhostWatch which was basically a fictional horror drama for Halloween about a haunted house, but was presented as a non-fiction documentary hosted by well-known presenters. People at the time didn't realise it was make-believe and were genuinely terrified and angry about the show. Seen today it's pretty much a forerunner of The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. The episode itself managed to be genuinely informative and also extremely funny.

Later on I watched a documentary called The Return of A Clockwork Orange, which was made in 2000 to commemorate the re-release of A Clockwork Orange in Britain. Stanley Kubrick, who directed A Clockwork Orange, withdrew the film from Britain and it was not available to view legally in Britain until after Kubrick's death in 1999. The movie was incredibly controversial in Britain when it was first released due to the violence. For three decades it was the most high-profile banned movie in Britain and was trotted out in endless magazine and newspaper articles, documentaries and so on about violent movies. It's now readily available in Britain though and is frequently shown in TV there. I remember a few months after Kubrick's death I arranged a tribute evening in the Student Union at college and me and another guy promoted and showed The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange. By the time the last movie came on it was literally standing room only. The place was packed out. That was a great night.

Today I went up to the Dental Institute. The bus broke down on the way, so I had to run up to the Institute and then I got lost in the building, but I maanged to get there in the nick of time. In the end they were running late anyway so it didn't really matter. I had my right wisdom tooth taken out in November 2009 and this was basically a review appointment to see how it had been in the meantime and whether I needed my other tooth taken out. In the end the extraction had completely healed up and the other wisdom tooth, while coming in at an angle wasn't causing any trouble to the tooth in front. For now at least I don't need it taken out. The dentist who was dealing with me was this really cute Spanish woman which helped.

I went along to the comic-book store afterwards and got: Lil Depressed Boy issues 1 and 2, Batman Incorporated issue 3, Batman and Robin issue 20, Fables are Forever issue 2, Spawn issue 204, X23 issue 7, Spider-Man issue 155, iZombie issue 11 and Venom issue 1.

A Filling

Last night I was watching a couple of epsiodes of Twin Peaks, which were really good. They were among the darkest episodes of the series that I've yet seen but they did have some great comedy moments in as well, especially David Lynch appearing as the loud FBI Chief. I saw a really good ice hockey game last night between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Penguins won five to four.

I took the day off work today and went up to the Cineworld cinema and saw Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese. The film, which was based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, takes place in 1954 where two US Marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo) travel to an institution for the criminally insane on Shutter Island just off the Boston harbour to investigate the mysterious disappearance of an inmate. It was a very good film and very well-made it also followed the book very closely.

After the movie I wandered around for awhile before heading up to the dentist. I had to get a filling put in due to some decay on one of my teeth that had been revealed after my wisdome tooth was extracted last November. I had to get about three or four injections in my mouth to anaesthetise it and the whole thing took about forty five minutes. My mouth is still really numb and I know that it will be painful once the anaesthetics wear off. The dentist said that I would probably need to take pain-killers for the next two days.

Tooth Extraction

On Sunday night I got up to 18,604 words on NaNoWriMo. I wasn't really able to do anything to it last night.

On Sunday night I watched the movies The Notorious Bettie Page, directed by Mary Harron, which starred Gretchen Mol as the controversial 1950s pin-up model Bettie Page. It was a very stylise movie and very entertaining. Following that I watched a 1949 movie called All the King's Men, directed by Robert Rossen and based on a novel by Robert Penn Warren, which starred Broderick Crawford as an honest, "man of the people" politician who runs for office vowing to stamp out political corruption, however, once he gets elected he starts behaving worse, more brutal and more corrupt, than the politicians he replaced.

Yesterday morning I went along to the Dental Surgery Institute to get my wisdom tooth removed. Basically the procedure was to cut open my gum, drill into the bone and kind of lever my tooth out. However, apparently the tooth was so impacted, they had to cut it into two. I was given a local anaesthetic, which was like four injections into my mouth, so although I was aware of what was happening, I coudn't feel any pain. The whole thing took about forty minutes.

After the operation I went to my parent's house where I mostly sat around and watched episodes of The Wire. I also watched the movies Starter for 10, directed by Tom Vaghan, about a student (played by James McAvoy) at Bristol University who gets the chance to appear on the popular TV quiz show University Challenge. It was very funny, and An American Werewolf in London, directed by John Landis, about two American hikers who are attacked by a werewolf on the moors in England. That is a really good film.

I stayed the night at my parent's and just recently got back. I've been on painkillers since the operation, and it has been sore and uncomfortable most of the time. I've not really been able to eat either.

I'm off work for the rest of the week and I hope it gets better soon.