News You Can Bruise for 2005 May 30

So I went to the dentist to get a crown put on the tooth that's had a temporary filling for three years, and he didn't seem incredibly impressed with the job my braces did straightening my teeth. Personally I think my mutant tooth is still a little crooked but on the whole they're straight enough. Anyway, he tried to upsell me on some gumline cosmetic surgery that was just plain weird.

Here's a rendition of my two upper front teeth with the gumline:

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As you can see from my state-of-the-art diagram, the gumline above the mutant tooth is higher than the rest of my gumline. That pesky tooth is weird enough to guarantee I'll never be in a cereal commercial, but it's not a big deal. This is where the upsell came in. The reason it was weird was that I'd think cosmetic surgery might be used to restore my gumline to the population average, making it look like this:

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But it seemed like my dentist was proposing raising the other tooth's gumline, bringing me further from the population average for the sake of local symmetry:

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And making me look like a rabbit. No thanks. Of course, we've already established that I know nothing about teeth or how they're supposed to go into the mouth of Homo sapiens, so maybe that gumline isn't as weird as it looks.