Thursday, 12 July 2012
Today I had my six-month dental check-up.
When the dentist came in and took over from the hygienist for a few minutes, I told him I had a chip on one of my molars. I said it had just happened a few days ago, and I don’t even know how I chipped it. My tongue just went over there and noticed the rough spot, and I’ve been favoring it ever since. He took a look, noted that chipping of the back molars was common when people have such a cusp, and suggested we just leave it alone. Fine with me.
He walked away, and the hygienist told me my molars (teeth #3 and #14) have a Cusp of Carabelli.
I felt the tooth on the other side of my mouth and noticed she was right. “Not everybody has them,” she said. Wow! I’ve lived all this time and never knew I had two Cusps of Carabelli. This was astounding. It’s like when I noticed that not everyone has hanging earlobes, or that some people have hairlines that come to a widow’s peak.
After several back-and-forth movements of my tongue to study this new-found part of my body, I asked the hygienist: “Does it give me any special powers?”
I think it was a good question – maybe I can walk through walls, but only if my tongue is touching one of the cusps at that moment. Maybe possession of a pair of cusps means that I could be one of Professor Xavier’s X-men.
The hygienist laughed, and said that unfortunately it didn’t endow me with any special powers. Too bad. I was hoping that ‘with great cusps of Carabelli comes great responsibility.’
Friday, 13 July 2012
So, here’s an article from Gallop regarding their recent (and recurring) survey.
Basically, every so often, they poll Americans on their willingness to vote for candidates with certain traits. They break it down my age group, too, so you can see how the respondants’ ages affects their answer (or, correlates).
Of special interest this year, if the respondants’ willingness to vote for a Mormon. If you scroll down in that article, you’ll see that 72% of people self-identifying as Democrats would vote for a Mormon, while 90% of Republicans said they would. This is amazing, because in most other cases, Democrats are more open-minded here; they’re more willing to vote for a woman, a black person, an atheist, a Muslim, and a gay person. Republicans are more willing to vote for a Jew or Catholic…but only just barely (3% and 2%, repectively). But when it comes to Mormons, they’re 18 percentage points ‘ahead’ in their tolerance.
Why is that?
Simple, says ElectoralVote. Accoring to this brief article, published today…
While interesting, what the poll really says is what people are willing to tell a pollster, rather than how they would actually vote. Although 18% of the respondents said that would not vote for a Mormon, when push comes to shove (and the shoving date is Nov. 6, 2012), given a choice between a white, Republican Mormon and a black, Democratic generic Protestant, it remains to be seen whether the expressed bigotry against Mormons dominates. It is also possible that some of the anti-Mormon voters rationalize their vote by convincing themselves that Obama is a Muslim, which in their eyes is even worse.
For the most part, I think this is an accurate assessment, though I also think it’s safe to say that when push comes to shove, 18% of Republicans still will not vote for Romney. Many probably just won’t vote. Some will write-in a candidate or leave it blank. Others will opt for Obama. I don’t think this is necessarily because Romney is Mormon, it’s simply because they maybe don’t like the guy.