Big Floss perpetuates big dental lie

We've heard it a million times (or at least every six months): Floss. Floss. Floss.

Daily flossing will save your teeth.

It will prevent heart problems.

It will improve your life.

The value of flossing has been considered fact – as widely accepted as the need for exercise, that sitting too close to the TV makes your eyes rectangular and that swallowing apple seeds leads to trees in your stomach.

Turns out it's not necessarily true.

A recent damning article by The Associated Press revealed that there is no scientific evidence that flossing helps prevent cavities. None. Just like there's no scientific evidence that if you are hit in the back while crossing your eyes, they'll stay that way.

The federal government has recommended flossing since 1979, which is the same time it issued the controversial warning that disco dancing could be fatal, which was subsequently disproved by Gloria Gaynor's anthem,"I Will Survive."

The floss news was shocking, particularly since it also isn't proven to reduce plaque.

Leading to the question: What could be behind this wall of lies?

Big Floss.

The worldwide amalgamation of floss producers. Seriously. Do you realize that the global market for floss will hit $2 billion per year in 2017?

That's a lot of string, some of it is waxed, most of it wasted by being wrapped around fingers. And Big Floss realizes that if the public knew that the use of it didn't make a difference, it could create a huge cavity in industry earnings.

When The AP contacted the henchmen of Big Floss – including Procter and Gamble and Johnson and Johnson – they either declined comment or acted like they had a sore tooth and couldn't talk. Neither is impressive.

According to The AP's article, Wayne Aldredge, president of the American Academy of Periodontology, acknowledged the weak scientific evidence and the brief duration of many studies. But he urged patients to floss to help avoid gum disease with a strange analogy.

"It's like building a house and not painting two sides of it," he said. "Ultimately those two sides are going to rot away quicker."

Says who? Big Paint?

Aldredge also said that the impact of floss might be clearer if researchers focused on patients at the highest risk of gum disease, such as diabetics and smokers.

That's . . . wait, what? DIABETICS ARE AT HIGHER RISK FOR GUM DISEASE?

This just turned into a full-fledged panic attack. As a diabetic since age 14, I'm . . . wait a second. Do they have any evidence that proves that? Or is Big Floss just trying to once again take advantage of diabetics?

Let's get back on point. In addition to Big Floss, I assume that dental hygienists play a role in this conspiracy.

Think about their jobs. They're paid well, but they spend the day cleaning our teeth. At the end of an hour scraping gunk off someone's teeth, I suspect you want to make a point, if only to get out your aggression.

Dental hygienists always tell us to floss more. They always act like we're slobs. (Or maybe that's just me).

Might hygienists be in cahoots with Big Floss? I fear it's possible.

Still . . .

Despite the stunning lack of evidence that flossing helps, I will likely keep flossing. And so will you.

We'll do it for the same reason we stopped eating apple seeds when we were old enough to know better.

There may be no scientific evidence that apple trees can grow in our stomachs, but why take a chance?

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

I want to be famous enough for an AP obit

Early in my journalism career, it became a running joke: I could parody obituaries written by The Associated Press.

They always, always, always started the same way: The person's name, why they were meaningful, the word "died" and the day. Then a period. Then a three-word sentence, saying their age.

Bing Crosby, who partnered with Bob Hope on a series of "On The Road" movies and was one of America's greatest crooners, died Sunday. He was 73.

Harry Caray, the play-by-play voice for more than five decades for four major league baseball teams, died Tuesday. He was 81.

Always the same. Which got me to thinking: What would my obit say? Perhaps more interestingly, what would be a cool obit to have?

Again, this isn't about the obituary that will run in the local paper ("Brad was a beloved husband, father and master to his dogs, with whom he played cards until his last days . . ."). This is about having a claim to fame that is enough to get you an obituary by The Associated Press. And having that claim to fame be something that people enjoy.

Right now, it would most likely be something like this: Brad Stanhope, who wrote columns about pet monkeys, space travel, his mechanical ineptitude and ironically, obituaries, died Tuesday. He was 53.

Wait. That's how old I am? I better get busy! This is getting fairly close to being practical, not whimsical!

Anyway, think about for what most of us would like to be remembered, which is really what this is about. Of course there are only so many Mother Teresas or Jonas Salks or Steve Jobses, so it's more likely that most of us will be remembered for something unique, not for making a worldwide change. My choice?

Something quirky enough that everyone connects with it, but not so much that I got bugged about it all the time.

Like Bette Nesmith Graham. You know, the mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, but more importantly, the inventor of Liquid Paper. That's the stuff we used to "paint" on paper when we made a mistake with our typewriters, which were . . . oh, never mind. But when Bette Nesmith Graham died in 1980, you can bet her obituary read "Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper and was the mother of Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, died Tuesday. She was 56." (What? 56? I've got to get busy!)

That's a good example. So is Larry Waters.

You remember him. He's the guy who tied a bunch of weather balloons to his lawn chair and floated at 15,000 feet above Los Angeles, using a pellet gun to shoot the balloons so he could come down. He dropped the gun and got tangled in power lines, causing a brief blackout.

His obit? "Larry Waters, who tied weather balloons to a lawn chair and floated 15,000 feet above Los Angeles in 1982, died Tuesday. He was 44." (What? I'm on borrowed time?)

You get the point: While many of us are past the point of being a president or rock star or famous actor or discovering the cure to a dreaded disease, we still hold onto the hope that we'll do something that makes us worthy of an obituary by a wire news service.

So here's my dream: "Brad Stanhope, who famously had a pet monkey that served as his butler and later drove a flying car to work, died Monday. He was 153."

I've got plenty of time!

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Musings on great art, the color palette

Mrs. Brad was talking with a friend and I was listening.

Except it sounded like gibberish: They were discussing art.

I like art. Specifically, I like Art Howe, Art Monk, Art Garfunkel and Art Linkletter. But on a different level, I enjoy works of art. The statue of David. The statue of Willie Mays. The painting of dogs playing poker. Finding Waldo. All the great art of the world.

But colors? They make me laugh.

In the discussion referenced earlier, Mrs. Brad and her friend were looking at a color palette, discussing the names. As if they made sense.

Sap green. Payne's gray. Cadmium yellow light. Quina-cridone magenta. (To be fair, they didn't say those. I found those on a color wheel. But they said words like that.)

It was all mumbo jumbo, which is typical. Everybody takes what we understand and makes it complicated.

It's like medicine, where they come up with drugs that start with X or Z to treat a malady that has a multisyllabic name ("Take new Xaxoplaxin, to treat the symptoms of Ribertosom Syndrome.")

Similarly, listen to the sideline reporter at a sports event, explaining how your favorite player has an abrasion on his head and a contusion on his hip. Oh no! It's serious: a scrape on his face and a bruised hip.

Anyway, it's the same thing with colors, although there's apparently a reason for it.

Turns out that, contrary to what I believed in my childhood, there are more than 64 colors.

Seriously. Shocking, right?

Sixty-four seemed like a lot – and that was the outer limit, of course, because that was size of the Mac Daddy of crayon boxes, which only rich or artistic kids possessed. The 64-crayon box with a sharpener? To me, that must have included every conceivable color, a fact made obvious by the inclusion of not just blue, but sky blue and blue-green.

(We can't ignore, of course, the "flesh" crayon. Not only was that racist, it was wrong. That was not even my skin color. And it creeped me out to call it "flesh," which seemed like something a monster would eat.)

Anyway, it turns out there are more than 64 colors. And it turns out that the naming committee for the colors has the freedom to go crazy.

Cerulean blue, by the way, is next to patholo blue on our palette – which actually is a color-mixing guide. In other words, it allows you to combine burnt sienna with raw umber and come up with a new color (medium slumber?).

You want your house to be white? Do you mean eggshell, alabaster or chiffon porcelain?

That's a blue shirt? Do you mean navy, Aegean, azure, admiral or arctic?

And those are the fundamental colors – the ones that Big Paint, the conglomeration of major paint producers, largely agree on.

Here's all I know: When Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was painting, he probably didn't use terms like eggshell, raw umber and patholo blue. The great Coolidge likely used white, brown and blue on his masterpiece.

Who's he? Oh, I guess I get to play the role of art expert now: Coolidge, of course, was the American genius who painted the "Dogs Playing Poker" series starting in the 1890s.

Sap green, indeed.

Brad Stanhope is a noted art critic and former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

What price safety? Maybe we should ask Graham

Safety first. Unless, of course, it makes you look like Graham, because sometimes safety is overrated.

Even car safety.

First, a caveat: I'm not talking about safety belts (why wouldn't you wear them?) or air bags (one of the great advances of modern society). I don't mean vehicles that are determined to be particularly safe (I can't afford a Hummer and don't have a Subaru or Volvo, but I respect them). I look forward to the self-driving cars. Until then, I would be OK with wearing a helmet while driving if someone I respected said it was a difference-maker.

Safety is important. But if you're talking about having a body designed to survive car crashes? No thanks.

Sound crazy? You haven't met the aforementioned Graham.

Yes, Graham.

He's the interactive, life-sized sculpture version of a human designed by an Australian artist out of silicone and hair (like Pamela Anderson!) to represent how a human could best survive car crashes.

It begs this question: In an era when athletes take performance-enhancing drugs to excel at their sport, does it make sense for a serious commuter to undergo surgery to be able to survive any car crash?

You might want to look at Graham before you answer.

The Aussie artist, named Patricia Piccinini, consulted with trauma surgeons (my theory: One was Aussie singer Rick Springfield, who played Dr. Noah Drake in the 1980s on TV's "General Hospital") about what would help a human survive a car wreck.

The result? Graham. He looks like the missing link, even on his website in which he appears wearing only gym shorts: www.meetgraham.com.au.

Graham has an extra-thick rib cage with air sacs to help absorb the blow of a collision. He has a flattened face and larger skull. He has thicker skin (which might come in handy when people make fun of him). Graham's legs are multiple-jointed, going both ways. They end with hooves.

Graham might survive a car crash, but his social life would be a train wreck.

A CNN.com article about Graham quoted David Logan, a crash investigation expert at a research center in Melbourne, as saying, "It's really about understanding the physics behind road crashes, and (Piccinini) did a fantastic job of interpreting that and creating something that is really able to be digested by anyone from what is some quite complex physics."

Well, maybe.

Once I saw Graham, I couldn't stop thinking of what his life would be like. On the worst days of my life, I look like a male model next to Graham.

It's interesting to think about what could make us more able to survive auto accidents (which kill 30,000 Americans a year) and nearly any advance is a good one.

But Piccinini's creation – Fordenstein? – brings to mind wisdom shared by Richie Cunningham in a classic episode of "Happy Days," when he spurned his father's desire to move to a bomb shelter due to fear of nuclear war: "I'd rather live now than just survive later."

Pretty deep, right?

Graham's appearance, however, brought a more salient observation by my friend Teresa.

"He might survive a car crash," she said. "But he'd never survive middle school."

Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.