Except the Tooth Fairy is just gross. Did you know that in some places dentists just stuffed extracted teeth into a hole in the wall, and when their buildings are torn down, workers find piles of old teeth?
That’s just nightmarish. Those are human remains, you know.
Thanks for the nightmare fodder. You can rock me to sleep tonight.
I saw a jar of teeth at a dentist’s office one time and it grossed me out.
In her yellowing, cavity-ridden citadel, the Tooth Fairy has heard the clinking of those long-hidden teeth. She is coming for them. She will not be denied.
Well, those caches will give paleontologists of the future something to think about.
And now I want to watch Hogfather again.
I had a lovely necklace of my wisdom teeth when I was a teenager.
Dumping stuff in walls is a tradition that has been around since the invention of hollow walls. When my bathroom was redone, the contractor found about 500 safety razor blades in the wall under the cutout for the old (plastered over before me) medicine cabinet/mirror above the sink. A woman up the street was getting a new kitchen and found about 20 pounds of broken mason jars divided among four spaces between wall studs. When I was in college, the administration building (an old farm house / speakeasy / whorehouse) had some work done to fix a leak. And twenty bottles of Cuban rum were hiding in the wall.
Okay, teeth surprises me. And weirds me out a little.
So that’s what Massachusetts looks like!
With those piles, we easily have enough influence over children to erase their belief in Santa, a perfect complement to your prior post. Just be wary of loads of small gods popping out of the woodwork to soak up the spare belief.
It could have been worse ,a vets office for example .They have got to put those DBs somewhere
We lived in an old farm house and the kitchen extension of the late 1700’s had, in order to deter rats, the space between the kitchen ceiling and the floor of the bedroom above filled with broken sherry bottles in the hope they’d not be able to move through the space without cutting themselves badly.
They may still be there!
All the empties under the floorboards?
Rats.
It’s because of the rats.
Not a new shortcut for dentists to take either, I saw a program once where archeologists were able to identify a Roman dentist office by the huge pile of extracted teeth under the site.
It’s like those slots they used to put in the wall for disposing of old razor blades… Like, why would they do that?
Why are they not disposing of biological waste in the way doctors and hospitals have to? Is this a money-saving thing? But if so why not dispose of in the garbage? So many questions…
mrquotidian @14:
Old fashioned razor blades are difficult to dispose of safely.
One of my hobbies is building plastic models. Fine-scale armour and airplanes. Sometimes I have to fill a seam with putty and then sand and polish it smooth. Which obliterates the panel lines and rivet detail. I can use a ponce-wheel to replace the rivets. I use a razor knife (a double edged safety razor blade, slid into a split steel tube with a tightening nut, and mounted in a wooden handle) to scribe the recessed panel lines back onto the surface of the model. When the blade begins to dull, I replace it. I then wrap the old blade in masking tape, enough tape so it becomes a tape tube, and then throw it away. No way would I put that in the trash can as I would be risking cutting myself or, worse, cutting the hand of one of the waste collectors. So, yeah, the hole in the wall for disposing of old razor blades really does make sense. Today’s razors, most of them, use cartridge razors which are not nearly as dangerous when it comes to shaving or disposal.
@16 How come you are not using and slicing your thumb with a Swann – Morton scalpel No 11 blade like the rest of us model makers ?
nomdeplume@15–
Dentists do have to dispose of medical waste safely, like other health professionals. But this building was a dentist’s office from 1900-1930, well before the era of modern practice standards.
Hmm I just realised my poor syntax makes it look like I was calling health professionals “medical waste”. Possibly true in some cases.
@18 thanks Chris, but even so…
@16 putting them in a wall isn’t disposing of them, just leaving the problem to someone else.
#10 @davidc1 Some horse people have some weird superstitions about disposal of the testicles after castration. The most common one seems to be throwing them up on the roof of the barn. Another one is if you want the horse to be fast, throw the testicles far away, as the horse will forever be chasing after them. Or you can toss one to the east and one to the west (but don’t look to see where they land!). There’s also a superstition about nailing the hippomane to the foaling shed, but I’m not sure why. For luck, or something. Horse people have more superstitions (often contradictory) about everything horse-related than you can shake a white-socked leg at.
ridana@21–
I think we can all agree that it’s bad luck to lose your testicles.
Interesting in that both “Hogfather” and “Rise of the Guardians” had major plot lines about the Tooth Fairy and the power of the teeth.
nomdeplume@20–
Agreed. Even accounting for past practices it’s still grotesque nightmare fuel. Pre-1930 I doubt there was any established medical waste disposal industry, so I expect there are lots of Cronenbergian discoveries to be made near old dentists’ and doctors’ offices.
davidc1 @17:
I have five different X-Acto knives and about 100 blades in at least ten different configurations. I have the razor saw. I have a small clasp knife. I have two old-fashioned scalpels. I have an old Testor’s track saw. I have four hacksaw blades that have been trimmed to fit in a second razor saw.
Not sure what a Morton scalpel is.
There’s a modeling knife I don’t have?
nomdeplume @20:
The attitude towards any kind of waste has not changed. If I die before I have to deal with it, that’s a win.
Kinda like Trump’s attitude toward national debt and climate change. Actually, the whole GOP.
Oggie
Swann-Morton are one of the major manufacturers of scalpels and scalpel blades. Based in Sheffield in the UK, they are also a co-operative.