Maybe you should try using a stick.

I feel like you're really responding to the title.

I looked at the pictures.

I hear your words.

I'm worried about the health of my gums because poor gums are associated with heart disease and dirty looks from dental hygienists.

I think you should lean into this new identity, heebie. Make your own artisanal eyelash toothbrush. The caress of the actual eyelashes on your teeth will give you such delight, that you would be a monster if you didn't decide to devote your life to sharing this extraordinary joy. Send one to Gwynneth Paltrow, who will describe it as the greatest invention since the jade egg.

In Soviet Union, GUM brushes you.

Wait, what is she doing to my beloved toothbrush?!

Vagina dentata.

You could probably make some pretty sweet toothbrushes using bristle-fur from various endangered mammals.

When civilization collapses and the electric grid is nonfunctional, one of the biggest losses for me is going to be my electric toothbrush. I don't think I know how a regular toothbrush works any more.

It's like an electric one, but you have to move your head back and forth.

Electric toothbrushes are where its at. I couldn't go back now.

Its is not where it's at, however.

I used Jammies' electric toothbrush for a little bit, just switching out the head, and then Pokey also started using it, and now it's always in a different bathroom or who knows where, and I stopped bothering.

It was no longer where it had been at.

What part of the first one looks like eyelashes? The bristles?

||

mogul Sayyu Dantata has chiselled his name on the stone which the names of members of the exclusive club of billionaires is etched. While other people's fortunes wax and wane according to the dictates of economic climates, Sayyu's name continues to ascend higher and higher on the register of the wealthiest Nigerians. Come rain or shine, Sayyu maintains his position on the enviable pedestal he has built for himself in the rarefied air of the most moneyed.

17: yes! The dark tips framing the pink center. It's a loose comparison.

18: what a mensch.

Not the best photo to highlight that, though I suppose they would have been thin on the ground.

Talking of Banana Island, an artificial island near Lagos in Nigeria, often called a Billionaire's Haven, one of the biggest celebrity houses in that earthly paradise belongs to oil magnate Sayyu Dantata who is the brother of Africa's wealthiest man, Aliko Dangote.

Tumor Island was somewhat less appealing

And can I just say the eyelash thing actually creeps me the fuck out. It makes me think of trachoma.

Uh, probably body horror trigger warning before you google trachoma.

23: Mossy didn't say it wasn't a Banana; he said it wasn't an island. Banana Tumor doesn't sound all that great either.

But Sewagey Banana Tumor! That may be a winner.

Sewagey Banana Tumor is my bank card password!

Wasting *our* time? How about the time it took you to make a home photo studio capable of showing the eyelashes with a delicate reflection and even, professional lighting?

In Soviet Russia, subject light you.

I really like that toothbrush design has gotten sufficiently ridiculous that something like this finally happened, as was surely destined.

Although they're clearly aiming at a what's-all-this-newfangled-shit, old-people market when they could selling to hipsters at twice the price.

It's a stick isn't it.

I also like that some kind person added a bit of automation to html-tagging here b/c lord-o-mercy was I struggling to remember how to format that link.

I finally got sucked in by all the podcast advertising and got a quip, which I actually really like because I don't have the space in my bathroom for a plug-in electric toothbrush (NYC!), but I save all of the analog toothbrushes that my dentist still insists on giving me for when I travel or for guests.

You could shop at Objects of Use, for your hipster personal hygiene objects. (I mock, but I love a lot of the kitchen gear they sell on that site).

https://www.objectsofuse.com/products/person

They sell these toothbrushes:

https://www.objectsofuse.com/products/person/natural-toothbrushes

which are not that far off 10.

My dentist insisted I get an electric one because I've done some mild gum damage by brushing too thoroughly and shouldn't do more of that. So go me? I would like to believe my children don't use my toothbrush and have stored it on a particularly high shelf for that reason, plus that would mean they'd have to brush their teeth without my telling them to.

Oral hygiene? I think I have a cavity. I blame Cassandane. I buy chips and sugary foods maybe three times a week (a pastry with my morning coffee roughly once a week, a soda on slow afternoons roughly twice) but actually eat them roughly three times a day. Cassandane is buying the rest. She gets chips and dip and just pure candy and squirrels it away for a rainy day or an unexpected party, only it's right there in the kitchen, I have a handful every time I walk by, and before I know it I've eaten the bag.

My junk food consumption has been a bit higher than it was a few months ago because my company started providing us little bags of chips, free for the taking. And I can't blame Cassandane for my alcohol consumption, and in the end I have to admit that I'm an adult, I'm responsible for what I put in my mouth. I'm just annoyed that my eating habits don't correspond better to my shopping habits.

Oral hygiene? I think I have a cavity

Have you considered an eylelash toothbrush? The eyelashes go into those hard-to-reach places where cavities form.

37: WTF is a eylelash toothbrush? Does anybody proofread your copy at this ad agency?

The next logical step.

37: I have considered that, yes. Should I check my local grocery store?

Everyone who's been afraid to submit a guest post can relax, Heebie has now used the post title she was saving for you.

40: No! It's only available at www.unfogged.com to anyone that can make heebie an offer she can't refuse.

Todd!

Is it always the same Todd or is it like Dave where there are hundreds of them?

That hasn't been a problem since the great Dave speciation event.

I would just like to put on the record that the idea of brushing your teeth with eyelashes is pretty gross.

And I brush my eyeballs with teethbrushes.

Count me in the electric toothbrush crowd. So much better.

27 and 30 both cracked me up.

Using a very gentle bristle on the gum line sounds like a good idea.

The sidebar was brushed away again.

Now it's back.

He never shaved a whisker from off his horny hide. / He hammered in the bristles and bit them off inside.

Double duty. Shaving and tooth brushing.

So, as noted before, I bonked my head pretty good yesterday, at the same time as both knees, a shoulder and an elbow. The injury that's really getting me down, though, is from Saturday: I burned the roof of my mouth eating a ridiculously hot piece of pizza. Does anyone know a good way to deal with this burn?

54 Maybe eat some yogurt? You can swish some aloe around in your mouth too.

You trash talk the motherfucker and choke-slam him in the rematch.

ME TOO! the roof of my mouth is also burnt! maybe we have the same mouth.

Tag team.

Whoomp, there it is.

I hate the pizza burn. Fortunately, it does seem to heal quickly.

Pizza burn is the worst.

Looking at the OP on my laptop (instead of just my phone), that really does look like eyelashes.

This 4th of July, Washington, D.C. is going to cosplay Red Square without the Lenin corpse.

38: I like an Islay-ish toothbrush for the way the smokey flavour complements my fennel toothpaste.

Heebie, you should try a "miswak" toothbrush and report back, now that you've become a Toothbrush Influencer. They're organic!

Also, all you folks with gum issues should floss. That's what my hygenist tells me every time I go in, and I believe her, even though I rarely do it. When I do, I use the Y-shaped plastic ones, which is horribly uncool of me, but they work better and faster than string. Extra incentive: there is a study (there's always a study) linking gingivitis with Alzheimer's.

Because they keep forgetting to floss, duh.

For local reasons, I thought that meant you had a ham-flavored toothbrush.

67 to 64.

65: I agree, but famously there is not much actual research on flossing.

But really: the rubber bristles on a lot of the toothbrushes these days seem like they'd be the exact worst thing for your gums.

I do like to floss, however.

I just use the leftover fibers from the bags oranges come in.

I just do the spastic straight-arm hip-bounce dance that's so popular with the elementary school set.

According to the local news, if you go to Florida and get a small cut while on the beach, you die. This is third or fourth on my list of reasons not to go there.

Ah, so that's what our new department secretary was talking to me about yesterday.

She's very chatty and nice, and rural white, and did the thing yesterday that rural people do with me: we were talking about vacations with kids, and I said that we either visit family or take them camping, and she did the spittake "you know about camping?" thing. Honestly, rural white people think that anyone else has not noticed that trees are pretty.

Have you ever really looked at a tree? I mean, really looked?

There's really not much there, aesthetically speaking, if you are up close is my point.

But at least it won't kill you as quickly as Florida.

79: Try me.

Don't wan't to give oneself indigestion now, does one?

Anyway, the water has lethal bacteria, the ocean is rising, and the land is sinking.

The satisfaction is worth the pwnage.

I'm surprised everywhere doesn't have lethal bacteria. The ocean on the face of it is a much more hostile environment than a bloodstream. They should be snacking us right up.

The bloodstream is full of terrifying monomaniacal xenophobic things that exist only to kill anything foreign they find, and also of a complex and highly efficient biochemical tripwire system that detects intruders and summons aforesaid things. The sea's mostly just water.

Water and fish shit.

Question. Does Boris Johnson always walk outside in the wind before having a photo taken?

We're all Maoists at the cell level.

The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a corpuscle drifts in the plasma.

87: no, he deliberately messes his hair up with his hands. It's part of the persona.

Wherever he goes, the wind follows.

Such a large portion of the available biomass is people, that a predator will have to evolve. It's probably going to be a disease or other people, but we can't rule out an unusually brutal owl.

87, 90, 91: His dream is that when he dies Elton John (or Bernie Taupin?) will rewrite the lyrics to "Candle in the Wind" again.

90: Like Benny Hill, but without the dignity.

92: or one has already. A fairly densely populated country could easily support a viable breeding population of several hundred of this hypothetical predator without increasing the human mortality rate beyond what the population could bear (or indeed ignore). About 2100 people are reported missing every year in the US and are never found. Let's assume that the real number is double that to include people who are never reported missing (homeless, illegal immigrants etc). That is a food intake sufficient to support a population of around 200 superhuman predators (assuming that they're significantly larger than their prey, about 200kg weight, which makes sense for something that will have to overcome an adult human); of course the predator would take non-human prey as well, such as dogs and cats, so we can posit a significantly larger actual population. In desert areas with few other large prey animals we would anticipate that this hypothetical predator would have a more human-rich diet. We should therefore anticipate abnormally high numbers of missing person reports in desert states such as Arizona, and this is indeed what we find.

But if it were an owl, we would find the pellets.

Each individual would only have to take prey once every 10 days to 2 weeks, depending on prey size (adult/infant) and so it would be very rare to observe hunting behaviour; this would also allow it to spend most of its time either torpid in concealment or selecting and stalking prey to minimise risk of discovery during the hunt itself. Pack hunting would be unlikely as a pack of 6 adult predators would need to take prey roughly every 2 days, and would also need a range of several hundred km in diameter, including at least one major city, in order for its predation not to produce abnormally high and undesirable missing person statistics in a small area.

96 is a good point. I'd think that it is most likely to be amphibian (not taxonomically, but behaviourally).

95: Sounds like you're working out a new story/novel idea.

The Superpredator's teeth would stay sparklingly clean by the presence of eyelashes in its prey.

99: I kind of am now. I am tempted to make it an owl and find some convenient explanation for the lack of pellets remarked on by Hick (2019). It would also explain how it is able to roam over a large hunting range. Otherwise the superpredator will have to take public transport and that would be implausible in a US context.

I've been sayin for years someone ought to look into those disappearances round the bayous.

It's clearly a metaphor. At the climax of the novel the monster is tracked to its lair by a first-term Democratic congresswoman from New York.

I am tempted to make it an owl and find some convenient explanation for the lack of pellets remarked on by Hick (2019).

Constipation.

The Great Owl Void.

Some species is going to win the evolutionary race. From an ethical standpoint, I can't think of any reason not to nudge things along in favor of the owls. Maybe dressing mice in little suits would start an association of humans with food?

This ordinary object that we've all been dealing with from time immemorial turns out to be Predator Owl pellets.

It turns out there's no such thing as a privet.

I'm doing Dwarf Fortress now (old is new), and annoyed that dwarven social mores forbid eating anything sapient, even a horde of goblins and trolls that was just doing its best to kill you.

I just bought a caged giant owl from the elves and shall shortly be butchering it. Might yield leather as well as meat.

Obviously they use the sewers.

109.2: The monster is you.

95, 97. Sure sounds like snakes to me. If the body has to disappear, I think we're talking anacondas.

101. If your owls take humans that's gonna be some serious pellets. Maybe they are rolled away by giant dung beetles? (Owl pellets are usually kind of egg-shaped.)

111: I don't edit the mores in the init file though; does that count for nothing?

109: What a wonderful game. Maybe game isn't the right word.

Anyway, work hard enough and you can turn your people into any type of savage you prefer.

114.2 deserves to be on an inspirational poster.

Karl Rove has one already.

30. Obviously we've moved on, but omg, for years I've been looking for exactly this. Straight handles in pretty transparent colors! I'm pretty sure I've aged out of the hipster bracket, so I guess this makes me a Plugger (TM).

I feel sure I still see plain-vanilla straight toothbrushes, at CVS or Target or both.

Plain-vanilla toothbrushes really sounds like it would introduce more cavities than it would prevent. Try sugar-free?

On topic, because Florida.

The pythons don't eat them?

I don't think so. At least not enough of them.

Oh come on iguanas are not a "menace" by any standards, far less those of Florida.

Not to bite people, but

Some green iguanas cause damage to infrastructure by digging burrows that erode and collapse sidewalks, foundations, seawalls, berms and canal banks.

just really doesn't help in a state with erosion and hurricane problems.