Tying up loose ends

Just a couple of things:

• Last week I went to the dentist for a little tooth repair.

In a previous blog I'd noted that not only had a filling in one of my molars fallen out, but a crown from another tooth had come off, all within two days of each other. Totally unrelated oral incidents.

Turns out, the tooth that lost its crown was a lower canine (I guess). It was a simple procedure to have it reset. My dentist, Dr. Sim Siceloff, cleaned off the recovered cap (that, thankfully, I did not swallow when it came off) and put it back on the remains of a canaled tooth from decades ago.

To do so, he used a small mallet to rap the crown back into place.

Not pleasant, but bearable.

When he was done, I asked him, "With all the advances in modern dentistry, it still basically comes down to hammers, drills and pliers, doesn't it?"

After some hesitation, possibly considering that all his years in dental school and recertification seminars have boiled down to this simple logic, he reluctantly agreed.

I go back March 11, incidentally, to have that pesky upper molar crowned.

• I was watching several college basketball games Saturday, and more than once, I heard the commentators declare "that was a good no-call by the ref there."

That got me to thinking. I know what they meant, that the official restrained himself from blowing his whistle on what could have been a ticky-tack foul ("Hey, ref, let 'em play!"). But doesn't the term "no-call" imply that the ref actually did see a foul and that he just let it go?

Why can't a state trooper do that?

And the other thing I wonder about is fouls and penalties that are not called in the fading seconds of tight games, the rationale being "let the players decide the game."

These must be unwritten rules that are simply understood.

Hmm. Just saying.

• We had a little bit of snow again on Saturday, the third time this year (by my count) that snow has fallen but hasn't really stuck.

That must be driving the kids nuts.

Careful what you wish for. I spent a winter in Portsmouth, NH, back in 1959. That one winter saw a snowfall that brought drifts to the second story of our three-story duplex. Yeah, it was Kid Heaven — we built snow forts and tunnels everywhere — but, man, that's a lot of snow.

And we still had school a day or two later.