cleo

i got an email from cleo hill jr today with this picture and caption:

Thats How you smile on espn when you win a chip!! Lmao Oh, don’t sweat the beard! Yes this is Dr schmorr’s work with my smile and teeth! lmao

cleo is the head men's basketball coach for shaw university, and this picture was taken after they won the ciaa (central intercollegiate athletic assoc) tournament recently.   i also discovered, when googling him, that he made coach of the week last month.

i did six month braces on cleo.  being the overachiever that he is, he also holds the award for the earliest to ask if a particular tooth was going to get straight, at less than one week into braces.  that question usually comes at month three.

while he was in braces, cleo managed to have a new daughter and break his foot playing basketball:

cleo was in braces longer than the six months and we get to see our ortho patients so frequently, they become like family.  it's sort of a sad day when their braces come off and they're not in the office every other week anymore.  i particularly miss having cleo hanging around here...he's good people.

but that's a good-looking smile on that happy face isn't it??

gold tooth saves guy from bullet

my evil trainer, raymond desade desmarais, emailed this to me today:  http://www.examiner.com/strange-news-in-national/new-orleans-man-s-gold-tooth-deflects-bullet

if you don't want to read the article,  a mr. davis (he's underage so we don't know his name) from new orleans, sporting an extensive grill, was out in his car smoking his brother, waltdell's, pot.  waltdell got mad at the kid for stealing his stash and after some words, pulled a gun.  while the brothers were wrestling over waltdell's gun, it went off and shot the kid in the mouth.    the gold grill deflected the bullet and the guy was utterly unharmed other than a cut on his lip and gum.  hah!  oh, and when filing charges, the kid had to make sure the police didn't confuse waltdell with their other brother waldell.  so, naturally i figure the kid's name must be walmdell.

not walmdell's mouth, but i thought this was pretty spectacular.  those are peridot gems in that grill!

and this brings me right back to the fact that i'm still waiting to do a nice, conservative diamond inlay in someone's upper canine.  i'm talking to YOU raymond!!  it could save your life someday you know....

entrepreneurs

long time no blog. holidays, travel, etc etc etc. at some point i'll get to my thanksgiving trip to brussels that included an overnight stay in amsterdam, including the photo of my pregnant friend hilde reading a map in front of a brightly lit sex shop, but that's for another day.

i'm not sure if it's a response to the several years of sad economic times or what, but all of a sudden, people i know are coming up with the most spectacular ideas and starting their own businesses.

we have a neighborhood book club and at one of our meetings about a year ago, we all commented on gigi's incredible handbag. gigi, an electrical engineer and all-around genius, got the bag in her home country of egypt and said that she hasn't seen one like it before or since but got so many complements that she was thinking about designing something similar. fast-forward six months and she's designed a prototype, been to new york to buy high-end leathers and fixtures and BAM, she's selling them. she's already got a second bag designed and they're flying off the shelves. her site is http://www.uvodesigns.com/

the uvo bag

gigi with her loci bag

then yesterday, i was talking to a woman who confessed to being a shoe junkie. she has over 200 pairs of shoes. she and her husband came up with an idea for designing beautiful heels for women with their favorite college team logos. he quit his job so he could work on the concept full-time and now they have a business called fanfeet.  http://fanfeet.com/ despite how it sounds, the shoes are gorgeous! i particularly like the clemson shoe...orange w/ a purple sole. fabulous!

kanye west now

so, we know i'm sort of obsessed with lil wayne's grill..

 and now kanye west has joined the club.  evidently, he had some extensive dental work done after an accident in 2002 that broke his jaw and required him to be wired together.   somehow, someone got hold of his panoramic xray, taken while he was wired together:

 now, what i see is that kanye had ortho at some point, probably in his childhood (they extracted 4 permanent premolars....a favorite treatment by some orthodontists that drives me crazy b/c it usually leaves patients w/ a flat mid-facial profile, but i digress, as usual).  it looks like he may have had some trauma to the lowers and he had to wear a lower splint:

 see?  even kanye got a little flat-faced from those premolar extractions..makes the mouth turn down.  sigh.

unfortunately, the photos of his new grill are all fuzzy.  it looks like they did work on the lower six anterior teeth, but i can't tell exactly what was done, but it looks like they're all splinted together like lil wayne's

here's the video of him discussing it on ellen:  they really do sparkle!



and i STILL haven't found anyone to let me do a simple diamond implant in a canine. i must be seeing the wrong patients....

kickboxing

as i've mentioned before, i started working out w/ raymond 'desade' desmarais several months ago to help the chronic back pain  from which i'd suffered--upper back from 15 years of doing dentistry, lower back from 3 yrs of picking up kids.  well, he knocked the pain out in a few weeks like he was swatting a fly, then he got serious about kicking my butt.  we started w/ weight lifting.  then he brought some pads in and let me kick him a few times at the end of a workout.  then he got me some gloves so i could hit him a little.  then he put it together and let me kick AND hit him.....and it's AMAZING. 

i had luc come yesterday to videotape some.  these are just some practice workouts.  the really fun ones are 2-3 minute timed rounds.

it's interesting for me to see the workout from this perspective.  i always thought i hit like rocky, but instead, i hit more like bullwinkle....if bullwinkle were a girl.  and maybe really, really tired.  in my defense, this was after a 45 minute workout.  and i'd worked all day.  and i'm pretty sure i had a papercut.  sigh.  i gotta work on my form.

daniel schorr died today and symmetry

i've always had a special place in my heart for daniel schorr b/c of the obvious similarities in our names...and the fact that we both have had to go through life correcting people who try to spell it intuitively.  him, shore, me schmoor.

i knew daniel schorr as a commentator for npr, not knowing that he was already in his 70's when first heard him on public radio in the 80's.  he was 93 when he died today, his advanced age never evident in his voice.  i had no clue he was that old and assumed he'd be around as long as me.  didn't i just hear him on npr this week?

what i've learned about him today:  he's been a journalist and correspondent for almost 65 years now.  he conducted the first ever tv interview with nikita khruschev in 1957.  he was number 17 of 20 on richard nixon's "enemies list"; a fact he discovered while reading the list live on-air.   in 1976, he made public a suppressed report on illegal cia and fbi 'findings' and to this day, he has not revealed his source.  he's been a staunch advocate for first amendment rights his whole career.

less auspiciously, he was born august 31, 1916, so he and i not only share similar names, we share our birthday (i'm aug 31, 1964.  if you have any interest in chinese astrology, you'd know that we were both born in 'dragon' years.  i think all this means that we both have a knack for occasionally pissing off the wrong people b/c of our beliefs and/or behavior).  the schorr's are ukranian-jew, he was born in the bronx.  the schmorr's are prussian-jew, my dad born in the bronx.

sigh.  i'm just really going to miss his voice.

my laser rocks

this is really only going to be interesting to people either in the dental field.  not for the faint of heart, but it's so cool!

this lady came in with a traumatic cyst the size of a marble!!  i've never seen one even half this size before!  she bit her lip, it swelled, causing her to accidentally bite it more, causing more swelling, etc etc.  you see these pretty often, same location, but they're usually the size of a bb.

 so i got her numb and lasered it.  it was sort of a surprise assault, but she did great!  here's immediately after--it's amazing!

here's one day later.  she has a little residual swelling, but the tissue looks great.  it's hard to believe i took a marble out of her lip yesterday.  AND it doesn't hurt.  little to no post-op pain.  lasers are crazy magic.