The musings of Mr Monkeysized

People in the States think Europeans have  bad teeth. Just like Glaswegians shower with a short spray of deodorant and Frenchmen never shower. And as for the teeth of the Americans themselves – have you seen them? Like white versions of the Hoover Dam – uniform, pristine, unreal, disconcerting. It’d be like kissing Pris from Blade Runner (although I always had a thing for Rachael).

I gather now from Foreign Policy’s blog that whatever unnatural witchcraft works for American teeth can now be applied to Andean glaciers, combatting melting, global warming and unemployment all in one.

The idea is to give these chaps jobs by getting them to apply a concoction of lime, egg white and water to the tops of glaciers and other chunks of frozen water. This white, gloopy paint reflects the sun’s rays rather than absorbs them, preventing puddles and unnecessary heat.

I hesitate to pronounce this ingenuity monkeysized, but it’s certainly disarmingly clever in its low-tech way. And low-tech is something that the monkeysizer can relate to, as it avoids too many of those technological leaps of faith that the modern world takes for granted.

And perhaps this is why the comparison with an American’s teeth is perhaps wrong: The average Yank strips their teeth of personality when they whitewash and twist them into mini-Hoover Dams. Those little nooks, crannies and poppy-seed catching faultlines that only our own tongues (and those of special invited guests) know; the misaligned molar and the impudent incisor. So three cheers for the glacier-painters of the high Peruvian Andes, and raspy boos to the tooth-wrestling deniers of reality from the USA.