The Price of Teeth

Now that summer is here I should probably start having more fun with my posts. Let what pitiful amount of hair I still have down and throw caution to the wind. I should broach topics that may be controversial and try my utmost to pull them apart with satirical analysis or… I could just talk about the weather.

Well, I’ll give you a choice. Either I can talk about the weather or the price of milk. The weather is surprisingly good..well for today in any case. The Irish (or adopted Irish in my case) tend to forget about everything on sunny days and so the most essential chores are left untended as we march out into the sun. So that just leaves the price of milk. Currently the price of a 2litre bottle of milk at my local Tesco is €1.69. This makes it €0.85 per litre. A pint of stout at my local pub is €4.90. This makes it €8.63 per litre. Using these prices we can now see that the price of milk is one-tenth as much as the price of Guinness. See that was fun. But I’m sure we can go further here.

My five year old has recently brought to my attention an object that we have not yet created a unit price, nor have we sketched an international pricing matrix for. The object in question…is a tooth. At my daughters school she is beginning to be drip fed news of the gaps now showing where her classmate’s teeth should be and the tales as to why they have appeared. Her classmates regale her with stories of pain and torture and the traumatic placing of a bloodied body part under the pillow for some twisted fairy (whom I have to convince her is good) to make a part exchange for cash. That is the happy ending to the trauma and, as Hazel has glaringly pointed out, there is no set pricing system when it comes time to cash in. Sometimes it’s a Euro. Sometimes it’s fifty Cent. Either there is more than one tooth fairy or she has an extremely inconsistent pricing system. One lucky classmate received as much as ten Euro. Ten Euro! That’s a lot of cash sitting in your head. Let’s look at some of the cold hard facts………

'As common as shark's teeth' - A new expression?

‘As common as shark’s teeth’ – A new expression?

We oldies have 32 teeth in our head. Kids have 20 or so. That makes them rarer than sharks teeth (Sharks are polydonts and can have up to 3000 teeth at any one time. Their teeth are constantly replenished and have they unlimited rows of teeth to replace those lost) but still more common than hen’s teeth (which don’t have any by the way). Let us say that the going rate for a tooth is the rather ludicrous price of 10 Euro per tooth. By weight that is about 20 Euro per gram. So assuming the street value for teeth is €20 per gram and is now our mandated price…where does that fit in a list of commodities? Somewhere between 14karat gold which is €18.43 today and 18k gold which is €23.68 per gram as I write this. For a gram of tooth, you can get twenty grams of pure (24k) silver. Now that you have this knowledge, think carefully before placing that child’s tooth. Don’t give it to some transient fairy that is out to profit.

In conclusion…and moving back to milk, one gram of tooth equals 23.5 litres of Tesco’s own brand milk or 4 pints of the black stuff. Use this information wisely…

…oh and by the way, milk is good for your teeth.

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1 Response

  1. July 18, 2013

    […] the brief time it was on board it bit holes in the knee of my waders rendering them useless (see ‘The Price of Teeth‘ for an insight into the teeth of a shark) and generally made a nuisance of itself scattering […]

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