alexist

Today I had the dentist. I was slightly nervous, simply because it was a new dentist and he hadn't done work on me before. It was OK though, he was good with the novocaine. :-) The only problem was that I had an amalgam filling done on my back tooth. My old dentist didn't like doing amalgam fillings, so I haven't had any done in years, and I forgot how they were done. I also forgot that you can't bite down on them afterwards and they leave your teeth a bit sensitive... as I just rediscovered when eating a chocolate biscuit! It's quite a big filling too (and IMO should be slightly bigger--it feels like the dip in the tooth is a little too deep. It's all the way on the top right though, so I can only tell with my tongue, not by looking.)

The other one I had done today was a white filling, one of the ones I had to go private on. My top left bicuspid is whole again. Yay!

Neil and I had some food (my eating ability was limited, so the pub was out) then met up with people to go to the cinema. We got to Bank and discovered the DLR was fucked, so we had to get back on the tube to Canary Wharf. At least we could cut through the shopping mall to get to the pub. The air conditioning wasn't brilliant in there but it was better than outside.

The AC in the cinema wasn't working too well either, but the film (Mr and Mrs Smith) was fun, though it could've been 10 minutes shorter; the end felt a little too padded out with gratuitous fighting. I'm good at spotting errors though: I spotted a giant "Los Angeles" sign on the highway during the minivan chase scene (the film was set in New York) and I noticed that Angelina Jolie's car was shot at and crashed in one scene and subsequently appeared without a scratch. :-)

The trailers were all for bad films. VERY bad films. OK, one might possibly have artistic merit (the last one, something with Don Cheadle in it). The first had a good cast but looked like a mass of horror cliches. The second, more cliches, directed by Rob Zombie. The third, bad action. I saw the trailer for it and it boasted that it was from the same director as XXX. Frankly, the advert reel was better than the promos, which is pathetic.

I'm checking out rent-a-car rates for our trip to the States. (Got to do it this time, not relying on my unreliable sister and brother-in-law.)

Is it illegal in the US to rent cars that were not made by Detroit carmakers?! The thought of driving a Plymouth for 10 days is just too depressing. Perhaps they're in cahoots: these fleet purchases may be preventing the complete collapse of General Motors! (Reliability certainly has little to do with their choice.)

(OK, if I want to shell out a stupid amount of money, I could have a Volvo. This is probably a special exception, made because Volvo is now owned by Ford.)

Oooh, wait, Hertz (expensive) has just offered me a Hyundai!! You un-American traitors, you!

Also, they charge silly amounts of money to rent at the airport. It's a little less if you're willing to rent with someplace like Enterprise that doesn't have a counter in the terminal, but it's still a rip-off. It's a rip-off we may be forced to grit our teeth and pay for, though, because getting my parents to pick us up and drop us off will be a whole big mess, especially since they'll be completely frazzled by the wedding.