A fishy filling in 1948, and horse dentistry in 1901.

I have the day off today, yay! It is because I am going to the dentist though, boo 😦

When the Man of the House goes to the dentist for a bit of torture I try to find an article about some dental disaster to share with you. As it is my turn this time I thought I had better find something dentisty as well, sigh…

The Mercury 15 Apr 1948 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26456180

Fortunately the first thing that caught my eye was not a story of dental horror it was a boys amusing interpretation of why his snapper dinner in 1948 had a small yellow ball in it.

His father jokingly told him it was a lump of gold. This was later proved to be correct by a jeweller and naturally the boy expected that meant the gold had come from one of the fishes fillings.

I like the way that kid thinks 🙂

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I also had to include this amusing article about a bit of horse dentistry in 1901 as well. I love the way they explain that the horse was treated ‘just like a human’, with the use of cocaine to deaden the nerves in the tooth before they were filled with either gold or silver. Crikey!

Warwick Examiner and Times 25 Dec 1901 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article82269262

I wonder how popular this drug dealing dentist was with his patients?

Yes, I know that drugs we consider to be problems these days were used in the past as legitimate medicines, it just makes me glad we do things differently today.

It also makes me wonder what medications currently used will be considered inappropriate at some time in the future!

French-Polished Hives and Police Court Bees. 1894.

Mornington Standard 1 Nov 1894 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article65812224

Bees seem to have quite varied taste as to where they will settle, sometimes defying logic. The start of this article is a great example of that. I wonder how the posties horse felt about going back to that shop for the next delivery? I expect that it was a little nervous about it!

I would have loved to see the seven french polished hives owned by the man in Melbourne. He is wonderfully described, not as eccentric, but as a ‘person having no wife to bother his life, but paddled his own canoe’.

He would never have felt as though he was sleeping alone with the resident hives in his bedroom. Do hives hum at night? Maybe he was scared of the dark…

Obviously this man was ahead of his times as these days keeping hives in the city is becoming more popular. Organizations like Melbourne City Rooftop Honey encourage the establishment of hives in the city and suburbs but I don’t expect there are any such polished and pampered indoor hives around today!

The rest of the article clearly shows that the author of this piece was not very sympathetic to the courts, he was pretty happy to see them inconvenienced by the arrival of the bees. I am sure he wasn’t the only one cheering on the bees in the police-court that day!

House wrecking horse. 1937.

Advocate 8 Jan 1937 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article68454862

What a wake up call! Imagine going to bed tonight and being woken shortly after by a horse coming through your front door and then smashing the place up. Strange that it chose to enter the house to run riot. I wonder what drove it in there instead of just running madly down the road?

Probably just as well they were all in bed. If they were all going about their normal business indoors who knows what the outcome might have been?

I wouldn’t like to have been Mrs Trueman in the morning. Cleaning up a smashed up house is one thing, but removing a dead horse from your dining room is another.

Horse in a fish trap. 1922.

Morning Bulletin 4 Oct 1922 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article54030383

Ha ha…horse in a fish trap… finny harvest… chuckle…

Sorry, I was ridiculously amused by the writing in this article.

I expect that Bert’s fish trap was the corralling-the-fish-into-an-enclosure type and not one in the lowering-a-cage-on-a-string style. Imagine the size of the fish they were after if it was!

In that case, a runaway horse would have been the least exciting thing in their day….