the random oracle

I ran out of floss in Beijing about a month ago and I’ve been desperately searching for it since.  I couldn’t find it in China or Thailand but I attributed it to the backwardness of the places; I’ve seen plenty of Chinese teeth that I wish I hadn’t.  But upon arriving in Japan I figured that here at least I’d be able to find something, right?  Well, I failed at the first few places I looked, but finally I found it in a pharmacy, and it cost… 700 yen!  That’s almost $7!  Now I know that’s not right because the toothbrushes and toothpaste all cost normal American prices, so there’s no way that floss should be this expensive.  And then it dawned on me: maybe floss is a big hoax perpetrated on us by the American Dental Association in association with Johnson and Johnson so that we’ll buy cheap pieces of waxed string in the delusion that we’re saving our teeth from gum disease?  After all, none of the Japanese I’ve seen so far have rotting teeth or anything… maybe we should all just brush our teeth twice a day, stay away from sweets and sticky foods, and save ourselves the pain of shoving pieces of string between our teeth every night?