Scary Dentist

For some reason, San Francisco TV is peppered with ads for dentists and tooth-whitening businesses. I don't remember dentists advertising this aggressively on the east coast, but I could be wrong. In any case, there's one specific dentist who advertises in San Francisco who scares me. It's not as though he appears against a background of David Cronenberg-type implements of dental torture. He's really just another in a long line of business-owners who insist upon being the spokesman for their own companies despite the fact that they can't read lines for beans. That in itself is not scary. What is? His smile. The smile itself is big and white, a good advertisement for Dr. Jang's work. What is scary about it is the way he uses it. One gets the feeling that he doesn't smile easily; the smile is jerked into being at the end of sentences or paragraphs of copy, with flipped-switch suddenness, like an exclamation mark. It's clear that Dr. Jang has been coached to look approachable and smile for emphasis. He may be a terrific dentist; his staff may be remarkable, and they may speak every language known to man (in addition to English and Chinese, they advertise that they also speak French and, I think, Japanese and Tagalog), but...how can you trust a dentist who looks like he's about to bite your head off? Scary.