Osama bin Laden dropped his latest live recording today. Very disappointing. His attempt to get back to his roots comes across mostly as a rehash of his old stuff. He’s just not the showman he once was.

How frustrated should I be about this?: I don’t have any experience in the field of intelligence (or, arguably, any intelligence) but it seems to me that this fanatical indie recording artist should be very, very, very, very easy to find under these circumstances.

“Hey,” says a guy, “I have the latest tape from Osama bin Laden.”

“Hey,” replies Porter Goss, “where’d you get it?”

“Steve gave it to me,” says the guy.

“Hey, is this Steve?” Goss says on the phone a short while later. “Hi Steve. Listen: a friend of mine told me you gave him the latest bin Laden track. Where’d you get it?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” says Steve.

“That’s interesting,” replies Porter. “Are you familiar with ‘waterboarding’?”

“I thought the president signed a bill outlawing that kind of thing.”

“He did, but he put an asterisk after his name. You’d really better just tell me.”

“In that case, David Geffen gave it to me at a release party for the new Strokes album.”

And so forth. Assuming none of the people in the chain pirated their copy from Kazaa, they should have bin Laden and/or Kevin Bacon inside of a week. Shouldn’t they? You’d certainly think so, if this weren’t the fiftieth tape bin Laden has put out. I’d wonder what it is they’re doing over at the CIA, but it sounds like all I’d need to do to find out is pick up my phone and say “bomb bomb, allah, jew bomb” to the dial tone. Or maybe check out the wrong library book.

Every day is a new fight in my brain between “my government has a list of the songs on my iPod” and “my government couldn’t competently find Mullah Omar if he applied for a position as White House tour guide with ticking underpants.” I suppose both could be true.

All this frustration with the CIA is probably really just misdirected anger at my dentist. Both have recently prompted me to wonder, “Does anybody know how to do his job anymore?” My dentist gave me the once-over at my last cleaning and went out of his way to praise the care I had taken of my teeth; then, at my most recent cleaning, he announced that I had more cavities than the surface of the moon. I assert to you that both of these things cannot be simultaneously possible; unless I died between cleanings without knowing it or am turning into a human fly, regularly regurgitating acid to eat, there is no way I am rotting that fast. I guess I could also be smoking meth in my sleep, or the bathroom faucets in my new house are actually connected to a drum of Mountain Dew, but I have seen evidence of neither of these things.

Not a lot of people could get cavities and blame the dentist, but here’s the thing: when he looked at them, the dentist was not sure that they were cavities. He opted to drill ‘em and fill ‘em “just to be on the safe side” after asking his hygienist what she thought.

“Hmmm,” said the hygienist. “Hmmmm.”

I also said “Hmmm hmmm hmmm,” but only because my mouth was full of picks and mirrors. Without them, my hmmms would have sounded more like, “Get away from me with that tiny buzzsaw; you are not proficient in your chosen field.”

Before deciding to go spelunking in my face, the dentist also asked me a series of questions. Any pain? Any heat sensitivity? Any cold sensitivity? Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm (no, no, no). Before he fixed the problem he wasn’t sure existed, all of that was true. After his timely intervention, every bite of food made me feel like he had accidentally left the drill in my tooth. I went back in yesterday with a stern expression on my throbbing face, and hey!, he had put the filling on directly in contact with my nerve. Wow, that would have been a super cool x-ray to do beforehand. So it was necessary to have the filling ground out of my skull with his tiny sander (possibly useful in tracing the origins of the bin Laden tape) and re-filled. During my free refill, the “doctor” (essentially filling a tiny pothole for a living) stopped the procedure, turned to his assistant and said– and I quote– ” What comes next? I don’t even know.”

I would have leapt up at that moment, speared his hand with a cleaning implement and darted through the lobby trailing my bib if I hadn’t sadly realized just then that my experiences with every other dentist I have ever had were at roughly this same level of care. He may, in fact, be the best dentist I have ever had.