I am … unhindered by talent

We’re up in Preston with WeatherGirl’s Mum for the holidays. Bandwidth here at her house is limited and at least mildly awkward, so there probably won’t be much posting from here.

The snow shot is from Morris a couple of years ago - the word is that they’re definitely gonna have snow on the ground for Xmas. It’s quite cold for the UK up here in Preston, but nothing on what it’s like in Minnesota. It’s a bit below freezing at night and heavy frost sometimes lasting the whole day.

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Today Sub-Evil Boy celebrates 14 years of being, well, less than evil. For this his parents are extremely grateful :-) !

To celebrate the event I decided to (I’m guessing) annoy him mightily by fishing up an old shot from out last sabbatical. Here he’s 6.5 years old at the thermal pools in Iceland near the Strokkur Geyser.

He’s just a tad bigger now, but no less cute :-).

Happy Birthday, and thanks for being significantly less than evil!

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We’re back from an excellent little 24 hour whirlwind visit to the Mighty Metropolis aka London. Most of it was spent in the British Museum, where we had tickets to see the Chinese terra cotta army. No photos from that, but it was quite remarkable and absolutely worth it.

I took lots of photos (many quite mediocre, or worse) in other parts of the British Museum, including this in a small temporary exhibit right by the entrace called "Divine Cat". This bronze egyptian scuplture was donated to the Museum by a Major Gayer-Anderson, who "was a keen restorer of ancient metal objects". Recent analysis (including X-rays) revealed that the good Major jammed a metal cylinder in the head to give it more strength, repaired a major crack, and applied a thick layer of green paint to help hide the repairs.

Oh.

An excellent little exhibit, and a nice example of the many complexities of managing a collection such as theirs.

And the cat was cool too.

I’ve posted the whole unedited lot up on my Flickr events account, and will post tidied up versions of some of the more interesting ones to my “main” Flickr account.

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One of the great weirdnesses of living here in the UK is being reminded of how completely American a holiday Thanksgiving is, effectively ignored on the rest of the planet. (Much like American Football, to which it is quite closely connected!)

‘Twere it not for various on-line reminders and communications from (American) friends and family, one could easily miss the whole thing. I, to be honest, only realized quite late in the day that Thanksgiving was today - I had been thinking it was next week.

But it’s today, so happy Thanksgiving! Now go read Athena’s cool Thanksgiving poem and enjoy your feasts!

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My sister (and co-author) is visiting Linköping University in Sweden this week both as an external examiner on a PhD defense, and giving a talk as part of a seminar entitled “Conservation biology in animals — behavior, genetics, welfare”. The first half of her talk is on work we did together, using computer simulations to better understand the impact of changes in selection pressure on genetic and phenotypic diversity of populations. This will (I think) be the first public airing of these results, so this is pretty exciting stuff.

I actually made the mistake of peeking a bit at what a flight would cost to join her, and we got all excited when the early results were actually very promising. Unfortunately further examination made it clear that “zipping over to Sweden for a few days” would in fact run close to $1K, which is money we really don’t have at the moment.

Sigh.

I’d never been to Scandinavia before, and it would have been really cool to hear the talks (especially hers) and meet the other biologists at the seminar. But such is life.

At the kind invitation of Michael O’Neill, I am going to the University of Dublin to give a talk in early December, which will be lots of fun. I’ve been to Ireland once before, to give a talk at the University of Limerick, and really enjoyed it. I’ve never been to Dublin, though, so I’m quite excited. Dublin Tourism has a very cool set of free podcast walking tours (smart people, them) which I’ve been listening to as a way of figuring out where I want to visit in my limited tourism time.

Thanks to Dead Man … Walking for the photo. Gotta love all those bikes, eh?

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Misty, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Sub-Evil Boy and I went over to Joe Alia’s house Sunday to practice as part of preparations for the big concert Sub-Evil and I will be hosting in 3.5 weeks. I brought my camera along and took a few shots of the two of them playing. I’ll probably post several over the week on flickr as I sort through them, but this is definitely one of my favorites.

Joe has worked up a chart of "Misty" for the two of them (Joe on sax, Sub-Evil on battered cornet), and here they’re working on playing it together for the first time. This is a special song in my family, and especially between my dad and sister. Its popularity in the 60’s led to my parents calling my sister Misty (even though her "official" name is Mary), and the song has become part of the powerful jazz bond between my father and sister. Given that the concert is (for me) largely about family and friends (and to raise a little money for cancer charities) to have Sub-Evil play this song is really wonderful. Joe gets huge props for working with us on this; having Tom play with him is essentially private lessons with an excellent musician, and I’m extremely grateful.

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Victory!!!, originally uploaded by Unhindered by Talent.

Or at least damn good news!

My dad IM’ed me in the office this morning to say that he’d just gotten back from his first major doctor’s visit since radiation treatment ended last month, and he got a clean bill of health. They didn’t see any signs of the cancer in his throat, so now it’s all about regaining his strength after the nasty rigors of the treatment.

They say that if this type of cancer is going to come back, it will almost certainly do so within two years. So now we wait. Today’s report, though, means that however it turns out, going through all that bought him something significant, and that really helps.

Whew…

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Impact

Originally uploaded by darkmatter.

Those wild and crazy people at WalkingTimeBomb.com have a whole host of ads aimed at college students who blithely assume (despite all the evidence to the contrary) that they’ll quit smoking after they graduate. Some of them are pretty strange and don’t make a lot of sense, but some are real winners:

Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is not harmful as long as you only do it socially.

When I’m at the bar I like to smack myself in the face a few times with a good claw hammer. So what? Who am I hurting? Or the other day I was walking along with Joe and he pulled out a shiny ball-peen model. Man, we just went to town with that baby. But what of it? I don’t plan on being one of those life-long hammerers. I’ll just quit after I graduate by tapering off with some of those small rubber mallets.

Generally I’m a pretty libertarian kind of guy, and I rarely give students grief about their smoking even though they bloody well ought to know better. Going through this cancer fight with Dad, though, makes it tough not to run around shouting at students that I see smoking.

The problem is that the claim that smoking (or not wearing a seatbelt or a bicycle helmet or whatever) only hurts the fool is based on a sad and ultimately unacceptable assumption that there is and will be no love in that person’s world when the odds come for their due. To watch my mother hold Dad while he’s vomiting again in the middle of the night, to hear her voice break on the phone after spending another all-nighter with him at the hospital, all this shatters any arguments that the impact of these choices is limited.

We are people, and that has implications.

When my father started smoking in the early 40’s, there was no broad understanding of the horrible risks involved, and as that data became clearer the tobacco industry spent millions to confuse and obfuscate the issues. At some point when I was a kid (late 60’s, early 70’s) Dad became convinced and stopped cold, an action I have always admired.

Today’s students can’t claim ignorance, and I sure as hell hope they don’t plan on lonely, loveless lives. I know that I have higher aspirations for them…

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I’ve tried to take at least some pictures while I’ve been here with my parents, both because I obsess that way, and because I want to record at least some aspects of this terribly important moment in all of our lives. I’m struck, though, by all the pictures that I didn’t (and won’t) take; images that I won’t forget soon, but which I’m not going to try to capture.

Some of it is just not very pleasant. Chemo makes him throw up (as it does many people). I’ve watched a fair bit of that while we’ve been here, although nothing close to what Mom’s helped him through, and these moments definitely fall in the “I wish I could pretend I hadn’t seen that” category. There are probably powerful images that could be made of this distress, and one could argue that going through this is a key part of the fight against the cancer and therefore worthy of documentation. But some other photographer will have to do that. It’s my dad, and I need to be giving him a hug and helping him wipe his face, not taking his picture.

Some of it is the sounds that still photography just doesn’t capture. Extreme discomfort can be a very noisesome beast, and there’s been plenty of that, with more to come. Harry Smith would probably tape the whole thing, but I’m passing on that as well.

Some of it I would love to capture, but just haven’t, and probably won’t, because it’s not easy and I’m only willing to go so far to record the moment. Mom stroking his forehead in the near dark, helping him calm down after a bad spell and encouraging him to go back to sleep. Her hand on his back; his hand in mine. Little glances; fleeting expressions; moments. In the end, the little signs of why we’re fighting this thing.

Sometimes you have to live, wading through the experience instead of recording it from the shore. I keep reminding myself that now is a good time to live.

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It’s hard to know how to say this.

“My father is fighting cancer.” Nope. Sounds too much like a back alley brawl, and this is a much bigger deal than that.

“My father is battling cancer.” Closer. Given the great chunks of medical machinery being brought to bear on his illness, “battle” seems more descriptive than “fight”. But battles are (usually) parts of wars, and I’m inclined to be more explicit about that. So…

“My father has become a foot soldier in humanity’s on-going war with cancer.”

This seems pretty apt. We (mostly my Mom) are the support staff, providing love and support and matériel, eagerly and nervously awaiting news from the front. But he’s the one in the trenches, dealing with the foot rot and the deafening machines of war and the crap rations.

The key diagnoses were last week, and luckily my wonderful sister was able to fly down from New York and be with them for several days of intense and difficult information gathering. A huge thanks to her for being there for all of us!

Dad’s got cancer of the throat. The doctors place the odds at 50/50, but the system is pretty complex and there are a whole host of things that could slip or crack. He’s got several weeks of radiation and chemo ahead, so it’s going to be a long slog (and probably a rough Christmas), but Dad and Mom and the doctors are all prepared for the fight. Saturday morning was the first skirmish; happily he came through that in excellent shape.

Everyone here in Morris has been really supportive and wonderful, for which we are extremely grateful. We’re going to take off the week of Thanksgiving and will drive down to be with my parents for that week. Until then, it’s fingers crossed and a lot of time on the phone.

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