A truly beautiful book about what is certainly a terrible and often terrifying collection of illnesses. Our family, like almost all families, has wrestled with cancer and wrestled with the scary and frequently devastating treatments that hope to kill the cancer before they kill the patient. This book provides a rich and illuminating context for those struggles, giving a palpable sense of the diseases and how our understanding and approaches have changed and how they’ve stayed the same. Mukherjee’s story telling is deft and compelling, sharing a complex and often very technical history in a way that remains personal, compelling, and accessible. It at times borders on the poetic, but without ever becoming sentimental or maudlin.

While this is technically about cancer, the book provides valuable insight into the complexities of medical research, whether scientific, mathematical, political, or social. We’ve made huge strides in so many areas of medicine in the last two centuries, but we rarely appreciate the oft tortured, surprising, and complex channels wended along the way. Yet to understand cancer and cancer treatment, and important challenges such as antibiotic resistance, and drug R&D, funding, testing and approval, it’s critical that we have this sort of context.

So most highly recommend; absolutely one of the best books I’ve read.

View all my reviews

The lead front page headline in last week’s issue of our (weekly) local newspaper?

Stalled train tangles traffic on Thursday

Yup. That’s what passes for news in our happy little world. The train had brake problems and ended up parked for two hours, initially blocking all 5 crossings in town; at some point they split the train and opened up the southernmost crossing rejoining the sundered halves of town. This was the day (10 Oct) that I brought WeatherGrrrl home from the hospital after her knee replacement surgery, and as part of borrowing a friend’s van to collect WeatherGrrrl in (thanks KK!), I ended up crossing those tracks three times while all this was going on. Thus I can attest that the Morris Police peeps were out directing traffic and being genuinely useful as I was moving back and forth, so big thanks to them for helping manage what passes for a big deal out here in the rural wilderness.

My favorite line from the article (emphasis mine):

For the next two hours, officers from the MPD helped keep traffic moving along Highway 28 and Pacific Avenue, two busy thoroughfares during the morning commute.

Well, I guess Highway 28 does have the only two traffic lights in town. That makes it a busy thoroughfare, right? Right???

Now I’m going to go back to watching construction vehicles push dirt around as part of the road construction in our neighborhood.

Or maybe I’ll check on the squirrels collecting food for the winter. They’ve been enjoying gathering up half-eaten apples from our trees, and tucking them in all sorts of interesting places.

I’ve been living and working in the Twin Cities as a summer intern for the super cool Kidblog folks (more on that later) and never got around to “officially” letting the world know. I’d hoped to catch up with some of the many friends, alum, etc., that live in this part of the world, and while some of that has happened, I now only have about 2.5 weeks left and realize how many connections I haven’t made. This is mostly because my job is cool and I really dig it (all of which is good), but I would like to connect with folks while I’m still here.

So, if you live in the area and would like to do coffee or dinner or something before I bug out, let me know! I probably respond best (at the moment) to e-mail (mcphee@morris.…) or Twitter (@NicMcPhee), but I’ll try to track my Facebook account as well.

Speaking of which, apologies to all my Facebook peeps. I really hate FB in a lot of ways and am happy to take any excuse to ignore it. The fun of work and other obligations meant I pretty much checked out of FB from late May until now, only to find that people’s lives have gone on without me! Wow. Thanks a ton for all the kind birthday wishes, etc., and sorry if you’ve been wondering why I’ve been ignoring you.

Looking back, it can be hard to imagine why people in the past just didn’t get it. Why they thought women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and why blacks and whites couldn’t use the same restroom, or the same school.

The people that voted to supported these old ideas were not all Bad People going out of their way to work against the rights of others. I know some where my relatives, and I’ll bet that some were yours. Certainly, there were plenty of small-minded, mean-spirited people leading the charge, but they depended crucially on the passive support of numerous well-meaning folk who mostly just didn’t want to rock the boat or weren’t very comfortable with change.

Tomorrow in Minnesota we get a chance to vote on whether our state constitution should be amended in an attempt to block all future efforts to allow gays the human & civil rights of marriage, & the legal protections it affords. As you consider this amendment, it might help to ask yourself: How do I wish to be remembered? As someone who quietly stood with those who would limit the freedoms of those different from themselves, or with those who believe in liberty and justice for all?

And let us be clear: This is a human rights issue.

Sue & I have been married for over 20 years and she has been a full, equal, & wonderful partner in building our shared life. Her creativity and passion flows through our child, our home, and the experiences we’ve shared. I would hope that our community would recognize this and support her associated rights, which include critical things such as health coverage, our pension, and her right to speak for me regarding medical treatment. If, however, someone didn’t recognize her rights, she would have the legal backing of the state of Minnesota, which ensures the human and civil rights of a spouse in numerous ways.

Why should any committed couple be denied these same rights, regardless of their genders?

Which brings us back to the question: How do we wish to be remembered? Do we want to be remembered as supporting a last, desparete gasp of a group attempting to deny yet another group a basic human and civil right? Or do we want to be on the right side of history tomorrow, knowing, win or lose, that we voted to treat our fellow travellers humanely, with courage & justice?

So I urge you to Vote No. It’s a vote your grandchildren can be proud of.

I would also strenuously encourage you, for many of the same underlying reasons, to vote no on the proposed Voter ID amendment. I recommend that you check out Guante’s excellent video on the Voter ID amendment if you wish to learn more:

You might also want to check out MPR’s nice video on the huge amount of vagueness and uncertainty there is in the proposed Voter ID amendment:

So go vote tomorrow. It matters. I know that the weird math of the electoral college can make it seem like voting for president doesn’t matter unless you live in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida. And it can seem like incumbents have a lock on everything. But on either of these amendments, it could literally come down to a few votes. So don’t say your voice doesn’t matter. Don’t say you don’t have time. Don’t say no one cares. Instead be a voice, however small, for a more humane world.

Vote No on both proposed amendments.

It’s been interesting as we’ve visited a zillion colleges this summer, which schools are helping students learn to navigate the unknown, and which are turning out editors for textbook companies :)

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but we happen to have a nice 80Gb iPod Classic (pictured above) that died over the summer with the telltale clicking sound of a stuck head. So I tried out Matt’s trick & whacked quite firmly (& quite loudly) multiple times on an old wooden chest and voilà – it came back to life! We thought we’d be travelling without the benefit of our huge shared pile of music, but it’s worked beautifully for many hours (all the way down to Arkansas & back).

Huzzah! Big thanks to Matt for the suggestion – banging on hardware beats the heck out of having to buy a new iPod. Again, I was only willing to risk this because this puppy was well past warranty, and there was no chance of repairing it. Obviously beating the tar out of electronics is something one should think carefully about and do with some care; your mileage definitely may vary.

Thus I was pretty seriously distressed when the home button quit responding yesterday. It had been acting a little touchy for a while, but I could always get it to respond if I was persistent. Yesterday, however, it just went dead. Kaput. The end. This is the kind of thing you don’t repair, and I wasn’t super keen on spending a few hundred to replace it, especially since everything worked fine except that one crucial little button.

A little searching turned up this forum thread, which boils down to two recommendations:

• Blow compressed air into the connector slot at the bottom
• Put a drop of contact cleaner, nail polish remover, or other water-free solvent on the button, and then work the button to try to get the solvent to wick around to the where the contacts are

Both of these are based on the assumption that the problem is some dirt or or gunk that’s collected under the button and is interfering with the contacts. Since my iPod lives pretty much permanently in my jeans pocket (along with pens, keys, lint, and various other experiments in the spontaneous generation of life), that assumption seemed pretty reasonable.

Some of the people that tried the solvent approach got too much in there, and it seeped along the screen, giving them an undesired aquarium effect. Consequently, I tried the compressed air first, since that seemed least likely lead to some unfortunate side-effect. Sadly, it also didn’t lead to the desired effect either. Consequently I moved on to nail polish. I put a drop on the button, and then clicked and wiggled that little button to try to work the liquid around. And after maybe thirty seconds of fiddling … voila! It started working!

It’s now been most of an hour, and the fix seems solid. I’ve had it propped up with the button end down, so if there’s any liquid still in there it’s headed away from the screen and the bulk of the electronics, and by now I would assume that most of the liquid has evaporated anyway.

I’d think twice about trying this at home, especially if you have a working piece of electronics. Mine was completely unusable without the button, so I was willing to take the risk, but I can imagine a lot of ways in which this might not go well, so tread gently into these swamps.

For me, though, it’s all happy, happy, happy :-)

These were gorgeous old trees, which provided us with shade in the summer and shelter from January’s bitter north winds. They will be missed. We lost all three of our boulevard elms in the past three years, and it’s already made a very noticeable difference to the lawn, gardens, and house.

We’re working on planting new trees, but those will be more for the next generation than ours.

Our last trip was a fine week with my parents in Arkansas, where we had much cooler weather than one might expect for this time of year. We even had one really nice, gentle rain, which was an excellent excuse to stay inside and read. Or sit out in the rain if you’re a ceramic frog :-).

Many, unfortunately, represent the nastier end of that long, old river of misogyny that runs through our world. A real winner on that front is an deeply awful Lysol ad that opens with

A man marries a woman because he loves her. So instead of blaming him if married love begins to cool, [a wife] should question herself.

Wow. Apparently all men are simultaneously saints who marry only for love, but are at the same time hyper-hygiene freaks who will let their marriage fall apart because their wife smells like a human. Yowza, yowza, yowza.

Go.

Be frightened.

Then get back to work.

P.S. This re-captioning of an old 50’s cartoon is a total hoot :-).