Public Service Announcement!

Updates are going to slow down again for a bit as I deal with a little life here. Here's the story, which ends in an important PSA:

Periodically (by which I mean about ten times a day) I get what I usualy consider junk email from work. It's the kind of crap that employers send out about things like clinical trials for "Healthy Lean and Obese African American Volunteers," ads for the "MAX IT OUT 4th Annual Concert Event," and how you can "Get started now on Go For The Gold." These are the titles of the last three to grace my inbox.

Yeah, exactly...you can guess which folder most of them go into. Apparently though I have some unconscious scanning routine that causes me to at least notice a few before I hit "delete." One of these lodged in my brain a couple of weeks ago: an email reminding male members of the community that while breast cancer and the like sometimes get higher-profile press at the NIH, we boys have gender-specific diseases to watch out for as well. The message prompted us to do self-exams. I think to myself, "Huh? Never done one of those. Maybe I oughta."

Day 0: I do a self-exam and next I'm thinking, "What the hell is that lump? And since when is that one twice the size of the other?"

Day 1: I see my primary care physician. She says "What the hell is that lump? And have they always been that different in size? You're getting an ultrasound!" I get an ultrasound that afternoon.

Day 2: I get the call: there's a big mass lodged in my right testicle which is almost certainly testicular cancer. Whups.

Day 3: Marg and I have a lovely a visit with Sam the Urologist, and I get a CT scan (both contrast AND no contrast! high-falutin!). Essentially, I'm told, it needs to come out. No good way to biopsy it, and 80% of these things are malignant. And by the way we should do it Tuesday. Sooo...

Day 8: I went in for surgery to have a cancerous testicle removed. Woo! Big scar (~3 inches or so) on the lower abdomen, edge of groin area. No, they don't take the direct route.

I got the path report today, and it turns out it's a good one. The only way the prognosis could be better would be if I fell into the small group of people they have to call and tell, "Uh, sorry...that didn't really need to be removed. Carry on."

I've had a stage 1A seminoma, with no visible infiltration either in local tissue or in the retroperitoneal lymph nodes (where it usually goes first). this is the most curable form of a disease that's eminently treatable to begin with. Odds are high that I'm in the clear already. However, to really minimize the risk of recurrence (and thus of chemo) I'm going to take the recommended additional step of a course of low-dose radiation to the gut.

Alright, that's my story. Now for the Public Service Announcement: Men, if you are in the prime age range (19-40) for TC, you should screen. If you have never, uh, checked yourself out, please do so now. Like most cancers, early detection is way better.

Relive the Cheese!

One of my time-waster activities lately has been going through old vinyl (the stuff I haven't replaced with CDs yet) and dumping some of it into iTunes. The records are an interesting time-warp for me. There's a lot of the usual stuff you'd expect from someone who was in college (and sometimes volunteered at the college radio station) in the late 80s: a bunch of Talking Heads, REM (all pre-Green and therefore not sucky, thank you very much), Art of Noise, Brian Eno, Elvis Costello, and the like. Plus a few guilty pleasures (*cough* Styx *cough*).

There's a few bizarre one-hit wonders as well. In particular I'm greatly enjoying relistening to an album from 1988 by Jon Astley, "Everybody Loves the Pilot...Except the Crew." This is a weird one. Astley is mostly known as a producer. His highest-profile fame was work he did for The Who; he's known as the guy who managed to edit "Who Are You" down from like nine million minutes to something approximating single length (at least for the time), and he remastered The Who's catalog for the digital era, apparently doing such a great job that even Pete "Really Picky Dude" Townshend thought it was pretty good.

Anyway, Jon Astley had an extremely brief pop singer career as well. "Everybody Loves the Pilot...Except the Crew" was the first of his two albums. I've listened to it a couple of times this week, for the first time in about fifteen years. It had one hit on it, "Jane's Getting Serious," which probably made Astley a bunch of money later on later when it got looped in a commercial for Ketchup or something. Pretty much all the songs on the album are good. Astley has a Bowie or Iggy Pop-esque baritone rumble voice, and he writes very clever lyrics about being afraid of modern life and commitment. What really makes his stuff entertaining, though, is the production. This guy is clearly aware of the inherent comedy in the overproduction rampant in pop music during that era, and he lampoons it by going completely over the edge. Like, seriously over the edge. Vast quantities of cheesy synths and sound effects, dive-bombing metal guitars, and in one tune approximately sixty-three key modulations.

It's delightful! I suppose it might not have been intentional, but sort of like the de Laurentiis Flash Gordon movie, it's very difficult to believe that the total excess wasn't done on purpose for fun. Highly entertaining, and recommended.

Brokenated!

Ugh. I broke the blog template. This one will do for now. I think I lost a few posts, but nothing I miss.

Finally back (again) writing and recording (hopefully nobody else will go into the hospital and I can keep at it for a while this time). Here's a teeny-tiny sample clip of some in progress stuff (just backing tracks), and here's another.

Ok, maybe that second one is just me goofing arounnd with a banjo clip ben used in his RileyCon puzzle last year. Tee hee.