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Summertime Blues

SUMMERTIME BLUES

Summertime blues for many Millennials represents that point in August when they know the fun is soon to be over and summer with its endless partying is about to come to a close; college resumes, resorts shutter their doors, and vacationers have run out of holiday days—and money. For many, summertime can be described in terms of baseball, beaches, babes, beer and barbeque.  Those who “party hearty” might add bud and blow to the list.  So, how’s that working out for you?...

Continuing Education

CONTINUING EDUCATION

Last Wednesday (May 10, 2023) Dr. Armine Smith of the Greenberg Bladder Cancer Institute at Johns Hopkins Medicine presented a webinar on “Minimizing Bladder Cancer’s Impact: Organ Preservation in Male/Female Cystectomy” via Zoom. I attended the session and it was very worthwhile, especially the Q&A. Dr. Smith presented what any doctor might say frankly about the topic, neither “dummying the material down” nor making it impossible for a layperson to understand. Dr. Smith’s presentation began with an overview of the...

THE HISTORY OF CANCER

Cancer through the ages: (A brief and not-so-brief history) With thanks to The Wiley Online Library I thought I’d spend a little time discussing the early history of cancer. When I was in the military, we were taught to always know your enemy. To that end, here are some fact and factoids that you may find interesting. ~ 70 million B.C. Cancer was fairly common in the hadrosaur (dinosaur) population. Mostly fibromas, hemangiomas and osteoblastomas have been discovered. Also, osteosarcoma,...

BLADDER CANCER BLUES

Last September, my wife and I sat in the office of a neurologist are she was writing out a prescription for Levodopa. She had confirmed that I had early Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and that I would need the medicine hence forth. Deena had been reading about Parkinson’s Disease, including first person accounts of women whose husbands had it and she also recalled my brother who has advanced PD. I mentioned that there are worse things to have besides PD and...

Синий Lamborghini

Синий Lamborghini

The forest that early morning was bright (though cold) as sunbeams filtered though the trees. A young man was working on a machine that had broken down. He was a tank driver named Dmitriy. His tank was not working as it should and if that were not bad enough, he and his comrades were lost. He would work for a bit, then think of his girlfriend Katrina and the синий-lamborghini he would buy from his wages as a conscript. A...

Woke Christian Women

WOKE CHRISTIAN WOMEN

As I follow the political and cultural news in America, I become increasingly distressed over the weaponization and misappropriation of the word “woke.” I know that there are radical groups on the left that claim this word as their own and use it to reflect their unique experiences, biases and agenda, and then there are other groups on the political right that interpret this word through their own experiences, biases and ahenda. It reminds me of the debate decades ago...

Fear of the Lord

THE FEAR OF THE LORD

We have all experienced fear of some sort at some point in our life.  Maybe as a toddler we were briefly separated from our parent while at the market?  Or, we were unprepared for an exam years later in school.  We also feel fear when we break the rules in society for which there are consequences.  Perhaps we felt fear while walking down a dark street or through a car park to our vehicle?  I once felt fear around the age of ten when I...

Götterdämmerung

The Ragnarök is an ancient story that describes the cataclysmic overthrow and death of those legendary Norse gods such as Thor, Loki, Freyr, Odin, and others in Norse mythology. According to the Ragnarök, the sun in those days lost its light and even the stars in the sky disappeared. People lived their lives in this unhappy gloom as if they were characters in a Lord Byron poem. At an appointed time, says the Ragnarök, powerful demons and giants were summoned...

IN THIS LIFE. . .

In 416 B.C., Athens and Sparta were at war. Caught in the middle of these two powerful belligerents was Melos, a small island in the Aegean Sea which tried desparately to maintain its neutrality. Though many Melians were related to the people of Sparta, Melos was careful not to give Athens a reason to harm them. The Melosian men talked each day among themselves of the weather, of sports and wine, perhaps just the common aches and pains of growing...

a niente: When you feel like you can't go on.

A NIENTE

I was watching highlights of the Beijing Olympic figure skating competition last evening and my thoughts went to Condoleezza Rice, a personal hero of mine who might have made the U.S. Olympic figure skating team herself years ago. One little known fact about her is the origin of her first name (Condoleezza) which is a musical term defined as “to play sweetly with feeling.” And if being an awesome athlete isn’t enough, she was also a concert pianist, who at...

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