Mr Keen McKeen

My attention span is almost nil right now, so getting anything down on paper is a serious trial. Honestly, I get about two hundred words in and then end up going and doing something else instead. I've got a job interview tomorrow and I'm going to find it a bit of a challenge and I need to be all smiley and keen. Problem is that I've never felt less smiley than I am now, and since I being made redundant by one part of Imperial I mustn't display by anger and bitterness to them either. Above all I need to display a keenness which is lacking right now since I haven't had a holiday since April, and in that time period I've been made redundant, moved house, had my brother's wedding, and cared for my father during his terminal illness, had his funeral and am now grieving for him.

I am exhausted on every level.

I mustn't show this. I must be Mr Keen McKeen from Keenshire. I must be the keenest interviewee they've ever had. They contacted me, not me them, so that's good news. I just hope the competition is rubbish as I'd rather not leave Imperial as it's a great place to work.

It seems flippant to put this as a status update on facebook... but I'm:

in pieces
in shock
can't believe it
drawing on an inner strength I didn't know I had
terribly sorry
lost
everywhere and nowhere
exhausted
facing up to what follows life

In short, the road we're on is nearing its end, and my greatest concern is that there is no suffering.

I'm missing him already.

Addendum to yesterday's post

1) I started writing this for a Macmillan Cancer forum but realised that it was best placed on my blog. Those on the forum are well aware of the issues that GBM raises and entails, right down to the acronym itself.

2) Temezedol is a oral (pill) chemotherapy drug. It is relatively new and is used at the same time as radiotherapy. It is 20% more effective when used in conjunction with radiotherapy rather than being taken seperately.

3) I work in medical research which means that I have university access to a wide range of peer reviewed science journals. I find that learning about these conditions help me to understand this condition. Once can google anything but peer reviewed science journals are the most trustworthy sources.

4) I found 3 great articles in The Lancet Oncology which were very informative regarding a new form of chemo only approved for use by the FDA in the US in May 2009. This was the good news.

5) These journals tend to make for grim reading.

6) I haven't and I'm not going to tell my immediate family the statistics for GMB. It would serve no purpose. This is the best portal to put this stuff down.

Things at the moment

The story: my father, who is only 69, was diagnosed with a grade 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) brain tumour at the beginning of July. He had a seizure whilst driving on the A4 in London but had the presence of mind to stop the car before fainting. 2 miles up the road and he would have been on the motorway doing 80 mph rather than 40mph so for that fortune I have to be thankful. His tumour is inoperable as it is in the grey matter, very deep and behind the right eye.

He had a biopsy at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead in mid-July which was traumatic for us all, diagnosis was confirmed, and today he had his final dose of radiotherapy having undergone a 6 week course of radio. He managed 5 weeks of Temedol before his quality of life was reduced to there being no quality. For 5 weeks he was an out patient at the Royal Marsden in London, but has been in for the last 10 days.

He has suffered from severe nausea and vomiting to the point that he couldn't keep anything down. He would then be hospitalised, as a result we've had four ambulances and my mother and I have driven him in twice in the early morning. We are fortunate that we only live 15 minutes from the Marsden, and very lucky that he continued to pay health insurance all his life, but saved it for the 'big things' that might come along. The Marsden had a serious fire a few years ago so beds can be hard to come by.

The last 6 weeks have been nothing short of diabolical. As many others here have commented, GBM is so cruel as it reduces sufferers to shadows of their former selves, seemingly rather rapidly. My father has lost his independence - no car - and now seems to be losing part of his mind. I kid myself that this is down to the radio and chemo but the professor (consultant) rang last Friday to say that the confusion he is suffering could be brain damage. He didn't say what the likely cause could be. I know that a side effect of morphine is confusion but then having a raygun fired into your head for 6 weeks can't be too healthy either!

The side-effects of the medication are taking their toll. Dexamethasone may be the wonder drug for reducing brain inflammation but it is destroying his muscle mass. I may be a bit off here but it is my understanding that catabolic steroids are the opposite to anabolic steroids. Still, they are one of the most important pills, those and the anti falling out of bed pills (the anti fitting ones). He's also on Cyclizine, morphine sulphate, a stomach lining protecting one, 2 blood pressure ones, and more paracetemol than you can shake a stick at.

His condition has deteriorated in the last 10 days since he has been an in patient which has presented us with a catch 22. He is physically weakening and now needs, and frankly struggles, to walk with a stick where before he was wobbly but at least he could get about. His short-term memory has completely gone too which means that the time and date have no meaning to him. He is unable to use his email and is so easily muddled. This is one of the worst aspects as he has gone from being perceptive and intelligent to being unable to carry out any work at all. Yet he still trys to work and this leads him to being frustrated and cross, which he never was before, and then he's easily distracted. In the hospital there are no distractions but at home there are so many distractions in particular paperwork such as tying up his business interests because, let's face it, the survival rate for GBM G4 is basically nil. How one can do all this when one struggles to put a password into the PC rather beats me.

I'm trying to be philosophical about it all. There's no one to blame nor anything he could have done differently as we know that no one knows the causal factors for brain tumours. I don't believe that it's God's will, or cruel fate, or bad luck or any other human emotional response. I don't even know if being fair or not comes into it. It is sadly just one of those things.

I now realise that he's not going to make 80 which was my expected target age, and I'm not entirely convinced that he'll make the UK male average life expectancy. He's had a very good life. The tragedy is that my mother will be denied her husband and our family will suffer this great loss. He is also being denied this retirement that he had just set up.

I have hope that his current symptoms of confusion are as a result of the radio and treatment and not due to the tumour or brain damage as was suggested as a possibility by the consultant. I also know that he is receiving world class care and that nothing more can be done. It still seems unreal, and caring for him these last few months has been so very stressful that I can't really remember him before all this. I will one day, just not right now.

I'll end now because I've gone nearly a thousand words. I work in medical research and though I'm not medically minded myself I have friend who is a doctor at Great Ormond St and another who is an oncologist. I know the ramifications of GBM as do they and it helps to discuss it with them.

As a family will shall get through this, after all people die all the time. My brother is getting married this Saturday and that is going to be emotional and deeply shocking for my father's friends to see his state. However it will still be a celebration of life and the future.

Change afoot and no policies

Michael Portillo was talking this morning of a scorched earth policy in the House of Commons. Not in the literal sense, more rather in the removal of the bad eggs who have been, let's say, lacking in moral fibre. A shake-up of rules is needed apparently, an end to party politics, transparency. That's great but personally my views on politicians have been scorched. I really couldn't care less what they have to say anymore. In some ways it feels like there's been a general election and in the euphoria that follows when the country is leaderless, parliament has been dissolved, the polling stations are closed but the count isn't in, one feels happiness that the last shower have gone and slight trepidation of the next lot. All magnified by caffeine as you're surruptiously staying up all night to watch it (nobody readily admits to doing this). What I'm driving at is that there is a point in an election when the new lot might or might not be in and the old lot might or might not be out. There's change afoot and no policies.

Which is akin to what we have now. Like most others I would imagine, when the Telegraph's MP expenses bonanza kicked off I was pretty angry with it all. Not just the shameless hands in the till, but the childish 'it wasn't me it's the system wot done it' excuse that somehow absolves anyone from blame. The greed, the sheer avarice of it all, the tax-dodging, the denial, and in some cases the bare faced fraud and that helpless feeling that they just 'don't get it'. Maybe MPs were never this arrogant or maybe MPs think they deserve respect rather than earning it, maybe this was a reason for what happened. But I'm completely mystified as to how this can happen and why it is that only one head has rolled, that of the Speaker yesterday. As has been stated time and again, any normal person would be fired from their job for abusing an employer's expense system. Yet for all the tough talking by the party leaders this hasn't happened. Caught with your hands in the till? Surely a summary dismissal is in order, and not just from the shadow cabinet but from Parliament. Perhaps, constitutionally this can only happen through deselection. That may be the mechanism for removal.

With this blowtorch of public derision searing through Parliament there are no new policy announcements, no select committee reports, indeed its as if not only the government has imploded, which is not unprecedented, but the whole system of government. Sure, they can say this and that but who actually believes them? More so, who actually cares? I've always disliked Gordon Brown, moving from optimism (could be better than Blair/return to the grey man of politics like Major) to pity (the Election that never was highlighted his indecision and I pitied him for that). He is the most disliked PM ever and Labour has its lowest polling ever. It has got to the point that I don't care for anything that comes out of his mouth. His demolition of the UK economy is absolute, as his inability to take responsibility not only for his errors but also any decisions that need to be made. At least Tony Blair had personality even if he was the epitome of spin. Brown is a divisive, indecisive, sulky, bully who has reached the top of the pile and is completely out of his depth. I don't like the man.

But here lies my concern. Parliament has been eviscerated, Gordon Brown is dead man walking, there's no prospect of Labour rising out of the ashes and there's a whole year until the next General Election. That would be fine were it not for the fact that these people are meant to be in charge and presiding over lifting this country out of this recession. Alistair Darling's pronouncements on the economy's recovery by Christmas suggest that he has either completely lost the plot or that bunker mentality really has set in and that he really believes that.

So here we are then. We're stuck with this useless government presiding over a broken Parliament and a ruined economy and we're going to waste a whole year while Gordon refuses to do the decent thing and call an election. It really is a sorry state of affairs.

And what could be done to improve matters? Obviously a change of government, but I'd like to see Proportional Representation, the format of the Chamber reconfigured to a semi-circle as opposed to two benches, the removal of all pomp and ceremony as these traditions seemed to have extended all the way to the antiquated work practices, primaries to choose local MPs, in short a complete revision of how Parliament is conducted. If it is ever going to happen it seems that now is the time.

Midlife-Crisis Blue Lagoon (Cast Away)

As some late Sunday evening telly I watched Cast Away last night (BBC1), the Tom Hanks opus where one ends up empathising more with a hapless Wilson basketball than Mr. Method Actor himself.

Cast Away tells the not true story of a Fed Ex manager who lives by the clock who has a big plane crash and washes up on a desert island where, get this, he has loads of time! Tom Hanks is Chuck Noland, a Fed Ex company man through and through, pager in one hand this man thinks, breathes, godammit sweats Fedex. And he's all wrapped up in chunkiest knitwear highlighting his equally chunky frame. He's such a company man that when his pager goes he leaves his big family Christmas dinner because he absolutely must fly to wherever in a Fed Ex Tristar. So this guys a real can-do kinda guy. We see him shouting at his Muscovite employees, and we see him shouting at them in Red Square as they do an impromptu open air Fed-Ex parcel sort to make the last flight out. The next time he's shouting because coconuts are falling off the trees. More of that later. Back to Fed Ex because you can't move for Fed Ex in this film. Its omnipresent. There are even some postal jokes. 'Take 5 days to get there and we'll be US Mail' and 'you wanna be on time fly UPS!' says the pilot of the doomed plane. The crash is karma for his irony. The ironies on him as all the parcels are late so he may as well be US Mail. There are loads of laughs here. They keep on coming when Chuck Noland has his fateful crash where everyone dies except him. Indeed he doesn't suffer a scratch. He's then washed ashore on a South Pacific island. What to do next? He doesn't find any water for a day which was a nice touch, and he eats a coconut. He find a torch on a dead pilot, and cuts his feet and hands and legs on coral and doesn't get infected. Its amazing. Its as though he has antibiotics or something to ward of the sickeningly rapid infection that usually occurs in the tropics from untreated coral cuts. You see coral is often living when it cuts your skin, and then it gets in the wound, and the air is hot and moist and before you know it your foot is the size of, for want of comparison, Wilson.

Not Chuck. He's so confident in his natural healing process that he uses some bubble wrap as a dressing and his legs don't drop off and he can still walk and doesn't get gangrene. The bubble wrap comes from the parcels washed up on the beach. And as this is a non-stop thrill fest we just can't wait to see what's in the parcels. There's Wilson the ball that becomes his best mate, and some ice skates that form a cutting/dental tool and a ballroom dress with a mesh ideal for fishing (who'd have thought) and ice skates! Ice Skates! On a desert island… but they look sharp and… and then when we watch him trying to light a fire for 10 minutes (36 hours in the film).

Four Years Later – and he's Stig of the Dump, and all that chunkiness is now skinny, and he has a caveman beard and curly hair. Ha-ha! His cave is daubed with neanderthal paintings and what-not. All in all he's regressed quite a way.

In the end he builds a raft, and loses Wilson (oh no, I ruined the one interesting plot line) and obviously gets rescued. In a nice twist his wife has remarried and had a child and so that relationship is dead. But this is a Robert Zemickis film so you just know there's some schmaltz coming up. You see good ole Chuck didn't open all the parcels on the beach. No, he was a good employee and kept one sealed and the thought of delivering it 'kept him alive for four years'. Any sane man would have opened it. After all, there could have been a solar powered satellite phone in it which would have saved us all a load of bother.

So in the final frame he's delivered the phone to some bird we saw at the beginning of the film who's a sculptor who coincidentally created a sculpture just like the logo of Fed Ex and incredibly didn't infringe their copyright. Chuck sees this and likes what he sees and he's now standing on a crossroads literally in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do next though hints have been dropped that he'll be heading back up the dusty track to the sculptress who we know is divorced because we saw her Fed Exing her divorce papers at the beginning of the film which like the beginning of this sentence really does feel like it was four and a half years ago.

Oliver Reed made a film called Castaway which was much better. It was based on a true story and that true story may have been written by Oliver Reed. I can't remember really, it doesn't really matter but the point was that Oliver Reed's character created the perfect Oliver Reed Desert Island, not unlike a Mid-Life Crisis Blue Lagoon. He put up an advert for single women to come and live with him on a desert island he owned in the South Pacific and not only did he get responses but they were hot too. Oliver Reed ends up running a South Pacific fiefdom where he drinks rum all day and the women, who either loathe him or just despise him, hang around with their knockers out.

Cast Away is rubbish and Castaway is also rubbish but Castaway has the benefit of Oliver Reed and female tits and Cast Away has Tom Hanks as a caveman. It's a no brainer really. (Look there's a nipple on the video cover!)

 

Zeitgeist and why Internet Conspiracies drive me nuts

The really serious issue that I have with internet films is their unbalanced nature. Good journalism takes a topic, investigates it, then interviews two groups, those who support and those who are against. It then draws a conclusion.

Zeitgeist used the internet as its source material which is a major problem in terms of reliability. I mean if I told you that I was going to make a documentary using Wikipedia as my sole source then (hopefully) you'd think I was mental. Wiki is renowned for being an unreliable source.

So I had a real problem with Zeitgeist other than my opinion that it was a waste of an hour of my life.

 

1. Unattributed narration
   

   The film opens with some monologue about how the world is a big joke or whatever. Then at the end a name comes up. Like Fred Blogs. There's no title. Its just a bloke speaking and because he's the introduction to the film it gives his speech further gravitas. But who is he? For all I know he's a mentalist from Speaker's Corner who's been given a global stage.
   

   This technique was used throughout the film, a weakening influence every time it was used.
   

2. Quickfire video editing
   

   Interspersing images of 9/11 with atomic tests from the 1950s is meaningless. Unless you're trying to show me that explosions are quite cool, or that wars kill people, or whatever. Or that 9/11 is somehow comparable to Cold War nuclear testing. Or is 9/11 a metaphor for Cold War MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Or that 9/11 is the new Cold War?
   

3. Religion is a tool to rule the masses
   

   Well done, you learnt something about religion in medieval Europe. I'd also argue that money sets the masses free. Religion also gives hope to the hopeless. Its easy to slate Christian fundamentalism when you think of fat Americans in the mid-west but it's a little different telling a DCR refugee that their entire belief structure is there to repress them not save them.
   

4. The 9/11 Truth: Its an opinion not the truth. Basing your thesis on other internet documentaries is not sound. Nor is it sound to use supporting evidence taken from news sources who you then go on to criticise for being controlled by the government/corporations/aliens. Using eyewitness reports isn't that reliable either as what people hear and see is often very different from what actually happens. Early reports of the Mumbai attacks had 100 gunmen running wild, that was reduced to 10.
   
5. and on heavily edited quotes such as that of coroner at Shanksville where United 93 crashed who is widely quoted as saying there were no bodies there… (because they had been vaporised by the impact – that's the part people naysayers miss out). As for the architects of the towers. The building was designed with an impact of a Boeing 707 hitting the face of the tower and not slicing through a corner.
   
6. The insinuation that 7/7 was an inside job, whilst being grossly offensive, neatly left out the attempt at a repeat bombing two weeks later when there wasn't a drill being conducted.
   
7. Listing all the terrorist attacks against the US and suggesting that somehow these were instigated by the US government. Pan Am 103. Why would the US not only bomb its own airline two days before Christmas, but also target an airline in financial trouble. Yeah, lets make Pan Am, icon of the US airlines go bust.
   
8. Banking. I didn't bother watching this bit as all I need do is read a paper or walk down the street to see the effects of the collapse in our banking sector. Its easier to portray them as the villains of the piece (the global conspiracy) when they're rolling in money. When they've been part or fully nationalised it's a less compelling argument. Royal Bank of Scotland [UK gov has a majority share], HBOS [Halifax Bank of Scotland] and Lloyds TSB are part nationalised. Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are fully nationalised.
   

 

I like to use this article to rebuff the oh so tedious 9/11 conspiracy theories: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html

I would also highly recommend 'The Power of Nightmares', a BBC documentary from about 2004:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares

If you want the ultimate 9/11 conspiracy film then look up 'Loose Change'. This is another 2 hours I've lost for good plus add another hour for raised blood pressure.

I think that, conspiracy bullshit aside, this is what Zeitgeist was aiming at – that it is fear that provides the impetus for many foreign and domestic policies.

I've also read and seen interviews where the argument is that sometimes people need to have something or someone to blame when something bad happens. How can it be that the mighty US of A can be brought to its knees by some crazy nutjobs with some box cutters? Yet that's what happened.

Personally I reckon the 9/11 Commission Report was so Republican because Bush's government was embarrassingly poor in preventing it. Any PM who had let something like that happen and admitted so would have had to resign. 9/11 went on to provide GWB with a pretext to invade Iraq. It also made him one of the most unpopular US Presidents in history. That's notwithstanding his single-handed destruction of the US economy.

My final issue with the global conspiracy is this:            So what?

What does it matter? Really? Do you think if we take the blue pill (like The Matrix) and see the real truth, that it will make things any better? Since these global puppet masters are all but invisible and yet have their fingers in every pie we could be chasing ghosts forever and still never find them.

How about this for a contradiction? Zeitgeist accuses religion of being a tool to control the masses. Their message professes to there being a higher invisible power that rules the world. Its evil and its greedy and it controls the world at its whim. Nobody knows who this power is, nor is there any proof that it exists and yet there it is. Now call me blasphemous but that sounds like a whole new religion. In essence, global conspiracy theorists are a very modern 21^st Century internet fundamentalists.

They've founded a new religion. Congratulations.

Not one I believe in