For over a year now I’ve been using a neat plug-in for my web browser which hides advertisements on websites, cutting out the clutter and increasing my surfing speed. However, several weeks ago I realized that this marvelous plug-in was causing weird behavior whenever I tried making comments on Facebook so I disabled it and was astonished to discover what I’ve been missing out on all this time: women!!! But not just any type of women; these are women who are looking specifically for guys who are 42 years old.

Holy crap!!! I’m 42 years old!! What are the odds??!!

I never knew that such women existed! Just look at the attached valentines card I made from the army of women I am now considering for romantic liaisons. They’re sassy, sparkly, smiling and besides the fact they’re completely obsessed with men my age they all have one thing in common:

Bewbs.

Just look at ‘em.

Wow.
I don’t even know where to start.

Related posts:

1. How to Make a Photo Album on Facebook
2. Understanding the New Facebook Home Page
3. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed

I was recently surprised to find myself blurting out the name “Oscar Goldman” to the television. As this is not something I typically do I feel it important to explain that I was (finally) watching the film “The 40 Year Old Virgin“. In the movie there is a scene in which the main character explains the importance of one of the hundreds of collectible toys lining the walls of his apartment. In this case it was a bland looking doll wearing a garish sports jacket; the epitome of 1970s men’s fashion and I recognized it without hesitation.

That little guy was Oscar Goldman, the boss of Steve Austin, aka “The Six Million Dollar Man“. Take a look:

As you may suspect, I not only knew who Oscar Goldman was, I had my very own Oscar Goldman toy as a kid… complete with the exploding briefcase seen in Jim Emmon’s video (above).

It’s important that I point out that The Six Million Dollar Man wasn’t just a formulaic episodic television show from the mid-1970s, it was a glimpse into a future in which the notion of “handicapped” had been redefined to mean “bad ass” for an entire generation of kids. We left the 1970s believing that nearly any physical handicap could be overcome through the proper application of high technology combined with enormous stacks of money (never mind that we also believed that giant robotic Sasquatches roamed the Pacific Northwest).

When word got out that Kenner was releasing a Steve Austin doll it immediately shot to the top of my Christmas list. This doll would be a game-changer!! It had a telescope for an eye, an arm that could lift practically anything so long as you kept jabbing the big red ratchet on the doll’s back, and (even better), you could roll back the skin on his arm to reveal the bionic circuitry beneath. This was the sort of doll that proved you were living in the future and I absolutely had to have one.

What I didn’t count on was that my parents might not be able to find me a Bionic Man action figure anywhere in town because every kid my age had asked for the same damned toy. Every store was sold out so they came up with a Plan B…. guess what I received instead…

I received a Mike Power “Atomic Man” action figure, made by the GI Joe people, who were committed to cashing in on the bionic fever sweeping the land. Their strategy was to crank out a GI Joe figure with prosthetic limbs. Good old Mike Power had one clear arm, one clear leg, two kung-fu grip hands, and one eyeball which did not function so much as a telescope but rather as a signal mirror. His right hand was articulated so that it could spin a “personal helicopter blade”… but it really didn’t help much.

This “counterfeit Six Million Dollar Man” had zero curb appeal.

The thing was a complete dud in my eyes… more of an “acrylic man” than an “atomic man”…. check out this video and see what you think….

Needless to say that I was let down a bit, but a week or two after Christmas I did eventually receive my own Steve Austin doll and later on an Oscar Goldman doll complete with exploding briefcase.

And yes, if you must pry… I still have all of them.

Shut up.
Shut the Hell up.

(For all you folks who grew up in the 70s and 80s you really need to visit Sean’s site ToysYouHad.com for a great trip into yesteryear)

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Last month, for the first time in over 5 years, I was officially back in the movie business, if only for few days. My friend Joeprops was in Atlanta, having taken over as propmaster of The Vampire Diaries. After completing a few small graphics jobs Joe pitched me on cool new project: illustrating a prop journal that one of the characters was slated to find in an upcoming episode (now known as “The Turning Point“, which aired on November 19, 2009). After thinking about the job for a day I agreed to have a whack at the drawings and spent the following weekend studying old woodcuts, peering through antiquated investigations of human anatomy, prying into the secret code of the Philosopher’s Stone, learning the vagaries of pentagrams, and generally trying to inhabit the mind of the book’s fictional author.

Next, I dug up my collection of Speedball inking nibs and a jar of good old-fashioned black ink and started in to drawing. Each drawing was done without penciled-in sketches – it’s just straight from the pen to the paper, just like in my real sketchbooks. I’m not a commercial artist, but neither was “Jonathan Gilbert” the character who supposedly created the drawings, and I thought the book’s drawings should feel genuine, not overly art directed (which is actually art direction in itself).

The prop department did some light aging to the pages but the grownups wanted them to look much older, so we employed my personal favorite method of aging paper which involves a strong brownian solution, a simple newtonian time machine and good timing. Out of all the pages we treated there was only one mishap – one of my ancient vampire curses lingered too long in our secret aging device and began smoldering with the hate of a thousand slain vampires until we doused it in the sink…. for the next 30 minutes every person who walked through the break room remarked on the lingering scent of charred vampire poop.

That’ll sure make your eyes water.

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Let’s face it, Facebook, you have managed to make me look like a fool twice this week and while that’s not terribly difficult to do, I’m getting tired of it. This time around I find out that you fulfilled my wish for a way to view status updates only. No application updates, no notes, no videos, no links to helpful articles like this one, just plain old status updates. So where did you put this fantastic new Feed View? Why, down at the bottom of my list of Feed Views. While this is probably not a big deal for most of your users, it’s a really big deal for me because I subdivide all of my users into different categories to help me wade through them a bit better. So, let’s see what we have to in order to see the Status Updates view as our default page view. (Thanks to Amber Ward and her list of friends for this tip)

Step One
Look at the bottom of list of Feed Views for the word “more” and click it.

Step Two
Locate the Feed View titled “Status Updates”.

Step Three
Move your mouse to the right hand side of the “Status Updates” Feed View item, then click and drag it ALL the way up to the top of the list, letting go of it at the very top.

Step Four
Now that the item is at the top of your Feeds List, CLICK IT!!

Step Five
Celebrate! Now you can see all of your friends’ status updates without seeing all the additional blather that they or their apps may be posting.

Mind you, by following these instructions and never looking back you many never run across good information like THIS ARTICLE again in your lifetime, so be sure to use the News Feed and Live Feed views from time to time to get a taste of what your friends are yapping about this week…. you never know what those crazy friends might be up to!!

Happy Facebooking!

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1. Understanding the New Facebook Home Page
2. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
3. Facebook’s NEW News Feed

Jeepers, people. Has Facebook gone wanky (again) or what? Don’t worry though, it’s okay, I have a fix so that your Live Feed works nearly like it did before the weekend of the Great Facebook Flop of Late 2009…… but before I get to the fix let me first mention that I found these instructions on Facebook… and of all people, it was sitting up on the wall of our friend Hollis Gillespie, a well known potty mouthed Atlanta author with movie deals and book deals coming out her ears. While I admire and respect Hollis’ creative skills it galled me that I, a graduate of Georgia Tech with a double-secret minor in computer technology, had to rely on a woman whose cellphone is held together by rubberbands (no offense Hollis).

So the fix.

If you’re not already there, go to your Live Feed. If you’re on your News Feed you’ll see the link above the box where you can type your status update.

Once there, scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen until you see a bar which states “Older Posts” on the left and “Edit Options” on the right. (This is just above the site’s footer)

Click on “Edit Options” until a dialog box pops up featuring the “fine controls” for how you view your friends’ feeds. Note the lower area entitled “Number of Friends”. There is a text entry field located here which allows you to tweak the number of users that will be screened for appearance on your Live Feed.

For reasons unexplained this number is set at 250. If you have over 250 friends this is a problem… so change that number to something higher. Once finished, click the “save” button in the lower right hand side of that pop-up box and it will disappear, hopefully taking your new higher limit back to headquarters and restoring some normalcy to your friend stalking addiction.

Happy Facebooking!

Related posts:

1. Facebook’s NEW News Feed
2. Make Facebook’s NEW Status Updates Group Your Default
3. Understanding the New Facebook Home Page

(note: be sure to read my newest post about Facebook’s undocumented transition)
I got tired of not understanding the NEW version of Facebook’s News Feed and went all the way over to their help section (tiring, this) looking for answers. Why they didn’t send the explanation out to its users baffles me (I’ve re-posted their answer below for you lazy people).

To quote Facebook’s Help Page:

What is the difference between News Feed and Live Feed?
News Feed aggregates the most interesting content that your friends are posting, while Live Feed shows you all the actions your friends are making in real-time.

How does News Feed determine which content is most interesting?
The News Feed algorithm bases this on a few factors: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update).

So THERE!!
Annoying? Yes.
Weird? Yes.
But I still call this a win. The app spam is gone and now I can simply follow the most interesting of my friends without even needing to pick and choose.

Let’s see how well this actually works.

Related posts:

1. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
2. Understanding the New Facebook Home Page
3. How to Make a Photo Album on Facebook

Katrina Rice didn’t get a screen credit.

Now, those of you outside the film industry need to realize that this is something that happens all the time. Those credits at the end of the movie that seem to go on for days and days? They could last even longer!! Quite often the carpenters and scenics who lovingly craft those ancient temples and gleaming space stations and barnacle-encrusted pirate ships are left entirely out of the credit roll at the end of a movie, which means that their names won’t live on into “eternity”… and despite the fact that many producers use the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) as their guide to work experience, there’s no substitute to seeing your name crawl up the silver screen and knowing that thousands of people around the world will see it (trust me, this is a surprisingly emotional experience).

Yes, the carpenters and scenics think that it stinks that they get left out on a regular basis, but they’ve become accustomed to it and no one in Hollywood seems particularly interested in changing the practice.

Of course it isn’t fair, and yes, it does in fact represent a caste system that exists in Hollywood, but I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know. I mean, you have seen Bowfinger haven’t you?

So when the credits rolled all the way through and the lights came up, we all started asking each other if anyone had seen Katrina’s credit. The answer was a unanimous “NO”.

Now it isn’t as if Katrina had been hammering together flats in a woodshop, far from the silent whir of Panavision cameras. In fact, Katrina was part of the shooting crew for the entire movie as Third Props and also worked as 2nd Unit Propmaster during certain sequences of the film.

From the Best Boy to Key Grip to Art Director, everyone on the crew knew Katrina Rice.

The film’s star, Woody Harrelson, knew Katrina Rice especially well because she’s the woman who perfected an entirely vegan replica of a Twinkie to suit his dietary requirements. I mean, the man talked to late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel about those very same faux Twinkies!!

In her spare time at home, not even on the clock, Katrina worked through batch after batch of animal-free, organic confectionery treats trying to find a recipe that would suit Woody and match the look of an actual Twinkie onscreen. On the day the actor finally had to bite into her handiwork on camera he congratulated her on her success.

Toward the end of the film Katrina approached me and asked me to help her design a shirt for the ladies on the crew so I adapted a diagrammatic zombie head from one of the Art Director’s zombie warning posters and made the artwork you see at the lead of this post: the Zombiegirl Power shirts – shirts which a lot of the women on the crew ordered (I’m wondering if the show’s Producer bought one for the ladies in his life).

And then, the weekend of the film’s release, Katrina organized a huge Zombie Princess Party and had a metric tonne of pretty girls get dolled up in princess gowns and zombie makeup just to go see the movie. It was a spectacle for everyone in the theater, an absolute hit.

So… like… what up guys? Seriously. Explain to me how you leave off somebody like that. I know that everything is more expensive these days, right down to the length of a credit roll…. but come on. A few extra names is terribly stingy.

So this is where I need some help from you internet goons and goonettes.

When compared against all the hurt and suffering in the world it’s absolutely silly and petulant to worry about getting screen credit on a film, but do me a favor:

When you go to see the movie Zombieland I want you to remember to shout out “Katrina Rice” whenever you see Twinkies. Don’t do it just for Katrina. Do it for all the people who work on movies and never get credit (including Katrina’s boyfriend, whose nickname is coincidentally “Woody”).

And tell your goony friends to spread the word…. What do I care? I’m not worried about getting hired by these maroons. The only way I’m going back into the film business is above the line – that way I can make sure that my screen credit rotates in 3D and has dancing skeletons on top.

Go kids!
It’s time to nut up, or shut up.

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I understand that my pals The Cardboard Troopers had a wild time this past weekend. They arrived in Atlanta for the 2009 edition of Dragon*Con, but they couldn’t actually seem to find a trace of the convention and the hotel people kept looking at them funny. I sure hope that they come back for the 10:00am parade on Saturday, they always seem to enjoy that.

Which reminds me that last month the Fall issue of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine hit the stands and I was simultaneously delighted (97%) and mortified (3%) to read the article about me that staff writer Van Jensen composed after we met prior to my surgery this summer. Entitled “How Did That NERD on the Left Become That PIRATE on the Right?“, the article does a really nice job of catching people up with the kid who won the Batman contest back in the 80s… and the second page features a certain cardboard trooper standing in front of a line of “real” troopers at Dragon*Con.

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Last week our friend Bob announced that he was going to sell a few old Star Wars toys he had laying around his house. This of course piqued my interest, as I’m one of those millions of children who were imprinted with the plans for the Death Star back in the summer of 1977. Like many of those kids, my formative years were spent poring over pre-production illustrations by Ralph McQuarrie and building my own models of the ships out of balsa wood and styrene. Looking back, I thought that I had a pretty great collection of lovingly-used, carefully-protected toys and memorabilia packed away into boxes and sent off for storage.

I was so wrong.

What I’m leaving out is that “our friend Bob” is better known in Star Wars fan circles as “VaderPainter“; one of the premiere Darth Vader costumers in the nation. His Darth Vader costume has its own custom-made road case… something you’d expect to see during a load-in for a KISS concert. It has custom-cut foam receivers for Vader’s helmet. It has casters. It has reinforced sides and custom silkscreened artwork on the outside. It’s totally Rock-n-Roll, and it’s totally ready for tour… which is exactly what Bob uses if for because he has appeared all over the place as Vader and has more Imperial Stormtrooper friends than you can shake a gaffi stick at.

Knowing how seriously he takes his costuming it should have come as no surprise that his Star Wars collection might be “above average”.

What it turned out to be though is “beyond imagination“.

Bob’s house is a realization of every Star Wars toy collector’s dream: shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves filled with figures and spaceships and books and models and replica costumes and helmets and…….. there were so many toys and figures on hand that I honestly had a difficult time focusing on any one item because there were five more things right beside it that I wanted to see. I kept finding myself staring with my mouth open at things I’d only ever seen in magazines, like an art student walking through the Louvre admiring the care given to each piece of art on display. Just incredible.

The video I’ve posted here is of Captain Matt of ThePirateShip.com being given a personal tour of the collection by VaderPainter himself. Enjoy!

After yesterday’s visit to Bob’s sale I have to tell you: my collection is a joke. And I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m more than a bit relieved because now I won’t have to build a Star Wars museum of my own. As we were driving away my 78 year old Dad said “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a toy store in a house.”

Right on.

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No related posts.

In the fall of 2008 I went to my new primary care doctor for a physical. My PSA levels were high so we ran a round of antibiotics to see if it was an infection of some sort. After two weeks we re-tested and the levels were just as high so I went to see a urologist, who suggested that everything pointed toward the need for a biopsy. I opted to wait until after the holidays.

On January 27th of 2009 I went into the hospital for a surgical biopsy. Three days later the doctor was on the phone telling me that I had prostate cancer. Somehow I knew that I was going to get that call, but it still shocked me to my core. On the way home that night I called an old friend to tell him the news, still trying to make sense of it myself. Later, I wrote a letter to a friend living out of state as I didn’t want to talk on the phone about it. Telling my parents broke my heart and I don’t like to remember that day. That night I told friends on a messageboard, most of them spread across the country and the world. That felt “safe” because they’re the “little people who live in my computer”… and they were so great, rallying to bolster me up. Later still, I met with my bosses to let them know what was happening, as best I could. But mostly I stayed quiet to the world.

February was a blur of appointments and scans and tests and conversations and absolute mind-numbing dread. A radical prostatectomy was the best option, with radiation seed therapy running a distant second. The recurrence of prostate cancer isn’t unusual, and since I’m so “young” to have this disease the best option was to remove the prostate entirely, which would dial the danger down to zero for the rest of my life.

Now, this urologist happened to be someone who performs traditional “open surgery”, and has done so for years. He suggested that I should look toward Northside if I decided to have “robotic” surgery. However, my understanding of “robotic” surgery was based on some old DARPA concept sketches published in tech magazines sometime in the 1990s and I had no desire to be a guinea pig for what I felt was immature technology.

Soon after, one of my oldest friends suggested that I go with him down to Florida to watch the Braves in spring training. After a bit of indecision I leapt off of the fear wagon and straight into Denial Town for a bit of a vacation and it was great. The perfect break; one that I was tempted to stay on permanently, if only I could get a job as an Imagineer at Disney.

But the trip to the land of pre-season baseball is always over all too soon and I was forced to find other ways to not deal with my Next Step. Hiding behind a string of must-see episodic television series was an excellent technique. Burying myself in work was another.

I maintained my silence about my situation with everyone I knew, only occasionally letting friends know, and even then it was only under certain situations. One of the dumbest things about considering yourself to be a fun-loving person is that YOU think your friends are going to expect you to be entertaining and funny… that they won’t want to see your thunderclouds. I couldn’t have been more wrong, but I wasn’t ready to tell people yet, partly because I didn’t have my Next Step in place.

I felt bottled up and it was killing me, but I couldn’t manage to make myself go to get a 2nd opinion… I think that the fright had caught up with me. But I still told a few people here and there.

Seriously, I dare you to try tossing the line “oh, by the way, I have cancer” into the middle of a dinner table full of people chattering away happily. That’s a social hand-grenade and I wasn’t able to throw it because I didn’t have a follow-up response to that announcement, and how dumb would I look not having a medical plan in place?

While I was at the Atlanta Film Festival I was talking to a filmmaker I used to date and she advised me that it would be best if I just kept quiet about the cancer, saying that she would never tell anyone… and as smart as she is, I knew that we were wired very differently. I wanted to talk about it with everyone, but I wasn’t quite ready yet… was I going to do the open surgery after all? Why was I dragging my feet then?

One afternoon I was scheduled to have lunch with a couple of friends from the movie business and another couple of former classmates from Georgia Tech. I was on the phone with my friend Channing, giving him directions to the restaurant when I was suddenly seized by “that feeling”, so I tossed the cancer grenade.

After the initial shock, and expressing his sympathies and best wishes, Channing said “Well, you’re going to get the DaVinci surgery, right?”.

Now, that’s probably very nearly exactly what Channing said to me. But the tone of his voice said “Please tell me that you’re not an idiot” and that surprised me almost as much as the fact that he knew what the DaVinci surgery was… I mean, I barely knew myself, and I was the one with the prostate cancer. It was a metaphysical slap across my metaphysical face and my metaphysical cheek was smarting something metaphysically fierce.

“How… how do YOU know about the DaVinci surgery??” I stammered.

“Remember, I’m a hospital architect, I DESIGN the stupid operating rooms!!” came his amused reply.

Driving to meet everyone for lunch that day, all I could think about was what Channing said. Then at lunch he and my friend Magnus explained that they had a friend who’d recently had the surgery with one of the two “big gun” surgeons in Atlanta and that this friend had become a disciple of the DaVinci surgery.

I never told him, but Channing gave me the push I needed.

I started thinking about the da Vinci surgery all the time. I started reading about the mechanized da Vinci “surgical system” and comparing it to open surgery, specifically when performing the “da Vinci prostatectomy”. In-surgery blood loss, nerve-sparing techniques, recuperation time, it all suddenly made so much sense. The tools were oh so TINY (see my illustration again to get an idea of how big the “snipping” tool is when compared to a dime).

This is one of the da Vinci machine’s instrument arms fully extended. The tiny operating tools are located at the end of the extensible black rod/tube.

It turned out that my belief that this was “experimental” surgery was out-dated. The technique had been around long enough, not long enough for hard clinical comparison to open surgery, but long enough that it had established numbers and they were good. The technique was gaining traction every year. Men I knew who’d had traditional open surgery in the last 15 years ALL said that they would pursue the robotic surgery if they could have it all over to do now.

With all of this information in my head I finally realized that I had bought into this surgical technique. I made the call to Scott Miller, one of the city’s very best da Vinci prostatectomy surgeons, and was met by the most incredible response by his staff. They sent me emails, they called me back to check with me. They held my hand a lot, and I needed it.

I was suddenly on track and everything felt right.

I had momentum.

I started throwing the cancer grenade more often, and every time it went off I found more support. LOTS of people had relatives who’d had this surgery, or something similar. Information began flowing. I could suddenly talk to people with other medical problems with new understanding. A week or two before the surgery I posted information to my friends on Facebook and sent out an email to other friends and was stunned to find out that an old colleague from the film business had been diagnosed a year before me and had the same surgery with the same surgeon. At his urging I called on him many times before and after the surgery, which was a real blessing.

What if I’d never told anyone?

Opening up was the best thing I ever did, I know three guys who have told me that they went to get checked after hearing about my cancer – and I’ve no doubt that they wouldn’t have given it a thought otherwise because that’s how we guys are. But we do talk about this stuff amongst ourselves, especially if somebody we know gets it. We’re not afraid to ask questions of each other and if I can help one person catch this particular problem by being a poster child it’s something I’ll gladly do.

Now, crawling into a quiet hole and not telling anyone does in fact work for some people, but it would have been the worst medicine for me. It’s up to you to figure out what suits your personality, your age, your culture, and your relation to your friends. But don’t be afraid to tell people. They’re certainly not going to laugh at you, and if they treat you like you’re made of porcelain for awhile, let them. Everyone needs a way to cope with this situation, and who are you to deny them their coping mechanism? Just don’t be afraid to tell them when they’re being a little too coddling.

Between my Facebook announcement and that big email I still managed to miss a lot of people and have been getting a lot of calls in the weeks following my surgery. It’s simply impossible to get the word to all of the people who know you, so don’t worry if you miss a few. They will understand that you have more important things brewing.

And… if some of your friends disappear from your radar entirely because they can’t deal with your situation, let them go without anger or hurt. It’s their problem. Maybe they lost someone important in the past and simply can’t deal with the chance of further loss, which is sad. Maybe they’re cold and insensitive robots and were never worth having as friends in the first place, which is tragic because that must be the way they live their entire life. Or maybe they never actually liked you!! LOL – just don’t hold it against them. Or do. Whatever works.

Going in for surgery can be scary. Teeth-chatteringly scary. Defy the fright by being the calmest person in the room.

Having your family with you is great, unless you don’t like them and then it’s probably a terrible idea. Fortunately, I like my own family quite a bit and knew that they were in far worse shape than me because I was about to get some really great drugs and go very, very far away for two or three hours, while they had to sit in uncomfortable chairs in a big waiting room with a lot of people they didn’t know, worrying about me for hours on end.

I remember getting into the gown, and then into the leggings they use to prevent clots. I remember being dressed with some sort of silver sheets and shower cap and leg coverings they said they were testing for keeping patients warm during the surgery. I was convinced that they just wanted to dress me up as a baked potato. I remember being wheeled into the surgery. I remember telling one nurse she was really pretty. I remember seeing the robot over in the corner. Then I don’t remember so much.

The patient lies on a platform beneath the da Vinci machine, where technicians do a million things I can only guess at, like switching out the various tools at the tips of the robotic surgical arms, as well as more traditional actions like monitoring vital signs.

Later on I remember being wheeled down the hallway and talking to people we passed, saying hello to anyone I could. The attendants were cracking up at me. That’s what I do when I come out of anesthesia… I like to wave and smile at people. They should put me in a parade right after surgery.

I remember getting into the bed. I remember a thousand night visits from a million different nurses and unceasing barrage of temperature checks and leg compressions and terrible hospital food and being tired and sleeping. But none of it was all that bad.

By noon the next day I was released to go home. For a week I had a catheter in place and the less said about that the better. It’s not the End of the World, but it sure is close, somewhere up toward the front row… not because of any pain, just the annoyance. Be sure to have a plan in place in case your cath stops draining, which happened to me one very exciting afternoon.

The catheter has been gone nearly a month and I have some recovery issues that I’ll continue to deal with for awhile, but there’s hardly any pain whatsoever from any of the actual surgery itself.

The six abdominal scars are healing quite nicely, and in case you’re wondering, here’s the key to the scar diagram as best I understand it:

1) Camera went in here. Prostate came out here.
2) Suction and some spritzing delivered through this incision.
3) surgeon’s micro hand tools
4) surgeon’s micro hand tools
5) assistant’s tool(s), delivery route of suture needles to site
6) additional grabber

Five weeks after the surgery my energy levels are still improving, but aren’t quite up to normal yet. I’m not supposed to do any heavy lifting yet. I’m still a bit scattered, but every day I’m a bit more “with it” and have been posting silly crap online again.

If you’re reading this and you, or a loved one, have been diagnosed with prostate cancer, I’m sorry. It sucks. It’s scary. Your options depend on your age and the state of your cancer and your existing health. A friend of my friend Dale, over in Charleston, South Carolina, sent along a PDF from Johns Hopkins that showed a study which said that surgeons who work on a LOT of cases on a regular basis are a VERY good choice…. seeming to fit with the old adage “give a job to a busy man and it will get done”. So, if your surgeon has done 30 of these operations, and you have the opportunity to go to a surgeon who’s done over 1300 of them, I recommend you investigate that high-volume doctor.

If you’re up to it, talk to your friends. Talk to people who have had your surgery. Nobody can prepare you for all of it, but it does help cushion the experience.

My friend Mike, who was diagnosed with a different sort of cancer taught me to be mindful of your loved ones, as they’re silently suffering in ways that you may not realize. So don’t lash out at them when you’re scared, as you’ll only ratchet up their stress levels.

And that’s all I have for now.

I still have months and months of recovery to go through, things that go beyond the healed scars. I wish you only the best and pray that you will find a path that leads you to the next big chapter in your life.

God bless.

Related posts:

1. 23andMe

One night earlier this week I woke up embracing one of my big J.C. Penny brand pillows, with my hand slid up inside the pillowcase… I’m not especially proud of this, but I’m pretty sure that I got to second base. The problem is, I didn’t know “her” name. So I’ve asked my friends to help me name this new pillow girlfriend and am posting a poll with all of their suggestions in the hopes that you’ll take a few seconds to participate. The winning suggestion will earn the submitter a free PiratePalooza 2008 T-shirt, compliments of my friend Captain Drew… and best of all, I’ll be able to resume my liaisons with my pillow without worrying about getting her name wrong. The advantages of having a pillow girlfriend far outweigh the disdainful comments of your fairweather friends!!

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She’s always fierce, ever so fierce – far too primal to hang anything as pedestrian as a name on. She’s simply “Kitty”, a title she pointedly ignores. I love her long black hair (I refuse to see the white hairs creeping in), the proud disdain in her eyes, and the way she seems to ignore me when she’s actually watching most closely. She bites: sharp, sharp, sharp!! She kicks: one, two, three!! All to let me know when we’re really, seriously engaged in the conversation primeval. She never backs down from a fight, unless the wind is wrong or the moon’s too high in the wild night sky. She melts into the shadows, adores the heat, and kills the little grey mouse ever so dead, dead, dead – just for me.

Or maybe not.

Regardless, you can see more pictures of Miss Kitty in her own Flickr album.

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I recently treated myself to something I’d been wanting to do for nearly 2 years… I had my family’s DNA genotyped by the company 23andMe. Here are 10 things about me and my folks that we didn’t even know (and this is just scratching the surface of data about ourselves that we can explore):

10 — My Mom’s mother’s mother’s mothers sprang from the same haplogroup as THE Marie Antoinette (though that does not mean that I am necessarily a direct descendant).

9 — My Dad’s mother’s mother’s mothers came from a region stretching between Spain to North Africa, all the way around to Lebanon. No wonder I like drinking Port and eating Baba Ganouj.

8 — My DNA says that I have a 24% lifetime incidence of experiencing Prostate Cancer, as compared to other people in my same genotype. This is fairly ironic, as I am currently recuperating from robotic surgery for prostate cancer.

7 — I am not a carrier of the BRCA Cancer Mutation, which now defines the life of my childhood friend Nikki who is still on chemo to this very day.

6 — I have a 21% lifetime incidence of experiencing Psoriasis, as compared to other people in my same genotype. This was another ironic discovery, since I’ve been dealing with that skin annoyance for nearly 5 years.

5 — I have substantially higher odds of having red hair. How crazy is that?

4 — My IQ will be raised by 6-7 points if I am breastfed. The things I’ll do to excel.

3 — I have moderately lowered odds of getting Mad Cow Disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease). Eat mor chikin.

2 — I’m over 99% European, less than 1% Asian. That tiny percent of Asian in me REALLY likes Asian food and hot Japanese Schoolgirls and Yu-Gi-Oh!

1 — The haplogroup of my Dad’s father’s father’s fathers suggests that we may be kin to the Irish king Niall of the Nine Hostages, who established the Ui Neill dynasty that ruled the island country from the 4th or 5th century and onward for the next millennium, though our family is more recently from Scotland. There can be only one.

—
Back in 2007, when I first learned of 23andMe.com, they were charging $999 to provide this service. The price has come down to $399, which isn’t cheap, but what price can you put on learning about yourself from the inside out? Tell ‘em that Drewprops sent you and they’ll say “Great!! That’ll be $399!!”, but in all seriousness, I recommend that you follow their Twitter feed to take advantage of some $50 discounts they’ll be offering in the coming weeks.

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Do you know what hyperbole is?
Do you know who Kirk Montgomery is?
Do you know what you get when you mix the two?

I just heard an advertisement for the new Star Trek movie in which Mr. Montgomery is quoted as saying that the new Star Trek is “this generation’s Star Wars”. ORLY? I thought it was supposed to be this generation’s STAR TREK!!!!

Cretin.

::sigh::

Following this new variation on logic I can only surmise that:

• “House” must be this generation’s “Gone With The Wind”.
• The new Will Ferrell remake of “Land of the Lost” must be this generation’s “French Connection”.
• “Transformers 2″ must certainly be this generation’s “Citizen Kane”
• and who could deny that “Operation Runway” represents this generation’s “From Here to Eternity”??

Alls I know is that THIS generation have their heads up their collective asses and that Mr. Montgomery is leading the charge. Just like Humphrey Bogart in “Ironman 2″.

Now THERE was a classic.

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1. Awesome 1978 Star Wars Yearbook

I have a little present for you… keep reading!

Anyone who’s been within a mile of a geek is aware that the Star Wars franchise continues to exert its influence on popular culture. Yet, in the 30+ years since its initial release, I think that we’ve forgotten the ferocity with which that space opera seized our collective imagination… it was a massively incredible time to be a kid… a time when words like “wookie” and “darth” and “R2-D2” were alien and exotic and felt wrong and strange and wonderful when spoken aloud.

The First Age of Star Wars stretched easily from 1977 into 1978, and yet there was very little merchandise marketing to take advantage of the movie’s staggering popularity. In time, Star Wars and its ilk would pave the way for today’s relentless merchandise marketing machines, but in that very first year there was little preparation by the studio or its licensees and intellectual property theft was rampant. It was a time when you could glue the words “Star” and “Wars” onto your product and make a million dollars.

Take, for instance, the following treasure stored safely below ground in the depths of the Drewcave, replete with children-drawn illustrations of creatures and characters from Star Wars (click here to download (note!!! this is a 14.7MB PDF). This isn’t a joke or a fabrication, but a real scan of a real book given to our class for the 1977-78 school season… a rare first glimpse into a burgeoning Star Wars phenomenon that has endured and is nearly as popular today as it was back then.

How It Was Made
I removed the original staples of this book and set them aside before scanning in each page. After scanning, the pages were straightened in Adobe Photoshop and then broken into single pages and placed into Adobe InDesign, before being exported as a PDF.

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1. Star Trek is This Generation’s… WHA??

Madame Duffey was a fascinating woman. She had coiffed red hair, a southern accent and that certain wackiness that all high school language teachers must possess in order to get the job.  I suspect that Madame Duffey aced her qualification exams because of the fantastically strong field of wackiness she emitted. Completely off the charts.

In Madame Duffey’s class the very first thing you learned was how to pronounce the teacher’s name.

“Madame” is easy, anybody can do that.
Maaaahhhh-daaaahhhhmmm.   Good, you’ve got it.

Now for the last name. She liked for us to pronounce it “Doo-Fay”.

Maaaahhhhh-daaaahhhhmmm Doo-Fay.

Did I mention this was French class?

The first few days were laugh riots as we intentionally butchered the French language, pronouncing everything as literally as possible.

“Bon Jower, Phillip! Ka Va?”

“Oooo-eeee, Ka Va! Ettt toy?”

“Oh, Komkye Kavah.”

As if Madame Duffey hadn’t seen that routine at the beginning of every French class since the very first time that SHE sat down to learn the language.

One day, Madame Duffey and the Spanish teacher hatched an idea to expand the minds of the entire school by force-feeding us culture.  They convinced the principal to allow them to use the school’s intercom system like a Honduran discotheque, piping music in to the lunchroom.

But not just any kind of music.

This was hardcore alpaca sweater weaving music.  It was music that drunken Venetian gondoliers would sing after a hard night of pushing honeymooners around the city.  It was Mongolian donkey-skinning music, Singaporean goat-wrestling music, Tlinkit whale-butchering music.

It was the world visited upon our school’s cafeteria and OH BUDDY was the world ever so LOUD!

Adjusting to the howl of world music was difficult, it was impossible to have normal conversations. You learned to sit between the people you needed to speak with the most and if you needed to talk with someone across the table it was entirely through hand gestures.

On the third day of World Music Torture I noticed The Girl. She was at the next table over from ours, on the far side of the table, facing me.  The reason that she stood out from the crowd is because she was crouched in her chair. By that, I mean that she was squatting in her chair with her feet underneath her… like a baseball catcher.

It was a such a novel way of sitting, especially in the lunchroom, that I thought it worth pointing out to the dude sitting next to me… so I punched his arm and hollered “Hey!!! Look at that girl!” and pointed.

“What squirrel?” he shouted back at me, suspiciously beginning to poke at his chicken with a fork.

I jabbed him again and pointed in the direction of the girl, only to discover that she was sitting calmly in her chair acting as if she’d never been perched in it like Johnny Bench.  I started to explain what I’d seen when somebody to my left let out a startled yelp.

I whirled back around and there was that girl again!, but this time she wasn’t squatting in her chair…. no, she was standing on top of her table, facetiously “rocking out” to the catchy Guatemalan toothache ballad currently grating over the tinny lunchroom speaker. She gyrated feverishly, as if possessed… as if every off-key note curdling out of the singer’s mouth was as super-cool-awesome as David Lee Roth* from Van Halen (remember, this was the 1980s, when DLR was actually super-cool-awesome).  The Assistant Principal (known as “Radar” by the student population) quickly zeroed in on Dancing Girl and hustled her down off the table and escorted her away, no doubt to some secret work camp on the outskirts of the county.

But Dancing Girl did not mock rock in vain!!! Her selfless act of rock-mockery made the school shut down World Music Week far, far sooner than the language department had ever anticipated. To this day I do not know who she was or how she worked up the courage to make a stand for a nice quiet lunch hour (or if she went on to have a career dancing on tables).

All I know is that I’m thankful World Music Torture Day was foiled.

* it should be noted that in the early 21st century it was discovered that David Lee Roth’s musical stylings were in fact based entirely on Guatemalan toothache music

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>> Click Here to Listen to the Bea Arthur Song Now <<

With her passing at age 86, Bea Arthur, star of “Maude” and “The Golden Girls” is once again in the news. As a child I always found Bea Arthur rather frightening and didn’t appreciate her comedic gifts until many years later when Golden Girls re-invigorated her career. Looking back to those early years I now realize that it wasn’t her smart, assertive personality that bothered me so much as it was her androgyny… my brain just couldn’t accept a woman who had a gravelly voice, wore polyester pants suits, or those long vest thingys that start with the letter “k” (which partially explains my distaste for Hillary Clinton). But not everyone was put off by Bea Arthur. In fact, our friend Geoffrey Brown had quite a hit on his hands on the coffee shop circuit a few years ago with his tribute song to Bea Arthur entitled “Bea Arthur” (aka, “I Want to Be Bea Arthur”). Won’t you have a listen? Check out Geoffrey’s website GeoffreyBrown.net and find out more about his latest venture, the Dancing Monkey Cabaret!

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I hadn’t been feeling very good lately and had almost decided to go home instead, but then I thought about how much time and effort my friend Linda Burns had put into producing and directing this film, and how hard Drew Johnston had fought to stay alive. Ordering the ticket took 3 minutes, and I’m so glad that I made the effort to see the movie, even if I didn’t have the energy to stay to mingle with people afterward.

If you’re a competitive athlete or know someone who might be interested in Drew’s story, the film is already available on DVD from LivingIsWinning.com

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I’m a huge Tongo Hiti nerd and can’t wait to stop typing this entry and drive down to the Atlanta Trader Vic’s to see them perform live and in person…. the video posted here is from last Thursday night and it’s *amazing*….. I’ve personally watched this thing 40 times and I’m sure I’ll watch it 40 more…. totally mesmerizing…. your journey begins with the powerful beauty of Celine Dion and ends in dark majesty. Sit back and enjoy Tongo Hiti at the Atlanta Trader Vic’s as they weave the most magical performance ever seen on YouTube at this particular time of the day (or night)….

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1. Steppin’ Out with Tongo Hiti

Today I got an message from a friend over on Facebook saying that they couldn’t figure out how to create a photo album. From the description they left me I realized that they were confused by Facebook’s confusing interface so I decided to post an illustrated lesson here on my site. It’s really not as hard as you think!

First, look in the lower left corner of your browser’s window. See the icons down there? Those are shortcuts to some of the applications available to you on Facebook. Callout #1 is pointing to an orange icon with a person’s silhouette in it. This represents the Photos application (and will in fact alert you to that fact if you hover your mouse over it). Go ahead and click that icon….

Don’t ask me why, but when you click the Photos application button it doesn’t take you to your own photo album(s), it takes you to a common area where you can see all of your friends’ photo albums. Handy if you’re just wanting to go looking around, unhandy if you’re headed to go manage your albums…. meaning that there’s one more click we need to make. Look at Callout #2 which is pointing to a link that reads “My Photos”. That’s where we need to go, so click it!

You’ve arrived at the area where your own photograph albums are kept. This is the area from where you can go and edit existing photo albums or create new ones. Making new ones is what we’re after, so look at Callout #3 which is pointing to a link which reads “Create a Photo Album”. That’s what we want, so click it!

Making a new album is easy! Just give your new album a name (”My 30th Birthday Party”, for example), give it a location if you so desire (”Airport Hilton”), and provide a brief description (people really do read captions, so make them interesting!). Next, decide who you want to be able to see these photos. If you don’t mind sharing them with the world, then pick “Everybody” from the pop-up list at the bottom of the images shown with Callout #4.

The only thing left to do is to click the button “Create Album” as indicated by Callout #5. Go ahead and click it. If you decide later that you don’t want to keep this album you can always delete it (though I’m not going to show you how to do that in this article, so you’re on your own if you post anything that might get you in trouble!! LOL)

Since you’re about to open your computer to another computer you need some guarantee that Facebook is actually the entity with whom you’ll be dealing with, which is why they issue a Security Certificate to your browser. This little bit of digital handshaking is intended to establish that secure connection… and the only way you’re going to be able to post your photos, so your only real option is to click the button that Callout #6 is pointing to marked “Trust”. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to do it right now!!

After a few moments (the connection process depends on your connection speed and your computer’s set up) you’ll be rewarded with a “window” into your hard drive. Callout #7 shows all the folders on your computer, so use it to navigate to the folder containing the photos you wish to upload to Facebook.

Once you get to the folder containing the pictures you want to upload, you’ll see small thumbnail images of each photo with an empty box on top of them. Those boxes are checkmark boxes (Callout #8 shows one example of this). All you need to do is scroll down through all the pictures in that folder and click the checkmark box for each photo you want to post to your new album on Facebook. Once you’ve put a check mark beside all the photos you wish to upload you can click the “Upload” button identified by Callout #9.

Note that you can only upload 20 photos at a time and that the Upload button will remain dimmed until you click at least one image to upload.

There are plenty more tips about uploading photos to Facebook, but I’ve run out of time for tonight! I hope that this lesson has been helpful to you. Feel free to share it with all your Facebook friends by posting a link on your Wall!

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1. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
2. Understanding the New Facebook Home Page
3. Facebook’s Secret Control Panel