h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh look. It's coming up 1:00am which makes it the 1st of November. Thomas Hood aside ( http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jerry/november.html ) November means NaNoWriMo, which madness I have always avoided, and National Blog Posting Month. Hence, this. Here.

It also means Movember, when blokes sprout taches "Facial grown and hand brushed" to raise awareness and funds for prostate cancer. http://uk.movember.com/

There are so many things I like about this. It's fun to see the moustaches. It's good to see guys doing something only they can do. It's a refreshing change to have fund raising that isn't breast-cancer-AGAIN. I am truly sorry if a friend, mother, aunt, sister of yours has had breast cancer, but it's a "popular" illness. Pink, even. You try raising money to refurbish your local clap clinic.

Or for prostate cancer.

Hence Movember.

And then of course there's the whole prostate exam thing. Billy Connolly's version is balm to the soul of any woman who has had cervical smears every three years for decades. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv3oY5tpSb4 (Probably not that safe for work, because of swearie Glaswegian language - "I am trying mentally to get in touch with my willie and I am telling it 'Don't. ***king. Move.").

To my disappointment, Z tells me "that isn't how you examine a prostate".

I am a Bad Woman.

Happy Movember, everyone.

Ben

Naughty...

That reminds me - I should probably put everyone participating on my friends' list

I've a tache already. Maybe I should go bald for Movember.

Nahhhh. Sorry lads. I'm all for combating cancer, but to have to shave *every* *single* *day*?

I've been wearing a moustache for years.

I had planned to embrace the novel-writing "madness," but November looks like a bad time for it in my life. I have medical procedures and appointments extending pretty far into the future. When the doctor sticks that long needle into my chest to draw out the fluid that's next to my left lung, I'm not going to feel like writing 3500 words that day. I might still write a novel, but not in any official organized program.

Well done, Ben - you're probably the first. I think most of us were going to wait for a bit more of the day to post before writing anything.

Paul - any novel of yours will be well worth waiting for. Especially if written in limerick form

Thanks for the vote of confidence. Verse novels are hard to write. I wrote a novella in verse one time, though. It was about an elderly man at the North Pole who was reflecting on his life as Santa Claus. He is dying, and has to wait for his replacement to arrive. He remembers when he was six, and had recurring dreams in which he was Santa Claus. His parents brought him to Vienna to meet a psychologist, to get to the bottom of the strange dreams. It moves on from there.

Z has disappointed me very much. One of the few things that cheer me up when I am flat on my back legs akimbo with a doctor shining an anglepoise lamp up my innermost etc., is the thought of Billy Connolly's prostate exam sketch.

at Ag's posting

I once read a comparison that I found to be pretty accurate...

Having an appointment with a dentist and a gynecologist is pretty much the same - in both cases, you are helplessly lying down in a chair, hoping he/she won't find anything wrong with you.

You reminded me to check to see if I can make any of the Mo Running races this month, thanks All I need is a fake moustache to run with...

I think this would be a good time to give Macmillan a really good plug. I'm afraid I have a hard time believing that there are "masculine and feminine cancers". Practically every organ in our bodies are the bloody same.

Do you have female lung cancer or male lung cancer?

How about your pancreas, is it male or female? Or your kidney? Or your throat?

Since I'm a male, the organs you mentioned are masculine. In a woman, they would be feminine. Cancer seems to do whatever it wants to do. I know alovely lady in her seventies who was just told that she has pancreatic cancer, and only has about a year to live. I am going to miss her terribly. I have a lifelong friend (male) who had part of his pancreas removed (the cancerous part). He has somehow managed to beat the curse, probably because they caught it in time.

Breast cancer sometimes affects men. This seems like a cosmic joke, because men's breasts don't do anything. Generally, the only way not to have cancer in an organ is not to have the organ in the first place.

No paul it doesn't seem like a cosmic joke. Wherever you have tissue I suspect you can get cancer.

I beat it already. More than once. If I can, anyone can.

Avoiding cancer seems like a better strategy than dealing with it once you've got it (other things being equal, which I know they often aren't). The trouble is, there are all those environmental toxins that don't show their true villainy for decades. Asbestos? The light fixtures overhead in our staff room at work were insulated with the stuff. Tobacco smoke? My father smoked until I was twelve. Aerial spraying of orchards? I grew up near some large orchards. Now transfats are showing themselves to be dangerous. It is said that a woman's risk of breast cancer is proportional to the amount of transfats in her butt. I carefully went through *all* the brands of margarine in my supermarket. Only two brands lacked hydrogenated oils. Then you have sodium nitrite, which is complicit in stomach cancer. Finally some of the big-name makers have taken it out of their hot dogs. Chances are, they could have done so years ago, but didn't.

"I beat it already. More than once. If I can, anyone can."

Tell that to Steve Jobs. Tell that to anyone who has lost someone to cancer. What an incredibly insensitive thing to say.

There are male cancers, obviously they are those that occur in organs only men have. One of the big problems with cancers in men in general, and testicular cancer in particular is that men don't check for them, and if they find something unusual may not tell anyone about it for a long time so that when it is diagnosed treatment is that much harder. That is why Movember is great - in the same way that the breast cancer charities work hard to remind people to check for lumps regularly, the Movember thing reminds men to have a good rummage around to look for problems. There is an attention-grabbing video out there somewhere (shocking but that is the point) where a beautiful woman touches herself...except she has testicles and is showing how to examine them.

Steve Jobs. Right. The Poster Boy for cancer until the next big name dies. I'm not sure why you assume I haven't "lost anyone to cancer", by the way.

I can see why you called my attitude insensitive, Kelli, but maybe "desensitised" is closer to the mark than insensitive.

Just to note, Steve Jobs most likely would have survived his cancer if he hadn't wasted more than 9 months with woo, trying to treat himself with an herbal diet. His was the good kind of rare in that it was treatable with a high success rate with surgery. He later regretted ignoring his doctor's and his family's advice.

How easy is it to forget that cancer is hugely more surviable than it was?

Cancer is a very sneaky disorder. It can involve genetic mutations, environmental toxins, even your philosophical outlook. The doctors will be be checking the fluid around around my lungs for cancer cells. My fingers are crossed.

"Steve Jobs. Right. The Poster Boy for cancer until the next big name dies. I'm not sure why you assume I haven't "lost anyone to cancer", by the way."

I assumed that because the "if I can beat it anyone can" attitude implies that anyone who didn't beat it didn't try hard enough.