Everything below is no longer valid, or are simply brazen lies.

UPDATE: This show is FILLED UP! If you haven’t gotten a confirmation from me, then we’ve run out of seats. There may still be seats at the show on 3/9 – check below for contact information. (I will also keep a waiting list.)

I may have mentioned that before.

But the details are ironed out and we’re now taking reservations! March 10!

There is no admission, although we’re giving you the opportunity to kick a few bucks Marian’s way.

Good for all ages. Bring the kids!

And please tell everyone you know. Stop them in the street if you must.

To RSVP, simply email me at christian [at] christianwalters.net and I’ll get you on the list and send you additional details/directions/etc.

If Lawrenceville on the 10th is hard to pull off, she’s doing another house concert on the 9th near Candler Park. Contact banyashj *at* hotmail.com for details to that one.

See you then!

But I’d replaced that bum with a human. So this was just Dr. Beasley calling to let me know there was no indications of cancer, that my swollen lymph nodes were from an allergic reaction or a slight cold or the full moon or any of the other 17 jillion things that make lymph nodes swell up. He just wanted to catch me before the weekend.

I could kiss that man.

Anyway. I’m done whining about being a cancer patient for the foreseeable future (i.e., we haven’t scheduled my next ultrasound yet) so we can move on to happier things.

Like Marian Call coming to perform at my house! I have details on that, which I’ll be posting here this weekend, Monday morning tops.

Back in December, and Norwegian artist named Morten Traavik went to North Korea, where he visited the Kum Song school of music. He met some accordion-playing kids there, who apparently treated him like crap because he left behind an a-ha CD.

Most adults would whisk that shit away from unsuspecting children, but this is North Korea we’re talking about. They actually listened to it. When Traavik came back a couple days later (probably to retrieve his CD before he got charged with war crimes), this is how the accordionists paid him back.

I keep expecting this video to be rendered in black&white line drawings.

This makes me very happy. I’m impressed that they could whip this up in such a short time, especially since that must have involved listening to the song over and over again. I’m sure it was a welcome break from endlessly playing “Kim! Jong! Un!” to the tune of “Three Blind Mice.” I just wish Traavik had left an Edvard Grieg CD behind.

a-ha and Grieg account for 100% of what I know about Norwegian music, BTW.

Anyway, thought you’d enjoy if you hadn’t seen it already.

To refresh your memory, here’s the original-if-more-literal video.

I hope all of you read xkcd. Its almost always funny — when its not, its moving.

Click to see it full-sized

Of course, that was one of the moving ones.

Click to see the whole thing. Seriously, click it.

Randall Munroe, the strips creator, occasionally lets his real life get reflected in his work. Last July, he posted a strip titled Lanes inspired by his fiance’s (now wife’s) breast cancer.

While I’ve talked about my own cancer dance often, I don’t think I’ve gotten into the changes in normal life as a cancer survivor, even with a comparatively mild, treatable type like mine. Also, talking about cancer helps me get Interplanet Janet out of my head when it’s inexplicably caught there.

The strip is correct — getting out of surgery or taking the last chemo treatment doesn’t mean cancer has surrendered. There’s a lot of cells in a body. Some of them are probably assholes.

At this stage in my post-surgical treatment, I get an ultrasound on my neck every twelve months or so. Those are relaxing enough — I always get an attractive nurse who sits with me in a dimly lit room for 20 minutes while rubbing warm gel into my neck with an aluminum dildo.

His third nipple has an especially downy hair growing from it

What they’re doing with the VibraPeen9000 is looking for anomalies. Of course, everyone has anomalies if you look hard enough. Maybe your appendix is shaped like a scallion. Maybe you have a really thick tongue. Maybe you have scar tissue on your throat from a thyroidectomy. Could be anything.

A year ago, my ultrasound showed some enlarged lymph nodes. Turned out to be nothing — I’d had a mild flu two weeks earlier and they were likely still swollen from it. Still, it was off to the hospital for a week-long series of thyrogen injections with a CT scan chaser, plus a cardio stress test and a CAT scan on my brain.

I just realized I didn’t get a Christmas card this year from my health insurance company. Probably just a clerical error.

Two weeks ago, another ultrasound, another large lymph node. I’m in the middle of another series of thyrogen injections. Basically they inject this stuff into you on Monday and Tuesday, then Wednesday you get a capsule of radioactive iodine, Thursday you have off, and Friday you get a CT scan where you lie flat for 30 minutes while you’re slowly flushed through a giant toilet seat.

I’m also getting something new this time. Its called a Positron Emission Tomography scan, or just PET scan. That happens about the time this posts on Wednesday morning — as I understand it, I lie perfectly still for an hour with an IV drip of something, then I’m wheeled through a completely different kind of toilet seat. Afterwords, they’ll give me my radiation pill and I get to go back on Friday for this seasons CT scan.

Then the real fun starts — stressing out all weekend while waiting for the test results to come back.

It sounds like I’m griping, but I’m really not. If there’s a shred of a chance that its come back, I want to know ASAfuckinP. Like I said, we all have anomalies — an ultrasound on most of you would probably turn up something funky somewhere. The only difference is that your cells don’t have that Bad Boy rep.

Like the xkcd comic implies: with luck, treating the cancer is just the beginning of the trip. If you’re unfortunate enough to get cancer, but fortunate enough to still be with us, everything unexpected about your body is going to get you the same kind of attention as a loaded gun gets you at a TSA checkpoint. Forever. This will continue until either the cancer returns and finishes the job or until you die from something else.

When you see a cryptic tweet from me about a radiology department or some alarming Facebook status, chances are it just means that its ultrasound season again. If a friend or family member has dealt with cancer, be aware — they are still dealing with cancer. One way or another, its the new normal.

Schedule those physicals, folks. And sit with your survivor loved ones once in awhile to talk about the ways cancer can go fuck itself.

I’m a little put out with both the American Cancer Society and the Susan G. Komen bunch these days, but there are plenty of places you can donate to with a clear conscience. It’s not just a cure they’re working on, but better early detection techniques. Help if you can.

Now Susan G. Koman for the Cure has changed its mind about pulling funding for Planned Parenthood. They will undoubtedly issue some press release about having reviewed their policies and found it possible to continue. What they will likely not say is that the Internet made it known that SGK would cease to exist as a charitable organization if they continued to cave to the anti-abortion bunch.

While I am very happy with both outcomes, I can’t help but sit here in awe at the efficiency with which our protests can self-organize. Iran in 2009, Egypt last year. Even minor things like Ocean Marketing’s interesting attempt at public relations. No issue is small when it catches the attention of millions of tweeters, bloggers, YouTube commenters, and Anonymous.

Unbelievably, this man was outed as a fuckstick

I found a pissy, get-off-my-lawn blog post from Andy Ostroy at HuffPo. I don’t think he gets it. Yes, the French Revolution came before Twitter. But the French Revolution also took more than four days to resolve and ended with like 12,000 dead people. Hosni Mubarack left 2.5 weeks after the Egyptian revolution started with the body count less than 900. (It may have climbed since — they are still protesting there over the military junta that filled the Hosni Gap.)

It’s not that the Internet invented protests. It’s that the Internet allowed more people to get involved immediately, which helps resolve things quickly. SGK not giving money to Planned Parenthood isn’t the same kind of event as attempting to overthrow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but it took virtually no time. Now the Net Denizens can move on to the next thing while SGK tries to rebuild a positive image.

I hope everyone is learning a lesson about the high cost of being an asshole. Your assholishness won’t be kept quiet from your friends, family, employers, and clients current and potential.

It is scary, though. Leon Trotsky and Maximilien Robespierre were both big players in kicking off the Russian and French revolutions, respectively. And those revolutions they set in motion were big players in their ultimate exile and guillotining without trial, respectively. (Robespierre must have felt quite the idiot, having allowed a law to be passed that let executions happen under simple public suspicion.) When you get something that big rolling, be sure you’re not ironically run over by it later.

But SGK’s reversal is a good thing. Planned Parenthood had received enough donations in the last few days to make up what they had lost, and I hope those donations continue even with the Komen money coming in. PPH isn’t out of the woods yet, since we insist on election these single-platform anti-abortion people to Congress.

I’m eager to see what’s next.

I’m worried that one movie is going to get lost in the shuffle, simply because it’s not very good. Man on a Ledge is similar to Man on Wire in that it’s set in New York and involves a man standing on something very high off the ground. Once you get into the story, it’s more like the Clooney/Pitt heist film Men Robbing a Casino. Except that Men Robbing a Casino had good actors and Man on a Ledge has Sam Worthington.

With Elizabeth Banks as Woman Leaning Out a Window

See, Sam is an ex-cop who is wrongly accused of stealing a $40 million diamond from Man with Lots of Money (Ed Harris). He plans a prison break with his brother (Man Without Muscle Tone) and his brother’s girlfriend (Distractingly Curvy Woman Wearing Tight Clothes). Sam ends up standing on that ledge to distract the cops while his gang is across the street finding proof of his innocence.

Today's episode of Pink Undies During Stress Tests

Being released now (up against the Liam Neeson movie Man Being Stalked by Wolves) is unfortunate. Man on a Ledge wears its heart on its sleeve, delivering no surprises and telegraphing the big plot twist almost before you’ve finished the hamburger you smuggled in. But Hollywood really wants all about the moral ambiguity these days. We’re all numbed from critically acclaimed films like Swedes that Rape a Lot, Men Trying to Play Baseball Cheaply, and Child Inconvenienced by 9/11.

And Man on a Ledge certainly doesn’t have the epic scope of previous Oscar winners Roman in a Coliseum, Hobbit Walking with Ring, or Iceburg on the Ocean.

I do want to give some credit to Sam Worthington. I have found him to be a mostly stone-faced semi-actor not burdened with charisma. His previous roles played off on that, too — Robots Still Not Killing John Connor 4 and Blue Tree-Squeezers Murdered by Cartoonish Thugs had him as a confused android and as a computer-generated alien, respectively. Here, he experiments with human emotions and reactions. He gets a lot of them wrong, but it’s very much a work in progress. Mitt Romney has the same problem. There were a couple of places where I could see what he (Sam, not Mitt) was trying to convey: a man standing on something high up and occasionally looking down.

But it’s simply too implausible. How did he train his brother and the girlfriend to be uncatchable jewel thieves from prison? Why couldn’t the scene with the girlfriend’s underwear have lasted much longer? The only reason the cops were there was because he was on the ledge — why not ignore the movie title and do the heist yourself without deliberately gathering the po-po unto you?

If you’re in jail for a crime of which you are innocent, and you break out but manage to prove your innocence before you are apprehended, are you automatically forgiven for the crime of breaking out of prison?

"Forget what I said about Zihuatanejo -- let's do donuts on the governor's lawn."

Are you also forgiven the thousands of dollars of property damage and other costs associated with getting that proof? My guess is no, which would seem to be bad news for Sam, who commits a jailbreak, assaults and threatens two cops, carries forged IDs, crawls out onto a hotel ledge some 200 feet off the ground, attracting legions of other cops and closing the streets in downtown Manhattan for a block in every direction, and during the endgame two other cops are shot to death — they turn out to be evil, but there is still due process to deal with. Not to mention the brother and the girlfriend use explosives on a private building and do an untold amount of other damage.

But no. Sam is a free man after doing a little paperwork. In fact, less paperwork than I have to do to pick up my held mail at the post office. The NYC justice system must be incredibly efficient and flush with cash. Nice work, Mayor Bloomberg!

So okay, Man on a Ledge not a great movie. Mostly due to the sloppy writing and improbable premise. The acting’s not great, either. The casting was weird. Oh, and the pacing. But it is definitely less than two hours long, which is not something you’ll get with more “nominated” movies like Rich White Girl Befriends the African-American Maids.

Still… I do like this current tendency towards creative movie titles. You never know what you’re going to get in the modern cinema.

• people who say “due to the fact that”
• the way we’re performing the National Anthem at big sporting events

On the first one: we have the word “because” for a reason, people! Don’t pile on extra words if you aren’t also piling on extra content! At least don’t do it in front of me, because I will become irrationally violent and come right at you. (See how it works?) I have a similar event planned for those who say “at this point in time.”

Note to people who say “utilize”: you’re on the watch list.

With the Super Bowl upon us, it’s really the National Anthem I want to talk about. Remember when the only worries we had about the anthem was something like this happening?

RIP Mr. Nielsen.

The Star-Spangled Banner has always been a tough song to sing for most of us — if you select a key where you can hit the bottom notes, the top ones are out of reach and vice versa. You either need someone with a good voice or several thousand people singing it at once. At large sporting events, it’s typical to have both.

Or it was, until the anthem became a high-volume Diva-Powered Pissing Contest.

I blame Whitney Houston. When she sang this for Super Bowl XXV in 1991 (Giants 20, Buffalo 19 — be well, Scott Norwood), many people said it was the greatest version ever. I can only assume they measure greatness in decibels.

If you watch carefully, you can see the moment when Whitney’s brain meat passes its sell-by date. Before the Super Bowl, she was one of our national treasures. She taught us that the greatest love of all involved wanting to dance with somebody for one moment in time. After, she told us that crack is wack and married Bobby Brown. What was in that headband?

While I’m not claiming I can belt out the National Anthem any better, there are still a number of problems here.

Let us sing along

Everyone the stadium is standing with their hands on their hearts, intending to sing along. As they should, because this song belongs to all of us. It was written during a battle by a lawyer and set to the tune of a British drinking song. What could be more American than that? You wanted all 74,000 people in Tampa Stadium singing out their Americanhood. This was 1991 during the first Persian Gulf War. (Remember that one? We were in Iraq for SEVEN MONTHS!)

Unless Luciano Pavarotti was a big football fan, by the time Whitney was proudly hailing everyone else had shut up. Except John Madden, who was diagramming what her larynx was doing with his light pen.

Speed doesn’t always kill

Whitney’s anthem is twice as long as it should be. It should move along like a march; uplifting, militaristic, and bombastic, like America fancies itself to be. What it definitely is not is a dirge. Save the funeral marches for Wagner. (Much love to Herr Richard, by the way. If his music hadn’t made the Nazis goose-step so slowly, WWII might have been different.)

Whitney’s take is not as bad as many others I’ve heard, but she does linger on the power notes. There are some who treat each syllable like a Station of the Cross. It is damned exhausting.

If you don’t get to the last note within a minute after hitting the first note, you’ve missed the point and lost the crowd.

Experiment with your own damn songs

Not too get too esoteric with the musical lingo here, but the Banner is in 3/4 time. It should be moving at a march tempo, but it should be possible to waltz to it. I don’t know why you’d be dancing to the national anthem, but Americans sometime enjoy a Fame moment.

In Whitney’s rendition, she’s changed it to 4/4, adding another beat to each measure and making it 33% longer. I’m not filled with jingoistic outrage at her changing the melody, but it’s a little disrespectful and makes it even tougher for Luciano Pavarotti to sing along, sitting there with his expensive Scott Norwood jersey.

Whitney was just the beginning

Each new solo performance becomes another opportunity to fuck up our national anthem in the artist’s unique ways. I can understand them missing notes. I can even almost understand flubbing the lyrics. (Just because I knew them in second grade doesn’t mean Christina Aguilera has to know them.) I don’t quite understand putting your own interpretation when you could be leading tens of thousands of people along with you.

And I really don’t understand this one from Recent Shitty American Idol Winning Hack Country Singer Scotty McCreery at last year’s World Series. I don’t mean the microphone flub at the beginning. Skip ahead to about 1:20 if you want, and listen for a coded political commentary about amnesty for illegal immigrants.

At least he hit the notes. Or at least slid up and down past them. Still, the original twang-free lyrics have been around since 1814 — Scotty can tuck away his trademark speech impediment for a minute at these events. He won’t have to do it much longer, once everyone stops pretending he’s any good.

For the next Super Bowl, Kelly Clarkson is handling the national anthem duties. I actually like her, despite her being on American Idol. She’ll probably be okay with the words. If she blanks, I hope she panics and starts singing “My Life Would Suck Without You.”

A little slow and twangy, but not ridiculously so. Mostly singable if you jump octaves when necessary. And no name-checking poor Jose. By today’s standards, Kelly does an excellent job.

Therefore…

I don’t mind progress or change, but I also respect consistent ties to early history. Whether I’m standing in the spot where the top of Thomas Becket’s head fell or eating a Nutter Butter after donating blood, I am stubbornly maintaining important traditions, and life is richer for it. Rich enough to not be lost because of an affected lyrical gimmick. (You’re 18, McCreery. Don’t start slurring your words until you’re old enough to drink.)

I know I’m likely alone in this. That’s the beauty of pet peeves. The anthem should be an up-tempo waltz with clean articulation of the notes and words, ideally in the key of B-flat major. If we can’t agree on that, then maybe it’s time we picked a new anthem.

This post was sponsored by the Committee to Give Marching Bands Some Damn Respect. I’m a Sousaphone Player and I approve this message.

Since human religions are inscrutably weird, I’d expect a ladybug one to be even worse. But at least they can see me, I assume. Ladybugs have eyes in all the cartoons, but I’m no entomologist. In any case, I’ve never grown wroth with ladybugs. I have a very straightforward relationship with the insect community.

I only have the one commandment (“Thou shalt not lay eggs in my cereal”) which I think is reasonable. I should be able to lay down some laws. It’s not like the bugs are pitching in on the mortgage.

I had thought the house was built on an ancient ladybug burial ground. But these macabre incursions are a recent phenomenon and the house has been around for 20 years. I had even begun to suspect that the ladybugs had build some sort of nest inside my walls because of the harsh winter, then wander in through some hole in my bathroom caulking and succumb to the chemicals the exterminator sprays. But I am trying to be logical, so I am disregarding the more outlandish ideas. (Holes in the caulking. Puh-leeze.)

I am never going to sell the place if it’s haunted by ladybug ghosts. I have to figure something out.

Does this say "put your hand in me"? It does not.

As usual in situations like this, I start thinking “bat box.” My neighborhood has enough bats to qualify as a “shitload.” I assume we have a lot of caves, vampires, or crimes in my area. So if I put up the bat equivalent of a birdhouse, some of those bats can move in and serve as little flying Robocops.

I am assuming that bats would automatically know to patrol the perimeter. They may take down a few moths, but that’s a small price to pay. And the mosquitoes… they can have all the free mosquitoes they want. They claim there’s no malaria around here, but that might be just what they want us to think.

So I’m getting a bat box. Expect updates about my new air force.

Some of you pedantic skeptic types might be saying “Christian, while I’m sure a bat would be happy to eat a ladybug, it’s going to be difficult for a flying creature to get them out of your walls using only echolocation.” Look, shut up. Bats are smart. They have incredible resourcefulness and a nearly supernatural drive, much like the superhero for whom they are named.

How do you buff your palm so much it becomes refle--... never mind. But don't high-five someone you're about to shoot. Bad form.

But until the bat box arrives and the bats come back from wherever they spend their winters — some stately manor, no doubt — I still have to deal with these suicidal ladybugs. Does anyone know how to cheer up a ladybug? The only peppy ladybug song I know is the Sesame Street one I referenced in the title. That feels inappropriate since I accused Sesame Street of lying.

Oh well… I do have a caulk gun lying around somewhere…

Marian Call on tour with some ghost orbs (Credit: Brian Adams)

Too-talented-for-her-own-good singer/songwriter/nerd-hymnist Marian Call is touring soon, and she’s going to be roaming all over the Southeast. This is an alien environment to most Alaskans, so everyone be nice.

And Atlanta is included! We don’t have details yet. Hetero Life Partner Tim Farley and I have each volunteered our places for a house concert. She’s got some other options as well. Wherever she’s playing around here, it’ll be sometime around March 8-10.

She’s going to do at least two shows, one at a real venue if it works out. So if you live in town and don’t want do drive out to the sticks with all the moonshine-soaked yokels, you should be okay. Or if you’re in the burbs and would rather not get stabbed to death during a carjacking inside the perimeter, you may have a workable option.

Keep your eyes peeled here or watch your normal Call-based information sources. Once there are details, there will be saturation. If you’re not familiar with Marian’s music, you have six weeks to get familiar. Go to mariancall.com and check it out.

Then come to a show and tell Marian in a very detailed way how much you love her. Provide a bulleted list if possible. The ladies love bulleted lists. She may even let you get a picture with her.

Seriously. She'll be photographed with anyone.

If you don’t live in Atlanta, she’s going to be touring other, lesser places too. Like the Northeast and Europe. (Not Denver. Never Denver.) If you can host a house concert, lend a hand.

Or, you know, don’t support independent music. We’ll always have Coldplay.

That’s certainly true in my case. I read those comments because I want to understand what they’re going through. Often the depth of their struggles is only matched by the breadth of their strength. Not often enough, though. If you ever need a reason to go hug your throw pillows and rock quietly back and forth, read some stories of the people who couldn’t find what they needed.

If only breast cancer had a good marketing hook...

Recently, one of my favorite bloggers compared our treatment of cancer sufferers to depression sufferers. I’d never thought about it before, but I think Jenny has a point. I’ve been on bike tours and walks for cancer. There’s an underwear run in Canada to raise money for “below the waist” cancers — colorectal, testicular, ovarian, prostate and cervical. Testicular cancer even has its own champion bicyclist who might have been juicing. There’s bound to be a memorial pancreatic cancer iPhone app soon.

Cancer also has favored nation status on House. That’s more than we can say for lupus.

But looking for the equivalent support and fundraising systems for mood disorders is a study in frustration. I can find Mental Health America and some suicide hotlines, but I don’t see any fun runs where everyone’s in thongs or something. It’s surprising, because the list of current celebrities who’ve had to cope with depression includes some pretty big names:

• Angelina Jolie
• Catherine Zeta-Jones
• John Hamm
• Anne Hathaway
• Hugh Laurie (he doesn’t have lupus either)
• J. K. Rowling
• Buzz Aldrin

Pretty A-listy. But with the except of Catherine Zeta-Jones, they all talk about depression in the past tense. Buzz Aldrin, for example, struggled with his new fame after the Apollo 11 mission and pretty much crawled into a bottle for the first half of the 70s. While I am glad one of my heroes fought off his demons, that doesn’t sound like what Jenny Lawson or Allie Brosch or many of the commenters on their blogs are describing.

Why is that? Why does cancer, or Parkinson’s, or multiple sclerosis get the celebrity PSAs and the charities and events and Melissa Etheridge songs?

The answer is obvious, I think. Cancer can strike anyone of any age or social class with no warning. The treatment for it can be long and harrowing. Even if you pull through an occurrence, you are more likely than others to have it again. Every time you wake up with something different about you, you are panicked that your reprieve is done and the ride is starting over. It’s not a disease you really get cured of — you just learn to ignore the fear and hope each change isn’t lighting the fuse on another internal bomb.

But depression is different. Depression is… ummm… well… see… shit.

Glibness aside, the difference is one shows up on an MRI and the other hides in your brain. Someone with a tumor is sick and needs our help; someone with a mental disorder is crazy and needs to be in a funny jacket with the sleeves tied around back. If you see someone with a weird lump, you get them to the hospital (usually). If you see someone sitting in the dark and staring into space, you try to cheer them up or tell them to snap out of it. Would you tell a cancer victim to quit behaving like a baby and stop having a malignant growth on their colon?

(If Lorraine Day is reading this blog, I withdraw the question. Sorry Lorraine, I’m just not convinced your “eating beets and oppressing Jews” plan is the cure for anything. Also, get away from my blog you delusional butt-nugget.)

I don’t know what it’s going to take to start viewing depression as a serious disease, and people with depression as victims. I don’t think it helps when our glitterati doesn’t bring it up until they can talk about it as being “long ago.” We’re too afraid of people with some funky wiring in their heads because we think they’ll do something like drown their children or dress as Howdy Doody and drive the wrong way on the interstate or buy Snooki’s book.

I think there’s a branding problem, too. The word “depression” can be applied to severe disorder that you wrestle with every day, or it might be feeling temporarily a little glum all afternoon because it’s the last season for Chuck.

Maria has summed up the posts I’ve referenced here and several more. She’s set up a place where people can at least share their experiences and their pain, and they can do it anonymously so they can step back out into the world with their masks on. Reading the posts on there is wrenching if you have even a shred of empathy in you. If you can make it through those, you won’t be thinking about Chuck for awhile.

Or maybe I’m just a little extra sensitive today. My ultrasound last week found an anomaly, and I’m worried I might get to go through this cancer shit again.

At least an ultrasound can give me proof there’s something unusual going on. Even in the worst case, we’ll see exactly what’s happening and I’ll have people running and walking and biking for me too. At least until the American Cancer Society discovers I’m an atheist.

In the meantime, people just as sick as any cancer patient sit alone running razor blades along their arms to stave off the numbness for a few minutes. Maybe someone you know. It might be worth finding out. It might be worth finding help.

OMG this is Chuck's final season!