"Our belief is the natural stuff will do just as much as that stuff if it's God's will."

Says the Amish man, who is hiding his daughter, who has lymphoblastic lymphoma.

"If we do chemotherapy and she would happen to die, she would probably suffer more than if we would do it this way and she would happen to die."

A court last month sided with the children’s hospital and appointed a guardian to make medical decisions for Sarah. Days before the ruling, the family took off from the small Amish community in Spencer, Ohio and headed for Central America to pursue holistic methods at a natural cancer treatment center.

Right after that, in the linked Daily News article, there's a photograph of a horse-drawn hay wagon.  I don't think they "took off... for Central America" by power of horse. And this sounds less like religion than like an ordinary, unscientific belief in alternative medicine.

"PEEP SHOW: NYTIMES publishes nipple on front page..."

Says Drudge, with a photo of a sleazy guy in the doorway of a peep-show storefront. The link goes to this PDF of the front page of today's NYT which does indeed show nipple — the top third of one nipple, just below a 2-inch surgery scar. The story is "Push to Test for Cancer Gene Sets Up a Dilemma in Israel." The woman — whom we see only from neck to mid-breast — has a nipple-sized Star of David tattooed at clavicle-level.

Too sensationalistic? Does it stir up old suspicions that breast cancer is getting extra credit in the clamor amongst the diseases for our attention? Is the matter-of-fact(ish) inclusion of nipple a way for the New York Times to say: We're about New York, and New Yorkers are a cut above the rest of the world when it comes to maturity and sophistication? Or is it just the latest, most pathetic sign that the NYT is desperate for readers?

If the last, it worked. Drudge reeled us websters in, and one can only imagine the effect at the real-world newsstands.

IN THE COMMENTS: Brando says:

Forget about the nipple! Isn't there a rule in Jewish law against having tattoos? Or have I been misled?

Neo-Neocon has more on the tattoo taboo.

I like the old Lenny Bruce routine on this subject. He'd gotten a tattoo when he was in the Navy in WWII. When his mother saw it, she screamed: "Now you can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery!" He said: "Its OK, Ma. I'll be buried in a Jewish cemetery. They can amputate my arm and bury it in a Catholic cemetery. It can wave to my body."

Who killed Alec Baldwin's TV show?

Alec offers some clues:

"People who I worked with that I cared about—these people were all very supportive of the show. Now there was somebody on the staff who I did not want to work with. There was somebody on the staff who I thought wasn't a good fit for me. And I wouldn't rule out if that person went to the Post and gave them that story."

The story that he called a paparazzo a "cocksucking faggot."

"These stories with the Post, the way they work, they have to have some kernel of truth. So if I complained, as I did, I said to them... I didn't ask for a humidifier, I asked for humidification. So we had a day where... my voice would crack, it was heavily air conditioned, I found it tough to talk. I did not demand someone put a humidifier in. And the woman using that dressing room, I was told she's allergic to some chemical, no one ever ever ever said to me that somebody had cancer, and I never said 'I don't give a fuck...'"

So, it wasn't just the use of the epithet on the street, it was inside stuff, staff versus star. The star felt entitled to use hairspray, and the staff member trumped him with her cancer. Her sensitivity, premised on cancer, is obviously — in the larger scheme of things — more important than his frivolous vanity over his hair, but in the production of a TV show, getting the on-camera talent to look right is actually more important than accommodating a particular employee's needs. If she can't work around hairspray, she shouldn't have a job in the room where the hair is being done.

Baldwin was hired because of his manly good looks, which includes his full head of hair, and there's pressure on him to live up to that image. He was also hired because he exudes passion, and that means he's not perfect at dealing with the pressure. He's got his sensitivities too, and they are intrinsic to the excitement that's supposed to make the show, a show centered on him. That's what MSNBC bought when they hired him.

Yes, kick him around for having "cocksucking faggot" in his head where it could pop out when he was trapped and fighting on the street, but don't fire him. We're left with the most boring and bland people blabbing on TV, including MSNBC's own little snake Martin Bashir.

"Smog blamed as girl, 8, becomes youngest lung cancer patient."

In China.

Is Obama to Blame for Cancer Death?

Compare, contrast, endeavor to eradicate hypocrisy:

1. November 3, 2013, Wall Street Journal: "You Also Can't Keep Your Doctor I had great cancer doctors and health insurance. My plan was cancelled. Now I worry how long I'll live."

2. August 8, 2012, FactCheck.org: "Is Romney to Blame for Cancer Death?"

"This Guy’s Wife Got Cancer, So He Did Something Unforgettable. The Last 3 Photos Destroyed Me."

Please don't Google that line and go to the website where it is written. It's one of those places that tries to pick up something that is or could be viral and to capture the traffic that really ought to go to the place that originated the material. In this case, the website copies a whole series of photographs and statement from the photographer's blog and doesn't even link to that blog.

From Angelo’s blog: “I remember the exact moment…Jen’s voice and the numb feeling that enveloped me. That feeling has never left. I’ll also never forget how we looked into each other’s eyes and held each other’s hands. ‘We are together, we’ll be ok.’”

That appears, without a link! You may think I've got my priorities mixed up, getting mad about bad etiquette, when there's cancer — cancer!! — in this world. I disagree. I'm no fan of cancer, but cancer doesn't have a mind capable of conceiving of a self-serving plan to do its damage. And scolding cancer isn't going to change anything. Expressing outrage at poor human behavior is constructive. So is taking photographs and blogging about a painful and terribly sad loss.

The photographer is Angelo Merendino. Here's his website. Here's the blog.

How will this shutdown end?

A stalemate in a game that cannot end.

"Once the government reopens and we get the debt ceiling settled, we’ll be happy to talk to them about anything they want to talk about." (Reid.)

"This isn’t some damn game. All we want is to sit down and have a discussion." (Boehner.)

Okay, so it's not a game. But "game" is at least an apt metaphor. Or, no, it's not, because in games, where there is a true stalemate, a rule ends the game, and the players can stop playing. They don't continue to sit at the chessboard until someone concedes.

Talking and having a discussion is also a metaphor. The 2 parties in Congress are not a couple on a date that's turned into a staring contest. Or maybe Boehner is the woman endlessly imploring her man to talk about their relationship, and Reid is the taciturn man who's waiting for her to give up and do what the junior partner in a marriage is supposed to do: what he says.

Alternatively, Boehner is the man who relentlessly pursues his ex-girlfriend asking only for a chance to talk to her, and the woman — Reid — curtly informs him that there's nothing to talk about.

We instinctively turn away. And yet, the 2 sides are, it seems, waiting for Us the People to assign blame to one side or another. We're supposed to decide, and when we've conveyed our feelings, the party that anticipates losing in future elections will cave so our loathing for it doesn't grow any deeper.

But are we still watching? They need us to watch. It's their only way out. They're trying to make it interesting, with war monuments and children dying of cancer, but... look: gigantic hornets are killing the Chinese and Sandra Bullock is floating in outer space!

So I tried to watch the pilot episode of "Breaking Bad."

There's much talk about the final episode of "Breaking Bad," and I've got a houseguest arriving on Sunday who importuned me to set the DVR to record that episode but told me I can't just watch the final episode with him. I've got to watch the whole series from the beginning, which is to say I've got to watch 61 hours of the thing before I can hang out with my newly arrived houseguest watching the show he's so excited about and (not that I care much) everyone in the media seems unable to shut up about.

Attending to the assigned recording task, I see that the network (AMC) is running a marathon of all the old episodes leading up to the big finale, so I set the DVR to lay in the requisite 61 hours. Last night, settling in to watch the new episode of "Project Runway," I see that I accidentally bumped it, what with all the incoming "Breaking Bad" and baseball games. (The DVR can record 3 things at once, but not more.) So I call up the "Pilot" episode of "Breaking Bad."

I turn it off after 22 minutes. Interestingly, 22 minutes is the classic length of a sitcom. Have I got Sitcom Mind? Reading the summary of the "Pilot" episode, I see that some exciting stuff was about to happen. When I turned off the show at 22 minutes, Meade and I had a conversation of untimed length about how perhaps there's a Hollywood plot to disparage ordinary American life through the depiction of the bored, boring, declining, dying white man. It started long ago with "The Honeymooners" — notice the shift to sitcoms — but the man we're invited to look down on has become more and more dull and meaningless until he's fully dehumanized and about to fall off the face of the earth anyway. (The "Breaking Bad" guy learns he's dying of lung cancer.)

If we'd hung on past the sitcom length of time, we'd have seen the police bust a meth lab, and other scenes of cooking up drugs, accidental fires, deadly fumes, sirens, a misfired gun, and a reactivated cock. I'm reading the plot summary out loud to Meade as I try to write this. We get into another conversation about television over the years and what it's done to our notions of masculinity. We're talking about Ralph Kramden and Ricky Ricardo as I dump sesame seeds into the stove-top seed roaster. (I like darkly toasted sesame seeds on cottage cheese for lunch, and Meade has been chiding me about over-toasting them, like sesame seeds are going to cause cancer.) The conversation continues as I follow Meade out to the front door, and it's on and on about "Bewitched" and "Leave It to Beaver" and Red Skelton.

"Remember how Red Skelton used to say 'Thank you for inviting me into your living room'?" I ask, and Meade — picking up the dog leash — remembers and entertains my elaborate theory about TV needing to be different from theater and movies because it comes into your home and how in sitcoms you're mostly sitting in your living room looking into some fictional family's living room, and there's this interchange between the sitcom family and the viewers' family. I bring up the transfusion metaphor from "Atlas Shrugged" that we were talking about a couple days ago. How has the poison — is it poison? — been administered all these years? Why have we kept the channel open? Because it only takes 22 minutes? What subversion of our values has taken place? I go on about Archie Bunker in his chair, which faces the TV....



... and we are on the other side of the TV, in our chairs, looking through at them, as if we are on their TV. What are we doing? Are the women nudged to look over at their men and see them as Edith, above, sees Archie? What has been happening in these 22-minute treatments we've volunteered for all these years?

Meade inquires about the 22 minutes — the time for the show in a 30-minute slot with commercial — and he seems to notice for the first time that the premium cable channels don't have commercials, and I tease him that he's like these sitcom husbands who are never fully clued in. He's off to get Zeus (the dog) to take him for a walk, and I make some wisecrack — like I think I'm in a sitcom — about how he should do well with the dog, since dogs don't even know the difference between the show and the commercial.

Ha ha. Back in the kitchen of my sitcom life, I see — through billows of smoke — that the sesame seeds are on fire.

"Married cancer patients live longer than single people who have the disease..."

"The study, published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, found that single patients were 53 percent less likely to receive appropriate therapy than married patients."

The finding suggests that maintaining grueling chemotherapy and radiation schedules and taking medication as prescribed is easier for people who have help from a spouse compared with single people who must manage the logistics of cancer treatment on their own....

Notably, men with cancer showed a greater benefit from marriage than did women. That doesn’t mean husbands are not supportive of wives....

And the award for Getting to the High Ground While Ditching Your Spouse Who Got Cancer goes to Catherine Zeta-Jones.

"The Welsh actress, 43, split from [Michael] Douglas, 68, after he claimed that his throat cancer was caused by the HPV virus, which he contracted from giving oral sex. Douglas did not make it clear he was exposed to HPV BEFORE meeting his wife, who felt this was the last straw."

Hey, old man, while you're busy dying of cancer, how about making it clear whose parts you were tonguing at the time you contracted that damned cancer that's screwing up my life too. Huh? Would it be too much trouble?!

I'm dying and you're going to needle me about the precision of speech?! The precision of the speech coming out of my CANCEROUS THROAT??!!!!

This is the last straw!

The last straw? The last straw?! Like there were all those other straws?

As a matter of fact, yes. There's the straw that's the fact that you are 25 year older than me and the straw that's me being so much prettier than you. Especially now that you've got throat cancer.

You monster! You won't look so pretty when the whole world sees what a monster you are.

The world will see one thing and one thing only: You said you got throat cancer from cunnilingus with me.

"Why We Should Study Cancer Like We Study Ecosystems."

Oncology ≈ ecology.

[R]ather than labeling cancer as a group of mutated cells, as the thinking goes, we should see cancer as a disruption in the balance of a complex microenvironment in the human body. Like a damaging invasive beetle eating its way through forests in Colorado, a novel disease breaking out in populations of wild birds, or loggers mowing down parts of the Amazon rainforest, cancer throws a monkey wrench into an otherwise placid, balanced system.

And once the monkeys get wrenches your entire metaphorest goes into collapse.

When the breast-cancer doctor attacks the lung-and-head-cancer doctor — with ethylene glycol in the coffee.

Things that may be true:

1. They're in love.

2. Antifreeze tastes like Splenda.

3. "She is a distinguished citizen and scientist, and these allegations are totally inconsistent with her personal and professional life."

"Michael Douglas... has revealed that his throat cancer was apparently caused by performing oral sex."

"HPV, the sexually transmitted virus best known as a cause of cervical and anal cancer and genital warts, is thought to be responsible for an increasing proportion of oral cancers...."

Mahesh Kumar, a consultant head and neck surgeon in London, confirmed that the last decade has seen a dramatic rise in this form of cancer, particularly among younger sufferers. Recent studies of 1,316 patients with oral cancer found that 57% of them were HPV-16 positive.

"It has been established beyond reasonable doubt that the HPV type 16 is the causative agent in oropharyngeal cancer," said Kumar...

But Kumar expressed scepticism that Douglas's cancer was caused solely by HPV, and surprise at Douglas's assertion that cunnilingus could also help cure the condition. "Maybe he thinks that more exposure to the virus will boost his immune system. But medically, that just doesn't make sense."

With a "faulty" gene and an 87% risk of breast cancer, Angelina Jolie opts for a double mastectomy.

Explained and described in a NYT oped:

My own process began on Feb. 2 with a procedure known as a “nipple delay,” which rules out disease in the breast ducts behind the nipple and draws extra blood flow to the area. This causes some pain and a lot of bruising, but it increases the chance of saving the nipple.

Two weeks later I had the major surgery, where the breast tissue is removed and temporary fillers are put in place. The operation can take eight hours. You wake up with drain tubes and expanders in your breasts. It does feel like a scene out of a science-fiction film. But days after surgery you can be back to a normal life.

Nine weeks later, the final surgery is completed with the reconstruction of the breasts with an implant. There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful.

This is a nicely written piece conveying the woman's courage and sensitivity. She has many children and her own mother died of cancer.

The piece is, however, marred by one sentence (and I would like to know the details of what lies behind this intrusion):

I acknowledge that there are many wonderful holistic doctors working on alternatives to surgery.

To what extent did Jolie pursue these alternatives? Does she credit the work of these "wonderful holistic doctors" or is that expression crafted to acknowledge the wonderfulness of the individuals — who might be well-meaning and socially pleasant — without saying that their treatments are any help at all? I note that she says these wonderful folk are "working on alternatives," not that they have any.

Did someone push Jolie to go at least that far, to smile in the direction of alternative medicine? Maybe she thought that her wan acknowledgement — alongside her own dramatic choice of the surgery — is saying (in so many words) to any sensible reader that the "holistic doctors" are a dangerous distraction. But I don't think people are that good at picking up inferences. Those who want to believe in alternative medicine are already weak on science and strong on wishfulness. I suspect that they will read that sentence and think Angelina Jolie thinks holistic doctors are wonderful. That sentence is a shiny light of hope amidst the scary — scene out of a science-fiction film — images of surgery.

Jolie deserves admiration for her bravery and her smart choice, both in getting the surgery and telling us about it. Perhaps as time goes on, she'll say more about the meaning and value of science and its alternatives. She is giving a beautiful performance in the theater of public education, and she has a fabulous opportunity to deliver a profound message that will reach the very people who most need to hear it.

"But since my cancer diagnosis, I’m beginning to empathize with Jesus at Gethsemane..."

"... Just as he’d gotten his life’s work going, just as he was planting the seeds of a new society, just as he was gaining followers willing to give up everything for justice and love, he found out he was probably going to die, at the age of 33...."

When has your life experience caused you to change which character you identify with in an old story?

Or is this a big sermon cliché? First, we identify with the sleeping disciples because blah blah blah but then etc. etc....

Eh. Maybe it's a big but great cliché. Let's have your examples.

I can't offhand think of any of my own, but I think of that mother in the BBC documentary we were watching last night who described her son as always identifying with the villain in the story and who gives — as her one example — Cruella De Vil. It's a power fantasy, and he doesn't seem to mind — mom says — that the character loses in the end. She probably thinks the BBC documentary viewer identifies with her, the devoted mother of a difficult child. Why would she have invited the documentarians into her home otherwise?

It's a cliché of documentaries to lure us into identifying with one character and then tempting, then forcing us to switch to another character. How else are you going to build narrative energy? And yet you invite these devils into your home. They seem so empathetic as you open up not just your house but your soul.

I said I couldn't  offhand think of any examples of my own, shifting from empathizing with one character to another. But now, in the context of that BBC documentary, I realize I do it all the time in blog posts. I get interested in one person, and I start writing, and I find — make?! — a narrative thread that ends up turning my empathy around. I'll bet there are over 1,000 examples of my doing that in this archive.

Perhaps you should turn against me. Perhaps I am the devil you've let into your house.

"Why didn't the opposing team stop the very small and sick child from scoring? The milk of human kindness?"

"Yeah. That and — seriously, would you want to be the guy who tackled a kid with brain cancer?"

"Six months after hearing they did not have breast cancer, women with these false positives experienced changes in 'existential values' and 'inner calmness' as great as for women who had cancer."

"They reported having more anxiety, feeling more pessimistic and having more problems with their sleep and sex lives — as well as other negative outcomes — than women who had normal mammograms."

You see where this is leading?

Screening less frequently could be one way to reduce the numbers of women who have to cope with false positives without greatly increasing their risk of developing advanced breast cancer, a separate team of researchers reported Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine....

"I'd never met or heard anyone who'd had a laryngectomy."

"I thought, 'Omigod, I make my living on the telephone and now I'm going to sound like Elmer Fudd on Thorazine for the rest of my life.'"

"Photo of breast cancer survivor's tattooed chest is shared by thousands after Facebook's attempts to ban it."

The nudity rules don't bend for cancer or for art. What can you really expect? But, anyway, I'm no fan of tattoos but I love this adaptation to mastectomy.

"iVegetarian: The High Fructose Diet of Steve Jobs."

"Flirting with fruitarianism and other eating disorders of Steve Jobs."

None of us, of course, knows what caused the pancreatic cancer that led to Steve Jobs's  death, or what, if anything could have saved him....

For awhile at college, Jobs lived on Roman Meal cereal. He would buy a box, which would last a week, then flats of dates, almonds and a lot of carrots.   He made carrot juice with a Champion juicer, and at one point turned "a sunset-like orange hue."...

Too much fear of death, too much of a fantasy of getting control... hubris.