I have friends who won't go see the movie Avatar because they think it's "too political." But they will go see The Step Brothers or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. What do I take away from this? It's okay if a movie is painfully stupid, unfunny or physically repulsive, but if the movie has the slightest whiff of a political message, it's to be shunned. (Honest to God, has Will Farrell no self-respect at all? I think he deserves to suffer for that scene where he scrubs his butt in the bathroom sink with the bath mat. I'm sure his legion of apologists and fanboys think it was the funniest thing ever, but if Will Farrell is your hero, you may need to think about your life just a little bit.)

I didn't think Avatar was that political anyway. It isn't anything like an examination of US involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's more like another installment in the long series of "noble savage" movies like Little Big Man and Dances With Wolves. Worthwhile? It's fun to watch. Life-changing? Not so much.

Did you watch the finale of Lost? I didn't. I started out a pretty big fan of Lost, but somewhere in the third or fourth season I lost the faith. I got tired of wishy-washy Kate. I got tired of Jack, who when he wasnt being wooden was being sanctimonious. I got tired of the way every time I started to like a character, death was soon to follow (Mr. Eko, Libby, Anna Lucia, Charlie, all morted out apparently just because I liked them). I got tired of the growing irrelevance of the flash-sidewayses and flash-forwardses and flash-diagonalses. And I'm really up to here with alternate timeline plots, which increasingly seem to be the plot device of choice these days, but seem desperately convenient to me.

I never hated Lost. It just stopped being interesting, and I stopped watching. The last episode I watched was the one where Juliet detonated the core of Jughead by beating it on a rock. I am so sure. I wasn't even really tempted to watch the finale. And now it turns out that the whole thing was, basically, a doctored version of Jacob's Ladder - and Jacob's Ladder pulled it off in about 100 minutes, and with a healthy dose of groovy horror. And instead of watching Hurley steadily gain weight from one season to the next, we got to see Elizabeth Pena's breasts. A lot.

Case closed.

Two Weeks

Two weeks of radiation in the books, and so far, so good. Radiation has thus far presented me with no side effects at all, or at least no side effects that I notice above and beyond the side effects of chemo that still persist (neuropathy in my feet and hair-trigger fatigue, mostly).

I still think it's working. My leg feels better. Sometimes it gets a little sore, but nothing like it was. And the swelling still seems to be going down. Not as gratifyingly quickly as when I first started ABVD, but my leg is functional, and that's enough for me.

On a side note: I do believe that from here on out, I'm going to hew to the "country club" model of political debate: I won't tell you about MY political beliefs if you don't tell me about YOURS. Everything is so politicized today I want to throw up. Consider this (only slightly fabricated) conversation:

"Want to go get some lunch?"

"I don't know, what are your views on the Arizona immigration law?"

"I think it's irrelevant to the issue of seeking sustenance."

Nobody ever wants to talk about anything even remotely interesting these days. Nuclear energy policy, SETI, the fact that North Korea blew a South Korean corvette in half with a torpedo, synthetic organisms, annoying Facebook super-users that live way larger than you do, the shambles that is US space policy, the technology of oil wells. It's always the same stuff, over and over, the same Obama Rerangement Syndrome business.

Radiation

A week of radiation treatments is now in the books, and it's safe to say that I think radiation therapy is better than chemotherapy in every imaginable way. It doesn't make you sick, it doesn't take long, it doesn't hurt, it involves lots of cool machines and lasers, and it doesn't leave you feeling like you just got your ass kicked by the entire Bolivian Army.

Will it work, though? That remains to be seen. I have reason to believe that it is working, but I have four more weeks to go, so even if I'm being premature, there's still time.

Botanical news flash: we planted a tomato plant in one of those Topsy-Turvy upside-down planters. Rabbits eat basically everything we plant except for some of the pricklier varieties of cacti, and we thought the Topsy-Turvy would be a good way to grow a tomato plant without just feeding the rabbits. And it actually works - the tomato plant seems happy enough to grow upside down, and the rabbits haven't eaten it. But the birds think it's a sort of amusement park and keep breaking off chunks of the tomato plant as they play.

Can't win. Just can't win. But I don't care. I'm so happy to be going through radiation therapy instead of chemotherapy I just can't seem to work up any outrage about the poor tomato plant.

One last item: I calculated the other day that the energy in a single dose of radiation therapy was the same as having Sigourney Weaver thrown at me at the speed of 0.52 miles per hour (I picked her because I've always liked her as an actor, and she seems like she'd be merciless and ruthless to cancer cells).

3DCRT

Turns out I'm having "three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy." Sounds like something they'd do on Star Trek. "Scotty! I need you to emit a three-dimensional conformal x-ray beam from the main deflector dish!" And Scotty wails "Ach! Me bairns!"

The whole point of conformal radiation therapy is that a computer builds a model of the tumor, which is then used to steer the beam so that the radiation primarily impacts the tumor and not normal tissue ("conformal" means, I guess, that the pattern of radiation exposure "conforms" to the contours of the tumor). This allows the doctors to increase the intensity of the radiation, inflicting maximum harm on the tumor while sparing the neighboring tissue from undue harm.

While I'm on the subject of Star Trek... I really did enjoy the new Star Trek movie - it was amusing and entertaining and, in most respects, a faithful homage to the original. But did they really have to destroy Vulcan and spawn another damn alternate timeline? Those things are the bane of Star Trek - you need a wall chart and a ground spotter to keep the timelines straight. And why Vulcan? Was it destroyed just for sheer goshwowness? Couldn't they have written the story in such a way that they didn't destroy such a fundamental part of the Star Trek universe?

And why, while I'm at it, does Spock's little whirligig spaceship leave an actual damn exhaust plume? The fastest ship known to 23rd Century Vulcan science leaves smoke trails? I don't think so. Hell, we've known since about 1965 that smoke trails are a serious liability in air combat (and, presumably by extension, space combat). The North Vietnamese almost didn't need radar at all to track US F-4 Phantoms; all they had to do was keep an eye on the sky and look for the characteristic black smoke trail from our J-79 engines. Elimination of smoke trails from missiles and jet engines wasn't the only goal of subsequent work, but it was a goal.

But don't get me wrong, I did like the movie. I just think that the annihilation of Vulcan is a symptom of the same tendency toward self-one-upmanship that afflicts later seasons of Lost. I eventually had to give up on Lost for that very reason. Well, that and the fact that it started out mysterious and kind of eerie, but then turned incomprehensible and, if you ask me, kind of irritating.

But anyway. The point was three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy. I calculated yesterday that a 45 Gray dose of X-rays is equivalent in terms of energy to dropping a ten-pound cannonball from a height of 39 inches. That should get the job done - I hope.