Men's things - XIII

Things we have to do

This morning, my second visit to The Christie, the largest single-site cancer centre in Europe and the first UK centre to be accredited as a comprehensive cancer centre. I know where I am going, Department 22, where many men with their partners and some women alone or with their own partners sit in one of four waiting rooms to be assessed, reviewed, or treated.

There have been offers to chaperone me to the hospital, from my neighbour, my friend, or a fellow steward from my church, but I have decided I am best able to cope with the conversations to be had alone. Obviously, if the opportunity were presented, Brian is definite and my best friend Kola, I would have welcomed to be with me through all this.

Taking the piss test

Having checked in, I was presented with a form, the International Prostate Symptom Score (I-PSS) which is a patient’s subjective rating of how they view their urinary health on a scale of 0 (Not at all) to 5 (Almost Always) on the various indicators of Incomplete Emptying, Frequency, Intermittency, Urgency, Weak Stream, Straining, and Nocturia.

Your total I-PSS score will suggest from your perception and feeling how the prostate gland is constricting the urine flow from your bladder to your urethra. My score fell within the range of mildly symptomatic though a bit higher than the score from two weeks ago.

I had already had a consultation on the option for a prostatectomy just over a fortnight ago, I was not enamoured about the aftereffects of surgery, it was all too unpleasant to countenance. Then getting to grips with the idea that something was manifesting inside you has left me somewhere between denial based on its invisibility and bafflement in terms of how to address it.

Just because you’re pissing poor

The consultant for the radiotherapy treatment option came in and introduced herself before asking how I came to know about the prostate cancer diagnosis. Walking her through each stage of testing and results leading to more investigations, she got a good idea of my understanding of the medical situation under discussion.

The I-PSS score then became the issue, and when I thought I might be able to avail myself of the breakthrough brachytherapy treatment for prostate cancer, I soon found out that I would not be eligible because of the treatment possibly complicating my urinary health. [Cancer Research UK: Brachytherapy for prostate cancer]

While I could appreciate no medical personnel would like to leave a patient worse off than they were before treatment, I felt that basing that decision on the subjective equivalent of a hunch when it would have been ideal to undergo urinary health analysis and tests was quite irregular.

Imagine being able to game the system because you had prior knowledge of adjusting the I-PSS score to suit the treatment you want even if the outcomes can be at best dubious and consequently debilitating.

Surely, there is a better way

I had multiple conversations with the consultant and support nurse when I was offered the external radiotherapy treatment that might stretch on for 20 low-to-medium dose sessions. Understandable to protect the functionality of my urinary system, which is under stress from an enlarged prostate, but that comes with other side effects. [Cancer Research UK: External beam radiotherapy for prostate cancer]

In all cases, however, the cancer will be removed totally. My inclination would be to opt for radiotherapy, but I will make no decision until I have had a conversation with my Holistic Needs Assessment team. The consultant twice said she knew I was going to read up on everything we had discussed, I can only wonder what could have given her that idea.

I am doing fine, I feel well, and I am quite hopeful and positive. Things would turn out right, I just need to get a handle on how I should pray. On my way out, I saw directions to the chaplaincy and prayer rooms, I found the chapel and sat in there for a while. As I was about to leave, the chaplains were coming out of their office for midday prayer, I was invited to join them, which I did and we had a moment of devotion, prayer, and reflection before I returned home.

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Give us Barabbas!

Evangelical pastor perfectly refutes MAGA Christianity! Culture, Faith, and Politics

The odious appeal of Donald Trump

Until just a few minutes ago, I was quite puzzled about how the Evangelical and Pentecostal movements in America and further afield seemed to embrace Donald Trump as the person and symbol to centre Christianity in the political discourse of the nation.

Fundamentally, I saw no principle or example that made Donald Trump likeable or amenable to the idea that this would help the promotion of Christian values. In fact, what I saw was a corruption of the purpose of Jesus Christ for the gain of earthly and political power without helping anyone see the mercy, the grace, the glory, or the power of God in their lives.

Christian nationalism with all its culture war paraphernalia and the accoutrements of wedge issues on women’s, reproductive, identity, or another other kind of right that suggests justice, fairness, respect, and dare I say the love of one’s neighbour, the grist of right-wing political doctrine seemed to replace the gospel and the message that Jesus Christ represented.

The quest for temporal power in determining who sits on the Supreme Court, what is taught in the schools, who has access to critical reproductive health options, and now, whether the net can be widened to give opportunity to those who are not like us had become the unquenchable thirst of religious purpose.

Discernment and discrimination

Even with my more active Anglican adherence, I am quite engaged and involved in the Evangelical and Pentecostal doctrines. A good deal of the underpinning of my faith comes from inspiration borne of charismatic expression and from listening to the anointed teachings of many leaders of that persuasion.

In listening, I have to be discerning and alert, following two basic credos from another preacher who has long departed to be with the Lord. In the first instance, he said, “Have as much sense as an old cow, eat the hay and leave the baling wire.” By that, I understand that not everything someone says is ingestible, I need to know what the hay is of the beneficial and the baling wire which is the packaging that is not edible and harmful.

I do not because I disagree with some things a person says then discount everything they have to say. I think there is a function of intelligence in being able to select the gems from the dirt or the rough. Nature is already a demonstration of that thinking.

We have always been human

Secondly, and I would paraphrase, “Do not follow anyone so close that you cannot cut away when they are falling into a ditch.” I guess someone else might say, “Keep a healthy distance and the door wide open.” Another variant of that would be something I read about a conversation between a mother and her daughter. “You have every reason to fall in love but get up and walk into your marriage.”

Do not yoke yourself to the untenable, make the allowances for the protection of your heart and your mind. Be smart and sensible, trusting just enough and verifying everything against the principled sources. In this case, when it comes to Christianity, that is the Word of God, the Bible.

I guess what always surprises me is how humanity in its fundamental nature has hardly changed. We can be persuaded in different ways to follow our basest instincts through charisma, sophistry, or just some force that through expediency we cannot resist.

Threatened powers fighting back

This brings us to the court of Pontius Pilate on the day that Jesus Christ was brought to trial before him, for he was the only political official who could sentence Jesus to death for the crimes that the chief priests had accused him of.

By the time Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, the priests were afraid that they would lose their religious influence on the Jews to Jesus Christ and their semi-autonomous political power to the Romans. They determined through Caiaphas the chief priest that Jesus should be put to death.

⁴⁸ If we let Him alone like this, everyone will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation.”

⁴⁹ And one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all,

⁵⁰ nor do you consider that it is expedient for ^[a]us that one man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should perish.” [Bible Gateway John 11:48-50 (NKJV)]

From then on, a plan was hatched to put Jesus to death. Still, the other relevant things alluded to in the YouTube video are what happened on Palm Sunday and the symbolism of riding on a colt of an ass, Hosanna which in Judaism is a cry for help and not the Christian shout of praise, the laying down of palm branches has its significance in the apocryphal book of the Maccabees. They lay down their garments for him to walk on, as if for a king. [Nashville Catholic: Why Palms? The Significance of Palm Branches on Palm Sunday] [Jehu is king! Bible Gateway 2 Kings 9:13 (NKJV)]

We want Barabbas

Even as Pontius Pilate had determined that Jesus Christ was innocent and had done no wrong, the priests prevailed on the crowd to demand the head of Jesus. Pontius Pilate could have exercised his prerogative of power there and then, but instead, he presented the people with the choice between Barabbas and Jesus Christ.

Every inclination would suggest the people would choose the man who brought the gospel, healed the sick, and raised the dead. Still, they chose Barabbas and the priests for that moment seemed to secure their political advantage.

At that, the crowd went wild: “Kill him! Give us Barabbas!” [Bible.com Luke 23:18-25]

Still, at the point where Jesus gave up the ghost on the cross, the inner sanctum of their political and religious power that only the High Priest could enter was exposed as the curtain was rent to two.

The birth of Christianity came on the day of resurrection as the priests had inadvertently dispossessed themselves of what they sought to keep. More pertinently, in contemporary times, we have situations that present us with a Barabbas or a Jesus Christ and what obtains in the quest for political influence and power by religious entities is selecting Barabbas over Jesus Christ, the expedient over the necessary, the temporal over the eternal, the human over the godly.

Essentially, the religious folk are just like you and I, we might have high expectations of their choices, but we would be disappointed if we trust more in humans than we do in the divine. In the biblical and today’s context, I now understand why Donald Trump appeals to the evangelicals as they choose the political over the gospel and find ways to justify their indefensible stance.

Opinion: The issues the CrowdStrike Incident brings to mind

We are not all perfect

In my 36^th year of a career in Information Computer Technology of which more than two-thirds have been as a freelance consultant, even in Nigeria where some thought it folly to abandon a salaried role for the uncharted waters of treading the streets of Lagos and beyond for engagement, I have been quite fortunate.

I would be the first to say every seemingly subject matter expert has a history and that is in keeping with the credo that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. My recognition of some of the stupidest things to do in any IT environment allows me to reflect on the imperfections, errors, ignorance, overconfidence, mistakes, and failings of experts. Critically, we should learn lessons more and excoriate ourselves less.

CrowdStrike’s bird strike

However, on Friday I was hoping so much that my weekend would not be ruined by the incident of an event that we would need to remediate, especially when what caused it was totally out of our control. I refer to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident where a US cybersecurity company rolled out a faulty update to their software which affected an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices.

In the process, we saw this affecting airlines, airports, hospitals, banks, hotels, payment systems, government services, enterprise systems, and emergency services, among the critical services the CrowdStrike software is widely deployed to protect.

The more technical people have already analysed the issue and several solutions have been proffered including an emergency recovery tool that Microsoft released late yesterday to help fix devices that have been left in an unusable state. [Microsoft: New Recovery Tool]

How ever did this happen?

In my view, I am shocked that this CrowdStrike update happened and calls for a reassessment of how we measure impact, risk, and consequence when what we do can be so far-reaching and the means to back out or roll back a presumed solution requires extraneous measures.

If anything, and I have been involved in major deployments that could reach up to 250,000 users globally, you do not roll out a major update on a Friday and I never do on a Monday either. You need the presence of mind and personnel active during the week if things go wrong.

Before that, all techies are left asking, how did such a fundamentally flawed update make it out of the gates at CrowdStrike without being caught in testing, review, change management, risk management, impact assessment, and just the basic corporate desire never to roll out a problem regardless of the situation?

Preoccupied with the stock market

I got one interesting insight looking through the Twitter (X) feed of the President & CEO CrowdStrike, his last tweet was quoting another before pandemonium broke loose on the 8^th of July, and it was the ululation about CrowdStrike being the seventh best-performing stock in the Nasdaq 100 year-to-date and the 14th best in the S&P 500. In both indices, it is the highest returning software stock of the first half of 2024, up over 50%.

[Tweet]

CrowdStrike seemed to be a celebratory mode and last month they celebrated 5 years of being Nasdaq-listed, I hate to think that they had taken their eyes off the ball and by some careless misadventure, a company that was supposed to prevent cyberattacks presided over one of the largest outages ever in the history of information technology.

It leads me to think of the nursery rhyme, Sing a song of sixpence where the king specifically had a counting house to count his money and the maid suffered the mishap of having a blackbird which would have been one of the four-and-twenty birds that were baked in the pie which escaped when the pie was opened and the birds began to sing. Things were not particularly right in that kingdom.

Falconry gone to ground

That this outage affected airports and airlines globally is quite interesting because the update was to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor product. This was a vulnerability scanner that rendered devices totally inoperable. Certain airports deploy falcons to scare away birds that might interfere with the take-off and landing of aircraft. They prevent catastrophic bird strikes that could incapacitate aircraft and lead to accidents.

I find myself thinking CrowdStrike had become a bird strike of unimaginable consequence that the cost of the outages is yet to be computed as many devices might still be offline. CrowdStrike stock price fell almost 20% in the 5 days to the Friday close of the market. The king of CrowdStrike counting his money just over a week before just took a personal hit of $43 million it might be up to $300 million according to Forbes. Not much for a billionaire though.

Ticking boxes and flipping heck

Back to the fundamentals, the question about testing remains as much as I am left wondering what product, service, or project manager needed to tick boxes to meet deadlines over rolling out a patch later than planned to achieve something. Siding with the techies rather than management, could the management have been given different advice, but the techie was overruled for expediency purposes?

I have had these conversations too many times with project managers who have promised the world to management long before they have engaged the input of resources and facilities to get things done to the standard they have promised. The resource is then put in a bind to meet unrealistic deadlines.

You need a force of personality to push back and assert that your job is to deploy solutions that work the first time, maybe with a few tweaks, but you would never roll out what you can determine with all clarity still has issues and can constitute a problem. I do not want to screw up anyone’s project, but I have a professional responsibility to those I provide service and support to not to leave the state of their corporate devices any worse than before my solution was deployed.

Push back and regulation too?

Better late than sorry is not a sin, it is understanding the impact and risk of what you do. One last thing, the update should have gone out in controlled tranches, not globally in one fell swoop. I can see a situation where legislation might require those who can impact critical services to submit a full assessment and deployment plan to a regulator before deployment.

We might be a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), or a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) type agency at national, regional, and international global levels to superintend services that can affect global infrastructure along with teeth to regulate, sanction, or punish those who handle their impactful responsibilities with levity.

Hello in There Over There

Hello in There · Bette Midler - John Prine

Looking out into the day

Life in the city presents a window of observation both literally and figuratively. If I cranked my neck looking out to the right, I would see the main road, full of traffic, the missing Venetian blinds pulled down by those who are not gentle of touch might offer a spectacle in flagrante delicto of things better kept out of view.

On occasions, where I have been asked about the weather, a predilection to Miss Havisham’s shunning of the public might suggest that one is unaware of where the sun or the clouds might have come to an agreement about what day they want to show.

Left to my own devices, I will know nothing of what happens in my city until after the event. A hermit untouched and unknown, yet conversant and connected in isolation from sensual interaction.

A part of apartment life

Then, so much information filters in like sunrays on a brilliantly sunny day. From the fourth floor of the apartment block opposite and across the street, I know they are in because they open the window that reflects a blast of light into my living room. Should I wave to them?

For the past two days, the first-floor apartment across from mine had the blinds drawn. They are on holiday one must presume for nothing in the weather of the past couple of days supports the need to shelter from enjoying the elements. They appear to be a partying lot, not that I might haphazardly identify them on the street. They are a function of the apartment in which they live, as I might have been an operatic revue of the unspeakable that excites chortles and giggles.

Old people maybe not lonesome

To the left on the second floor, at the breaking of the dawn, an old man sits at the window looking at a world that his youth once participated in with verve and vigour. The lady who sometimes sits with him might be the wife of decades of marital bliss, a companion of life and experience, with whom living out the rest of their days might stretch to a time beyond record.

The stories in those faces, the memories that fetch fresh waters from wells of existence we could not begin to fathom. They could be parents, likely grandparents, never doubt them being great grandparents, but no little girl’s face has replaced the visage that has met my gaze.

Maybe they see me when I see them, if they ever noticed; for I have watched that window from my desk for years, I could wave at them to say, “Hello! In there”.

Thought Picnic: The little foxes of pique

The inexplicable imponderable

A mobile phone holder on my office desk disappears and there is no other explanation for the disappearance beyond the likelihood that the other person who has full access to the apartment has moved it, used it, and lost it.

Yet, we are left to consider the unexplained in terms of the improbable when it is so patently not the case, for to level an accusation might sour the relationship whilst your sense of discomfiture is hardly assuaged by the realisation that you are losing control of your entire to trusted forces out of your control.

Take another example: a wallet that was vacated of essential things with some unimportant items left therein was placed from clear recollection on that office desk the night before a journey. A week later, I got a call that it had been found in the garden that I had not passed through for close to a week before my journey.

Then, it had rained for most of that week, but the wallet was dry having been picked up that morning by a jogger who happened to spot it on her way out for morning exercises. I find myself caught in another debate of the ridiculous. I guess the wallet just thought it was stuffy in the apartment and decided to step out for a walk, then could not find its way back home.

The obsession proposition

Much as one attempts to be unbothered by the minutiae of the hows and whys of what people do out of commission, omission, absentmindedness, carefulness, or carelessness, all of that never really matters if it is not noticed. My inordinate attention to detail that has found the trenchant criticism of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), is simply a need to maintain some order amid many other chaotic things totally out of one’s control.

You wonder, why people change things that have always worked for something that they have not had the opportunity to assess the efficacy of. The seemingly immediate advantage is lost to the long-term inconvenience that could exacerbate the annoyance of others.

Patterns are distorted as your record of how things were is displaced and influenced by thinking, events, or people working from a different perspective and have an inclination to tend to an alternate frame of reference. We all suffer from the inability to be inclusive of all the parameters that could make for a perfect setting.

Leave things where they were, be inquisitive but resist interference, consider the quirks of others which are quite different from their faults, and know when to accommodate rather than repudiate. The subtle traversal of advice to correction lies in the deft art of communication. For all times, know the clock should never be wrong.

These are the little foxes that ruin the vineyard in bloom. [BibleHub: Song of Solomon 2:15]

May I suggest blogging is easy?

Words always flow

A thought springs to mind, you reach for your laptop and flip open the lid with the confidence and purpose to write something. In the process you get distracted, a YouTube notification on your mobile phone and you are watching a performance that brings tears to your eyes.

You were thinking of writing a blog that you never even had any concept of how it would turn out and now, the trick you used to play of just typing and hoping the words come as you type is not working.

Bludgeon the block

Something suggests you have Writer’s Block, but chance would be a fine thing, because a block is more topical than incidental. I aver that it is when you have an intention that you suddenly cannot act on, that is a block.

In other cases, practise with thought processes allows you to write something, the quality of which might be questionable, and yet its beauty of expression is interesting as craftsmanship speaks for itself to the admirer and the critic alike.

Then if one were to close a blog as one were having a conversation following the basics of what a personal blog entails of how you feel, what you see, and how you are affected, you already have enough paragraphs for another blog. Then conclude with a full stop.

Essential Snobbery 101: Time is about you and how you respect others

Time for peace of mind

Last Thursday, I had a hospital appointment for 9:45 AM, in my planning the day before, I had determined that it was best to get the bus and at least 3 buses plied the route to the destination for a journey that would have taken 30 minutes.

Then accounting for reaching the intended department in the hospital complex, I gave about 15 minutes, especially if I could not get good directions or got lost along the way.

This meant I had to leave home at the very latest time of 9:00 AM with a 2-minute walk to the bus stop. I had a friend offer to accompany me to the hospital understanding the kind of discussion I was about to have, but their sense of timing was impaired by a personal emergency, he was not going to make it for my proposed departure time.

Time to ease the pressure

There are reasons why I keep time and many times my patience is tested by those whose concept of time suffers deficiencies of exactitude and timeliness, it is a fluid construct of happenstance dictated by quality of discipline and the aggrandizement of lassitude. Yet, for many reasons, these transgressions can be forgiven.

When it comes to hospital appointments, getting there with enough time to settle down before being called for initial observation before consultation is paramount. In circumstances where I have cut it too fine, my blood pressure has risen in consonance with the stress of not giving myself enough breathing space.

As I did not know what checks would be done, waiting for my companion was out of the question even as that presence would have been a source of support. When attending to medical matters, it is essential that you do not feel alone in that setting.

Time is respect and consideration

My attention to time is not just in this area, it pertains to appointments, schedules, travel, social events and much else. Time gives you a datum of measurement to allow disparate situations and people to align, when it is handled with levity, not only is it unfortunately a sign of disrespect, it gives little consideration to how others use their time.

To some, being fashionably late is a sign of status, I usually have 15 minutes to spare to allow for hinderances to being informed of why another is late, after which, I might well go and do something else. Heck! I have walked away from interviews because the interviewer has been badly behaved on keeping time.

My thinking, if you would waste the time of a stranger interested in working for you, what more would you do when they are contracted or employed? End the whiff of disrespect before it takes root. There might be an apology and an adjustment after, but that is not what I live for.

Time is first about you and then others, it is a paraphrase of loving your neighbour as yourself. Sometimes, I prefer others to choose the time, I’ll be there, I wonder what explanation you’ll have for not making it at the time you chose to meet.