100th Post

This is my 100th blog post.

When I started this blog site about 16 months ago I had no idea what I would write beyond the first posting, let alone the thought of the content of my 100th.

I would like to write something meaningful for the momentous (tongue in cheek) occasion, but truth is I have nothing that "over the top" to share.

So, I am going to do what I usually do and use this occasion and this blog to just serve as a cathartic exercise by shedding a few strong emotions through writing. And list a few truisms, at least truisms given my experiences. 

Cancer is evil. I have said it before but it is really evil. I mean like Dante's "ninth circle of hell" evil. I mean it belongs down there with Satan, Judas, Hitler, and crowd. 

It spares no one, destroys families, makes widows and orphans and is ubiquitous. 

And from a personal perspective, breast cancer comes from its own private place in that "ninth circle of hell".

Lori is beating the odds. Last November 2nd when she was diagnosed with metastatic brain cancer that had developed from her triple negative breast cancer she was told, we were told, she had less than six months.

So much for the experts. With an enormous amount of prayer, support of friends, some caring doctors, and some aggressive research she is currently in an immunotherapy trial of "iniparib and irinotecan" that has (for the moment) arrested the metastatic activity of her cancer.

The road ahead is going to be difficult but this evil needs to be fought and hopefully eradicated. I think Lori will be an atypical cancer patient and I pray and I believe she will be here for years to come.

It is a far more gruesome and hopeless tragedy for others.

I had no idea the havoc this disease was and is wreaking on millions of people yearly, those with the disease and those who love the ones with the disease. 

I think the 21st century, no, the next decade of this century should be dedicated to finding a cure. 

If John Kennedy could utter a challenge that would get us to the moon in less than ten years there is no reason the combined brilliance and efforts of the medical community cannot find a way to "kill" this "most evil of killers". 

I think true friends are a lot rarer than literature and history and experience make them out to be.

I think for such a smart man, Einstein was pretty foolish when it came to his beliefs about the existence of God.

I think over the next 18 months, one way or the other we will get this shrimp project into true levels of commercial production and I think a lot of folks are going to regret that they had a chance to help us make this happen and they did not.

I think the USA no longer has "leaders" anymore, I think we just have "politicians", and I am using that latter word in the full pejorative sense.

I think if after a lot of years on this earth if people (like me) with a decent IQ and broad global experience develop into curmudgeons, I think we have damn good reasons for being that way. 

I think it is an absolute crime, sin, and atrocity that in the United Sates of America we have to kill a single dog or cat because there is no decent home for them.

I think the major animal rights groups should be convicted of fraud and have their bullshit organizations dissolved. 

I think we should make it a privilege and not a right to have a pet and that a moratorium be placed on all commercial breeding and pet sales until demand outstrips supply so dramatically that when a stray dog or cat is found you have 500 individuals trying to qualify for the right to adopt that animal. 

I think it should be illegal for a shelter private or municipal to kill a healthy dog or cat. Seriously.

I think the reason Ernest Hemingway was and is my all time  favorite writer, is because of passages like this one from "A Farewell to Arms".

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It Kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of those you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry".

I think you can find a lot of beauty in life if you can endure the pain.