Brendan Gates

I bought my Livestrong bracelet in the Summer of 2004, right when they came out. I was caught up in the Lance Armstrong hype with him beating cancer and then triumphantly returning to win cycling’s toughest event. It was an impressive story, and you weren’t cool if you didn’t have one of the yellow bands on your wrist. So I bought one. The smallest one I could find, on account of my child-sized wrists.

Fast forward one year and like many people, I still had the bracelet on. Then something changed in my life. I had been feeling off for a few months, leading up to an episode where I temporarily lost vision in one eye and talked my way into an unscheduled visit with my primary care physician. Based off my pale skin and symptoms of sluggishness, he opted to check me for testicular cancer – pointing to my bracelet and saying “I’m sure you’ve heard of this disease”. That scared me a little bit. I couldn’t have cancer, could I? Later that night he called me with blood work results to insist that I check into a hospital immediately, as my blood counts were universally low. I did that, and woke up the next morning to a new doctor telling me to prepare for a fight with leukemia. That scared me more than anything has ever scared me.

It turns out that I didn’t have leukemia. Further testing revealed that I had (and still have) aplastic anemia. It’s pretty rare, so there aren’t a whole lot of inspirational books written by survivors. Instead, I was given a copy of Lance Armstrong’s book It’s not about the bike: My journey back to life. That book made a real difference for me. It’s right up there behind the care of my doctors and the support from my loved ones, for what I credit with how I was able to deal with the illness.

Almost overnight my bracelet changed from something trendy to something very different. It no longer had anything to do with cycling, or Nike, and had everything to do with me beating my own illness.

Now it’s 2013, and I’ve had the Livestrong bracelet on day and night for eight and a half years. I took it off once just to prove that I could, but other than that it’s been on my wrist every single day. Lance Armstrong is also now a confessed cheater. And his Livestrong foundation has been under attack over the last couple years for what it’s really brought to the fight against cancer.

I don’t care that Lance cheated. And I never really identified with Livestrong as an organization that supported me, since I didn’t have cancer. I don’t doubt that they helped many, many people. But it’s time for me to move on. My illness has been in remission for several years now, and the bracelet is just something that I’ve kept wearing out of habit.

So I’m taking it off. This doesn’t diminish what the bracelet meant to me at one time, nor what Lance Armstrong did for me. I just don’t need to wear it anymore. And if anybody asks, I’m still going to recommend that book.

Is it okay to knowingly broadcast somebody’s death on TV? I may be numb to most violence on TV, but something about showing an actual death just doesn’t sit well with me.

I read online today that Georgian Olympian Nodar Kumaritashvili died in a tragic Luge accident. He appears to have been going upwards of 90 mph when he took a turn too high and lost control of his sled, throwing him from the track and into an unpadded metal column. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter at a local hospital, but from the described efforts to “revive” Nodar by first responders on the scene, I would say there is good chance he was killed on impact.

A quick Google search yields no shortage of videos showing Nodar’s death. Some preface the video with a warning about the graphic nature, and some don’t. CNN ran a video showing the last few frames before impact – so they showed a man about to lose his life. And my local NBC affiliate ran an evening news story accompanied by the full video, with no warning to viewers of how graphic the video might be.

Can you imagine what this is like for Nodar’s friends and family? This is a huge story, and they probably won’t be able to escape the footage. They’ll be confronted with having to see their son/friend/brother die on TV, over and over again. That’s pretty horrific.

Should we be allowed to knowingly watch somebody die? Violence seems generally accepted; that gets shown on TV every day and nobody blinks. It also seems okay to show death, past tense, as mangled car wrecks and body bags on stretchers are also common fare for the news. I guess I just assumed that not showing people die was some sort of conscious choice. Instead, it seems that news organizations just didn’t have good footage of death to show. Now that they have it, they’re more than happy to run with it like it’s no big deal.

I was discussing this with co-workers and one of them pointed out that it isn’t much different than coverage of the Haiti earthquake, where they are showing people on the verge of dying. And they’re right, that isn’t a whole lot different. But I don’t think I’ve actually seen coverage in Haiti of somebody die, just lots of destruction. So it’s at least a little different.

I don’t know. Am I blowing this out of proportion? Is there death on TV all the time already and I just wasn’t paying attention?

It’s official. I’m a Kopite.

Well, I don’t know if I’ve earned that title yet. But I am throwing my support behind Liverpool FC. I tried to follow Frank’s advice and pick a player first, that player being Fernando Torres – whom I watched score the winning goal in the Euro 2008 final. Frank also mentioned Steven Gerrard, Liverpool’s goal scoring captain, who seems like he’d be fun to watch. Then there’s Dirk Kuyt, the other pale blond guy that Gerrard passes the ball to. Between those three I think I’ll have plenty to cheer about when the season starts Sunday versus Spurs.

Arsenal was my EPL runner-up, mostly because of a tech writer that compared Arsenal to Google. It was an article that I decided to ignore, obviously, as he compared Liverpool to Apple – a company whose products I respect, but whose tactics I loathe. And AC Milan was my international runner-up, because they have the always enjoyable Ronaldinho.