NEWS ON OUR BROTHER GÖRAN

From James at The Three-Legged Stool:

Our very beloved brother, Göran, has been on hospice for a week. He has an aggressive form of prostate cancer. According to his niece, the does not have a lot of time before he joins the Communion of Saints. Please keep him in your prayers as he graduates from mortality. And remember his blood family and his adopted family one of whom I am privileged to be.

Growing up in the shadow of a Swedish Lutheran Church, I learned Children of the Heavenly Father at a very young age. It was always sung in times of distress and for funerals. The last verse of the English translation says:

Neither life nor death shall ever
From the Lord, His children sever.
His the loving purpose solely,
To preserve them, pure and holy.

Thank you, James, for giving us the sad news.

UPDATE: Today is Göran's birthday. If you're his Facebook friend, you can wish him Happy Birthday over there.

UPDATE 2: Here's the link to the post on our gathering in Leeds two years ago, which includes more pictures of Göran. If you click to enlarge the second photo down, you will see that Göran wears preaching bands. He looked like a character right out of an Ingmar Bergman film. He's a dear, dear man, and I'm privileged to have met him.

DOGS DETECT PROSTATE CANCER

From the Los Angeles Times:

Man's best friend may cement his position if early results from French researchers can be replicated. A team of researchers from Tenon Hospital in Paris reported Tuesday at a San Francisco meeting of the American Urological Assn. that dogs can be trained to detect the characteristic odor of unique chemicals released into urine by prostate tumors, setting the stage for a new way to identify men who are most at risk from the cancer. If developed, the test might be more effective than the PSA test now used because it would have fewer false positives.
....

The researchers are now attempting to identify what specific chemicals the dog is reacting to in hopes of developing an "electronic nose" that wouldn't require treats and potty breaks.

It seems to me that treats and potty breaks are not a big price to pay to keep the doggies working. What's wrong with letting the dogs live with their humans and working them for limited periods of time (no sweatshop hours)? After all, in past times, many dogs were working dogs, and even today we have working dogs, such as seeing-eye dogs, airport security dogs, sheep dogs, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, as Yul Brynner would say,

I once flew across the Atlantic, seated next to a man and his seeing-eye dog. The dog lay quietly at her/his human's feet and only shifted around slightly during the whole seven hour trip.