Emru Townsend's battle against leukemia
Well-known Montreal animation critic Emru Townsend was diagnosed with leukemia recently.
Editor of Frames Per Second magazine that he established in 2001, Emru is also a close friend of the Montreal ACM SIGGRAPH chapter. Indeed, our two organizations, through the enthusiastic orchestrations of Emru’s sister Tamu, collaborated together in producing the very successful Mike Johnson Animation Innovator event in 2005.
Emru has often covered the SIGGRAPH annual conferences for PC World and fps, as well as participating himself as panelist, moderator for Sketches and jury member of the Computer
Animation Festival. Slated to be CAF chair in 2009, Emru was actually contributing to this year’s edition as
CAF co-chair when he got the bad news this past autumn. Autodesk's Sam Lord Black has kindly stepped in, but only as "interim chair", as they have not let Emru resign!
Not to be deterred, Emru is back online, direct from the hospital bedside, with short and witty snapshots of hospital life in a cancer ward. With updates from his [howsemru] mailing list1 having titles like “Hair today, gone tomorrow”, Emru not only handles the flood of inquiries from sympathetic well-wishers, he also provides us all with an example of how being courageously upbeat can be the best medicine for a miserable prognosis2.
The newly-established [howsemru] community has been given a
challenge: find Emru a bone marrow donor. The search of existing databases has
been unsuccessful, sparking calls for people to register as potential donors
until a match has been found: A Facebook group, recently formed for that very
purpose, aquired over 800 members in its first 14 days; in Seattle, a friend at
animation studio Plexipixel organized a major donor drive; in Montreal, there
will be an evening of spoken-word performances at Coco Café on Feb. 24 to encourage people in the Montreal community to register as donors. If you are interested in registering as a bone marrow donor ( you only donate if a match is found), visit this Hema-Quebec page3. Please pass the message along, people can register from anywhere in the world3.
We all wish you a full and rapid recovery.
- Chris Isaac Larnder, Founder
Montreal ACM SIGGRAPH
Update: The campaign now has (as of March 12 2008) a full website up and running: HealEmru.com.
Update: See the expanded list of donor organizations below: the search has become worldwide!
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1If you wish to subscribe, contact tamu (at) videotron.ca.
2If you notice me paraphrasing TV commercial slogans, blame it on media-fanatic Emru: We once drove down to a SIGGRAPH conference in Boston together, discussing media and digital culture ( “and beyond!”) non-stop for 6 hours!
3 Here is an expanded list of organizations to donate through, depending on your location:
If you are from another country than the ones listed here, visit HealEmru.com for a world-wide(!) listing.
