Celebrating Darryl’s birthday

Unbelievably, Darryl is 38! A good caliber year.

James & I joined Darryl, Angela, Kaitlin, and Cynthia at D & A’s place in Sherman Oaks – and walked from there to the Clay Oven, an Indian restaurant on Ventura Blvd., for dinner. Good food, good conversation, and good behavior on Kaitlin’s part (considering that she’s just eighteen months old).

Kaitlin’s such a cutie! She's on the verge of talking: babbling, nodding, and gesturing, as if she knew what we were talking about.

Meanwhile, Robin's recovering from a back spasm that has her taking it easy until Monday...

David Kanouse on NPR's "News & Notes"

My brother David was interviewed on NPR's "News & Notes" this week about a study just published in the Journal of Sex Research.

Baseball been bery bery good to me

After the long dark winter of our discontent, and background noise about games with oversized and misshapen balls, the new season has finally arrived. Sports Illustrated picks the Angels to beat the Dodgers in the first Freeway World Series, and even such sabermatic stalwarts as ESPN's Rob Neyer pick the Angels to win their division. Sports Illustrated aside, few are picking the Dodgers, and that's great with me. After two games, the Angels are 2 - 0, the Dodgers 0 - 2. Just the way I like it.

For the Angels, this is a turnover year. Darin Erstad, Tim Salmon, and Adam Kennedy, stars of the 2002 World Championship, are gone, but a highly touted crop of young prospects has finally matured: Howie Kendrick (second base) and Casey Kotchman (first base) look to be stars in their own right; their young catchers, Mike Napoli and Jeff Mathis, are coming into their own, and they still have Brandon Wood and Dallas McPherson waiting in the triple-A wings. Garret Anderson, the remaining veteran, is apparantly healthier than he's been in several years. Their starting pitching is as solid as it gets: Bartolo Colon, Jered Weaver, John Lackey, Ervin Santana, and Kelvim Escobar. Their bullpen is lights-out: Justin Speier, Scot Shields, and K-Rod (Frankie Rodriguez).

The dark cloud on the horizon: Colon and Weaver are both recovering from injuries. For the first half of April, Joe Saunders and Dustin Moseley will be starting in their place. Are Colon and Weaver really going to come all the way back? Will Joe Saunders, Dustin Moseley, and Hector Carrosco be able to cover them if they don't? But even in the worse case, I don't see Texas, Seattle, or arch-rival Oakland winning more games.

Ahh, the joys - the sunny perspective - of Spring...

Recommended reading

I just finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I commented on it at Darryl’s website a while back, and will add here that it’s one of those books, like Erich Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, that’s bound to get you thinking more about what goes into the food you eat.

From the introduction:

Folly in the getting of our food is nothing new. And yet the new follies we are perpetrating in our industrial food chain today—by replacing solar energy with fossil fuel, by raising millions of food animals in close confinement, by feeding those animals foods they never evolved to eat, and by feeding ourselves foods far more novel than we even realize—we are today taking unprecedented risks with our health and the health of the natural world.

…how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing.