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.

My brother David, with Grandmother - Kate (Dollie) Kanouse.

December 1944

Battlestar Galactica

Season three concluded Sunday night, and what a finale it was! I don't watch much television - some news, the Daily Show and Colbert Report on occasion, Bill Maher on Friday nights, Angel games during the baseball season - but three long-running shows have hooked me in recent years: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Battlestar Galactica. Battlestar is a remake of a mediocre series of the same name from the 1970s, with vastly more interesting characters and complex, nuanced takes on current issues.

It's also downright fun. This is a future (or past?) of warp-speed space travel and dazzling high-tech war rooms, but not cordless phones; radios and pop-up toasters are right out of the 1950s, and people still smoke cigarettes in the workplace. And now we have "All Along the Watchtower" (what's with that?!?). Unfortunately, we have to wait until January 2008 to find out what happens next.

Marijuana

Andrew Sullivan has a link to an interesting report on drugs and toxicity - and once again, marijuana ranks as the least addictive, most benign substance.

My sentiments exactly

Photo by Nick Calyx. Thanks to Harry Myhre for both title and link.

For Slatkin / Zlotkin friends and fans...

Review from the New York Sun:

Fashioning a Lyrical, Fluid Line Classical Music
BY FRED KIRSHNIT
March 14, 2007

Cellist Frederick Zlotkin had the honor of introducing the most beautiful melody ever written by Robert Schumann, the main theme of the Andante cantabile from his Piano Quartet, aboard the chamber music barge Sunday afternoon at Brooklyn's Fulton Ferry Landing. Mr. Zlotkin is most likely tired of being described as Leonard Slatkin's brother, so let's introduce him instead as the son of the fine cellist Eleanor Aller. This day, he teamed with another local celebrity, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic Glenn Dicterow, along with violist Karen Dreyfus and pianist Gerald Robbins.

Mr. Zlotkin made the most of his opportunity, fashioning a lyrical line notable for its fluidity and grace. He did not employ a great deal of vibrato, but did include a delicious portamento slide toward the conclusion of this infectious melody that brought to this reviewer a flood of memories and at least a trickle of tears. The other two string players each had their turn at this type of gorgeous music making and each acquitted themselves admirably.
...
Although it was the third movement of Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor that grew out of the aforementioned Schumann Andante cantabile, it was the Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor that the quartet performed this day. The piece has a special place in the history of the California ex-pat community so dear to Mr. Zlotkin's parents, as it was this mighty work of chamber music that Otto Klemperer convinced Arnold Schoenberg to orchestrate so that he could conduct it with his Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.

My son with his daughter

Darryl with Kaitlin at a family picnic in Griffith Park.

Joining the world of hybrid cars

We bought a brand spanking new car today, a Honda Civic Hybrid. It has an EPA rating of 49 city / 51 highway, and a cool cockpit with GPS navigation and XM radio. What fun! What a huge car payment! (photo by Robin)