Friday April 27, 2007

Slava died today

The world lost a great man today. Mstislav Rostropovich died today in Moscow. The New York Times has a warm and loving obituary (assuming you have a free login to read it). I re-joined the San Francisco Symphony Chorus in large part to sing with Slava - his widely used nickname - performing Babi Yar, a piece written by his teacher & mentor Dmitri Shostakovich.

Not only was Slava a great conductor, and a tremendous cellist, but he was also a world citizen who suffered the consequences of criticizing his mother Russia (whilst defending the writer & dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn). When the Berlin Wall fell, Slava flew there immediately, and gave an impromptu solo recital.

It was a tremendous honor to sing under his baton, and I will miss him greatly. (2007-04-27 08:01:41.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday April 24, 2007

Call to Arms - American Chocolate in danger!

Guittard Chocolates, a family run premium chocolate maker in Burlingame California, has raised the alarm over a request from the "Chocolate Manufacturers Association" to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (couched as a "Citizen's Petition to Modernize Food Standards") to among other things lessen chocolate standards in the U.S. In particular, this petition urges the FDA to allow something to be called chocolate that contains no cocoa butter (with vegetable fat substituted in its place).

You can read more about this U.S. food threat at: What's This About at the Don't Mess with our Chocolate website, along with Guittard's April 10th press release and their follow-on April 11th release. They are tracking media coverage as well.

If you want to get involved, click on the "Submit Comment" button on the FDA comment web site for this proposal. But you had better hurry - the comment period ends April 25th. Had Scharffen Berger chocolates not been bought by Hershey, I'm sure they would be at the front lines of this battle as well. (2007-04-24 12:26:32.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Accessible U.S. Currency update

Last November I noted in this space a ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robertson in ACB v. Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury that the United States had to make its currency accessible to the blind. Today in my local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, Edward Epstein wrote the article Changing Bills for the Blind noting that local U.S. Representative Pete Stark has proposed legislation to make small physical modifications to U.S. currency to make them identifiable by touch. Titled the "Catherine Skivers Currency Act", after past president of the American Council of the Blind Catherine Skivers, the legislation proposes literally cutting the corners of the $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, and $50 in particular patterns to make them identifiable. The $100 bill is left untouched, making it physically identical to the $500, $1,000, $5,000, $10,000, and $100,000 bills. Fortunately those have been out of circulation since 1969, so this probably won't be a serious identification problem... (2007-04-24 11:59:40.0) Permalink Comments [1]