A burning question I’ve been pondering for 10 years has not yet been answered, but someone else was curious too and wrote to the Seattle Weekly’s Ask Master about it (second item). Why does butter in California come in shorter, chunkier sticks then in other states? Arizona, Oregon, and Washington butter is also in this form. My best shot at an answer is that these states are hotter and a chubby stick with less surface area is better. Let’s forget the fact that the temperatures in the other states are often higher in the summer months. The actual answer may be as mundane as learning it was the shape of the first west coast dairy farmer’s wife’s butter crock. But we may never know. Most people, upon hearing of my curiosity about this subject, shrug it off. They are saner people than I. (via Alt-log)

“As Norma Desmond might have remarked, classical music didn’t get small — the media world that it’s trying to be part of got real, real big.” In a two-part series, the Chronicle examines why the business of classical music is not growing, though it still has an active audience. Compared to the world of pop music, classical is small potatoes, and companies are no longer willing to wait for the long term return on slow, but steady, album sales. Online businesses are hoping to grow into this market, but they’ll need paying subscribers and advertisers.

The article mentions in passing that classical radio stations “are tweaking their formats to try to reach larger audiences.” The two stations I’ve listened to are playing shorter parts of longer pieces and putting the more popular tunes on heavy rotation. With the vast catalog of classical recordings and many unrecognized B+/A- composers, as my conductor likes to call them (he teaches), this is unfortunate. One doesn’t need William Tell all the time, nor the same Holst planet played every day. My husband owns a 200 disk CD changer and we are considering filling it with all our classical albums and using that instead of the radio. After a few days of listening to cropped popular symphonies on our classical station, it seems it can’t be that much worse. But if this format gets more people to support classical music, I will not complain.

The cracks that grounded the space shuttles have been found in all four orbiters. The same cracks were found on test equipment used before the first shuttle ever took off (that’s over twenty years ago now!). NASA believes missions can begin again this fall, but the investigation into safety concerns continues.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Chocolate. These do not keep well at blood temperature.

A former resident of the Bronx reminisces about the New York blackout of July 13, 1977, when the city and surrounding areas were completely dark, allowing him to see the Milky Way. There was no moonlight in the way either. Twenty-five years ago today I learned what the word “looting” meant.

The Musee Mecanique has found a temporary home at Fishermen’s Wharf. Interestingly, Disneyland “expressed interest” in housing the collection at California Adventure. Let’s hope the permanent home negotiations with the National Park Service go well.

A cat is stuck in a tree in the town next to ours. The owners of the tree are paying about $350 to have landscapers in a cherry-picker try to rescue it. It’s been there almost a week. And they don’t know whose cat it is!

I’m always suspicious of motives, sometimes overly so. When I browsed through the fluffy Parade Magazine that comes with the Sunday paper and read about Rob Lowe’s involvement in cancer research working with Amgen (this was in the “In Step With” column), my first thought was “shill! shill!”. Bells rang in my head when he said “I’m not endorsing any medicine…[but] talk to your doctor about infection…” But the article also mentioned that he has lost relatives to cancer and his dad has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, so I felt guilty about my cynicism. Then I read in Salon that Lowe has “recently embarked on a drug-company sponsored awareness campaign for a cancer-related illness called febrile neutropenia that will reportedly net him $1 million.” My cynicism came back. I appreciate that people can get paid (and paid well) to raise awareness, so I don’t fault him or anyone for making money hawking anything. But it’s good to know all the motives. When he says he’s not endorsing any medicine, but he clearly is “raising awareness” for Amgen’s Neulasta, it makes me feel duped. Raise your own awareness about health issues and products by researching why people say what they say. Lowe has good intentions, I’m sure, but he’s being paid too.

Even more forward motion has been announced on the issue of trans-fat labeling. The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences, released a report on Trans Fatty Acids yesterday (report in PDF format). The report lists funding from various U.S. and Canadian public service groups (e.g. FDA, NIH) and a “Dietary Intakes Corporate Donors’ Fund” which has contributors like Roche Vitamins and M&M; Mars. The finding of the report which has weighty bearing on the FDA’s plan to alter food labels is that there is no safe level of trans fats to recommend for people’s diets. You know how the nutrition labels have a “% Daily Value” column? Well, that doesn’t work when the RDA of trans fat is a big fat zero. Despite a suggestion to combine the saturated and trans fat amounts and keep an RDA, the FDA food labeling chief is currently maintaining that there will be a separate line. Will it be clear that no amount of trans fat is good for you? And how furiously will the food industry fight back against this new policy? Trans fat is everywhere in processed foods, and it is about to be brought out of hiding.

A SF Chronicle writer tested out the Sirius satellite radio service and found it similar to the XM system he tested in November. The main difference was that he installed the XM himself in a 1993 Chevy company car, whereas the Sirius system he tested arrived preinstalled in a new BMW X5 SUV. We now know who’s putting their PR money where it counts. Both have CD quality sound, decent coverage, and similar station lineups. Sirius is a little more expensive because it is commercial-free. Both are using ground repeaters to enhance coverage; XM has many more since it has one less satellite up there. Will we soon be buying radio the same way we buy cable/satellite TV? (for satellite radio news, check out the SatRadio weblog)