December 5, 2020

Fashions in supermarkets – Diminishing car traffic – Giuliani’s downward spiral – Evening statistics

In the new Oriental supermarket (called, somewhat incongruously, “Ranch”) I came across a rare find:  a stewing chicken.  It has become quite difficult to find one, although I’m not sure why; they are egg layers that have become less productive as they age and would have to be culled in any case.  At any rate, this is the first one I’ve been able to purchase in several years.  For once I’ll be able to make a decent chicken stew in a stock with a well-defined flavor (instead of that faint hint of chicken that results in using younger and more tender cuts for stewing). 

Stewing chickens were much more common in stores when I was growing up, but I rarely saw once I reached the age for attending college.  It’s strange how supermarkets are subject to fashion, almost as if they are selling clothes instead of food.  Why, for instance, is the skin almost invariably taken off of chicken breasts before they are packaged?  That was not the case until relatively recently.  If one is using the meat in a stir-fry or a sauté then purchasing it with the skin removed is a convenience.  If, on the other hand, they are baked or in a fricassee, it is better to get them with the skin still on; there is less risk of the meat drying out during the baking or browning.  But the butchers at the supermarkets don’t appear to agree; they take the skin off automatically, it seems, and if you want to find some with the skin still on you may have to do quite a bit of searching.  Curiously enough, the skin remains on for whole chickens and for all other parts of the chicken sold separately:  legs, thighs, wings. 

During the course of shopping and various other errands I could not help noticing that the traffic on the roads is diminishing again.  It makes for more agreeable walking, of course, but it is an ominous sign.  As a result of the colder weather and also, perhaps, of the various discouragements officials in all states have been making about travel of any kind, people are taking fewer road trips (even when they are only day trips) than before.  Winter is generally a less crowded season on the trails in any case, but this year I suppose that fewer people will be hiking than usual.  It is to be regretted; it seems apparent that it is less risky to be out of doors than inside.

“The fiery youth of today would start back in horror if he could be shown his portrait in old age.”  No, I’m not applying Gogol’s words from Dead Souls to myself – I haven’t sunk into invalidism or unusual fits of eccentricity, unless indeed maintaining a journal is considered eccentric; but to Rudolph Giuliani.  Had he died a decade earlier, he probably would linger in many minds with grateful remembrance as the mayor who rejuvenated New York City and as a stalwart presence during the crisis of 9/11.  Now he will go down in history as Trump’s crony and dubious accomplice in the attempt of the latter to invalidate our electoral process.  The most recent setback to this enterprise occurred yesterday, when Judge James T. Russell turned aside Trump’s lawsuit in Nevada, not merely dismissing it but giving a detailed statement running to 35 pages of why not a single claim advanced in the lawsuit was valid.  Indeed, none of the 46 lawsuits that Trump has filed to date has made any headway.  In response to these results Giuliani has said, “We don’t need courts.   The United States Constitution gives sole power to the state legislator to decide presidential elections.”  In other words, he is saying outright that how people vote don’t matter and that he will continue to labor to install Trump as our dictator.  And he has become ludicrous in proportion to his moral deterioration; the conference during which he sweated so profusely as to cause his hair dye to melt while shrieking out conspiracy theories is probably the most vivid image people now retain about him.  Who could have predicted that the man who presided over Ground Zero and rallied New York City through the most devastating attack it ever endured would be reduced to this?

Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 66,833,796; # of deaths worldwide: 1,533,741; # of cases U.S.: 14,982,628; # of deaths; U.S.: 287,825.  There was a time when both India and Brazil seemed likely to surpass us but that time is long gone; several days of new cases in the hundreds of thousands have placed us far in the lead again, where we are unlikely to be challenged.  More than 4.5% of our population has been infected by now.