Saturday Soother – October 15, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Lobster boats at dusk, Lubec Harbor, Lubec, ME – October 2022 photo by Rick Berk Photography

Wrong and Ms. Right are chilling on Cape Cod. We took time out from doing nothing to watch the Jan. 6 Committeeā€™s most likely final hearing on Thursday. You know by now that the Committee voted unanimously to subpoena Trump. You also know that he will never appear.

The Committee has to wrap up its work and publish it before the next Congress is sworn in, January 2023. And the most important thing that they can do is to make a criminal referral to the DOJ for Trump and a few of his fellow travelers like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, John Eastman, and Jeffrey Clark. The Committee also must share the entirety of their investigative record with the DOJ as soon as possible.

If they delay until the new Congress is sworn, and if itā€™s controlled by Republicans, the new Speaker will dissolve the Committee and refuse to cooperate with the DOJ.

But letā€™s move on and talk a little about the price of chicken. Itā€™s going up bigly, but rotisserie chickens at Costco are still $4.99, as they have been for more than 20 years.

Chicken is our most popular meat: Americans consume 99 pounds per capita, way more than beef (56 lbs.), pork (52 lbs. ) or fish (19 lbs.). Thatā€™s 20 whole chickens per person, per year. The Hustle reports that about 10% of the chicken we eat are rotisserie cooked, and that Costco sells around 12% of all rotisserie chickens in the US. They began selling a 3 lb. cooked chicken for $4.99 in 2000. And 22 years later, the bird still costs $4.99. Adjusted for inflation, the Costco rotisserie chicken should be selling for $8.31, but theyā€™re keeping the price low because nobody walks into Costco and comes out with just one chicken.

Costco says that they are losing a ton of profit on cheap chicken. In 2015, the CEO estimated that the lost profit was around $40 million. They have worked to control costs by opening their own chicken processing facility in Nebraska in 2019. That one facility produces 43% of Costcoā€™s rotisserie chicken requirements. Costco reports that it saves them 35Ā¢/chicken. And their rotisserie chickens have their own Facebook page with 19k followers.

Want to save on your food bills? Eat more Costco chicken.

Itā€™s time for us to spend a few minutes decompressing from another week of crummy news. That means itā€™s time for our Saturday Soother. As Wrongo writes this, heā€™s looking at an Atlantic Ocean tidal inlet. The weather for the past week has been fantastic, but weā€™ve had very high winds and lots of rain to start this weekend.

Still, the shore birds are congregating on a small sand bar thatā€™s visible at low tide in front of our rental house. They are often joined by a solitary man who motors over in a small skiff and spends an hour bent over at the waist with a clamming rake, hunting for shellfish treasures. He seems reasonably successful, returning every day at low tide to toss a bunch of clams into a plastic bucket, hop back in the skiff and motor away.

Wrongo couldnā€™t bend over at the waist and rake for an hour without needing spine surgery.

As you cruise into the weekend, start by brewing up a mug of Kenya Nyeri Hill coffee ($12.50/12 oz.) from Road Map Coffee works, in Lexington in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The roaster says that it has a chocolaty finish with notes of red currant and tangerine zest.

Now grab a seat on the deck and listen and watch ā€œKol Nidreiā€ by Max Bruch. Bruch wrote it in 1880. It is an Adagio based on two Hebrew Melodies for Cello and Orchestra, consisting of a series of variations on two themes of Jewish origin. Many mistakenly believed that Bruch was Jewish because he wrote this piece, but he was not. From Bruch:

ā€œEven though I am a Protestant, as an artist I deeply felt the outstanding beauty of these melodies and therefore I gladly spread them through my arrangement…ā€

Here it is played in 2018 by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under the direction of Paavo JƤrvi. The cello soloist is Mischa Maisky, who was born in Ukraine:

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Adele Schwartz

The Kol Nidre service is often the only service I attend annually. I have heard this music played many times in many ways, but none quite as heartfelt and moving as this. Thank you for posting it.