DON’T USE PUBLIC CELL PHONE CHARGING STATIONS.

There are free USB charging stations everywhere now. You can find them at nearly every airport and hotel. They are in thousands of restaurants, coffee shops, shopping centers, and public libraries. Don’t use them! Crooks have figured out how to infect cell phones and computers with malware and steal your data through USB charging stations. It is known as ‘juice jacking.’ How many charging stations are infected? No one knows. All we know for sure is that it is going on and is becoming more common. However, there is a safe way to recharge your device while you are away from home. Take a USB wall charger and plug it into an electrical outlet. It doesn’t appear that crooks have figured out how to infect cell phones or computers through electrical outlets, at least not yet. Most charging stations have electric outlets nearby. Keep a wall charger in your luggage while you are traveling along with your own charging cable. Criminals intentionally leave infected cables and wall chargers plugged in at charging stations and give them away as promotional gifts.


2 WIDELY BELIEVED MYTHS FROM HOLLYWOOD.


Myth #1: THE IRISH WERE ROOTING FOR HITLER IN WORLD WAR 2.
I recently saw the movie ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ on TV. In this big-budget movie, an Irishman goes to England to help German commandos who are there to try to assassinate Winston Churchill. The Irishman is not risking his life for money but out of a hatred of England. Another movie on TV that same week was ‘The Man Who Never Was’. This movie takes place in England in 1943 and is based on a true story. In this movie, an Irishman goes to England to spy for the Germans. At the beginning of the movie, the Irishman lets the audience know that he too is doing this because he hates the English. At the end of the movie, just as he is getting ready to send a message to Berlin that he thinks will help Hitler win the war, he looks at his radio transmitter and makes the sign of the cross. This is to let the audience know that he is working for Hitler not only because he hates England, but also because he is Catholic. There are other movies and TV shows with this same theme.


As I said, this is a myth. Although Ireland was neutral during World War 2, the country was always pro-Allied. While Ireland had very contentious politics at the time, all political factions in Ireland were deeply committed to democratic government, and they understood that Hitler was a threat to democracy everywhere. Plus, Hitler did things during the war that enraged people in Ireland. In 1941, hundreds of German bombers dropped bombs on Belfast in Northern Ireland, killing large numbers of people, setting the city on fire, and damaging or destroying over 30,000 homes. Eamon de Valera, the Republic of Ireland’s head of state, delivered a radio address after the bombing titled: “They are our people.” It reflected the shock and anger of the country.

The Irish government helped both Britain and the United States throughout the war, although there wasn’t a lot they could do. Today, Ireland is one of Europe’s wealthiest countries, but in the 1930s and 1940s, the Republic of Ireland was very poor. The country had a tiny army. They had no navy, no air force, and no air defense. They didn’t even have one military airplane. Not one. Although the government of Ireland discouraged its citizens from participating in the war, over 50,000 Irishmen enlisted in the British army and navy during World War 2. They served in every theater of the war. I know of only 2 Irishmen who joined the German army. (How they came to join the German army is a long story. I think they were shanghaied.) In addition, over 100,000 Irish men and women volunteered to work in British war industries. Many of them were killed by German bombardment.

In many small ways, the Irish government made it clear that they wanted Britain to win the war. For example, when German Luftwaffe pilots crashed in Ireland or when German sailors were rescued by Irish ships at sea, the Irish government put them in internment camps and kept them locked up there until the war was over. On the other hand, when RAF or American pilots crashed in Ireland or when British or American sailors were rescued at sea, the Irish government drove them to Northern Ireland. If you want to learn more about how the Irish government helped the Allies, look up ‘The Donegal Corridor” or “Irish D-Day Weather Stations” on Google.

I have never seen a World War 2 movie in which the Irish were helping the Allies. They are always working for Hitler. I am surprised that Irish-American politicians don’t complain about this nasty myth.

Myth #2: PEOPLE WERE STILL DEBATING WHETHER THE EARTH IS ROUND OR FLAT IN THE MIDDLE AGES. ‘A Man for All Seasons’ is a wonderful movie. It swept the Academy Awards in 1966. The movie is about Thomas More, Henry VIII’s chancellor. It takes place in the 15th Century. In this movie, Thomas More says that people were debating whether the Earth is round or flat, and he wasn’t sure which side was right. That’s ridiculous. While illiterate peasants may have believed that the Earth is flat, educated people everywhere knew the Earth is round. Christopher Columbus was not trying to prove the Earth is round and neither was Magellan, although that is mentioned in many movies as well. The reason why you can see farther from the top of a watchtower or a ship’s mast than you can from the ground is because the Earth is round, and people have known that for thousands of years. Around 250 B.C., a Greek mathematician named Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth. His calculations were remarkably accurate. He was off by less than 1%.

About ‘The Four Corners of the Earth.’ This expression can be found in numerous places in both the Old Testament and the New Testament; however, this doesn’t mean that the people who wrote the Bible believed that the Earth actually has 4 corners. The ‘four corners of the Earth’ is a figure of speech, one that we still use today. It means ‘from all over the world’ or ‘from remote places’. I sometimes see people on TV who identify themselves as ‘religious conservatives’ who don’t seem to know what a figure of speech is or that the Bible is full of them. Perhaps the best-known Bible metaphor is: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.” It was written by King David, who undoubtedly knew that he wasn’t literally a sheep.


The Flat Earth Society. Many years ago, I got an application for an apartment from a U.C. Berkeley physics student. He was a member of the Flat Earth Society.  At first, I thought this organization was a joke, but then I went to their website and realized that it is definitely not a joke. These people believe that the Earth looks like the map in the United Nations flag. See below. They have dozens, maybe hundreds, of papers and articles ‘proving’ that the Earth is flat as a pancake. There were 2 articles on the website that were written by the applicant for my apartment. They included math and geometry that was way over my head. After this guy left, I wondered – How could someone who believes that the Earth is flat get into Berkeley’s physics department?

MINT NEWMAN-O’S REPLACES MINT OREOS.
Dark chocolate and mint is a great combination. I have been making chocolate-covered mint Oreos for a long time, but I have switched to mint Newman-O’s. The only difference most people notice between them is the color of the filling. Mint Oreos have a green filling, but mint Newman O’s have a white filling. The first thing I noticed when comparing the ingredients of these products is that mint Oreos lists sugar first and flour second, whereas mint Newman-O’s lists flour first, and sugar second. Also, Newman-O’s don’t contain some problematic ingredients that are in Oreos, like corn syrup and artificial food coloring, which explains their green filling. Mint Newman-O’s definitely seem to be a healthier product.

I would appreciate your comments. If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Newsletter

WARREN G. HARDING

WHO WAS AMERICA’S WORST PRESIDENT?

We have had quite a few bad presidents. There will never be an agreement among historians as to which one was the worst, but my choice for worst U.S. president has always been Warren G. Harding.

Incompetency. First of all, Harding was incompetent. He knew it and said so frequently. While he was running for president. Harding said: “I am a man with limited talents from a small town and should not be president.” That isn’t the sort of thing that a candidate for president normally says at a campaign rally. After becoming president, Harding said: “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here.” At press conferences, Harding told reporters that he did not understand how the federal government worked. When he was asked a question about the income tax, President Harding answered: “I don’t know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere, there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it all out in my mind. But I don’t know where that book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it.” Strangely, the more often that Harding said that he was incompetent, the more popular he became. People thought Harding was just being modest.

How Did Harding Get the Nomination?  If Harding was so incompetent, how did he get elected? Most Republicans assumed that their candidate in 1920 would be former president Theodore Roosevelt, but he died suddenly in 1919, and none of the other potential candidates had enough support to get the nomination. The convention was deadlocked. They needed a dark horse candidate, and Harding seemed like a safe choice. His speeches were inoffensive and vague. In 1920, the most controversial issue was whether the U.S. should join the League of Nations. In his speeches on this subject, Harding gave a list of reasons for joining the League and a list of reasons for not joining the League. Harding left people who supported joining the League feeling that he also supported it, and he left people who opposed joining the League feeling that he also opposed it.

Teapot Dome Scandal. Warren Harding was not only incompetent, but he was also corrupt, and he filled his administration with other corrupt politicians. A number of Harding’s appointees were caught taking bribes from oil companies in a scandal known as Teapot Dome. The scandal was exposed in 1921 and by 1923, the Congressional bribery investigation had led to Harding himself. That summer, Harding left Washington for a long trip out West, ostensibly for his health. A few weeks later, President Harding checked into the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. That night, Warren Harding died suddenly in his hotel room. There was no agreement among his doctors as to what was the cause of death. Some people suspected that Harding had been poisoned. He was only 57 years old. Florence Harding, President Harding’s widow, refused to allow an autopsy to be performed. She had the president’s body embalmed one hour after he died, so we will never know what he died from.

Palace Hotel. In addition to President Harding, several other famous people have died in the Palace Hotel’s presidential suite, including King Kalakaua, the last king of Hawaii. I would like to see the inside of this suite, but you have to rent it for a minimum of one night to see it, and it rents for $7,000 to $10,000 a night. Whenever I walk past the hotel, I look at the window of the presidential suite. It’s Room 8064 and faces Market Street.

Prohibition. Warren Harding was a heavy drinker and kept a well-stocked bar at the White House. Prohibition went into effect in 1920, the same year Harding was elected president. Although Harding had run for president as a strong supporter of Prohibition, while he was president, Harding had Prohibition agents bring truckloads of confiscated top-quality liquor to the White House for his ‘examination.’ When Harding’s friends came to visit him at the White House, he gave them liquor to take home for their own ‘examination.’

Poker. Warren Harding was a compulsive gambler and hosted frequent poker games at the White House. One of the people President Harding played poker with was Louise Cromwell Brooks, a Washington socialite. She later married General Douglas MacArthur. At her elegant dinner parties, Miss Brooks often served food to her guests on White House dinnerware. When she was asked how she got the dinnerware, Miss Brooks candidly told people that she won it in a poker game with President Harding. Below is a picture of one of the plates. They sometimes pop up for sale on eBay. Other people who played poker with President Harding told similar stories. After his death, the White House staff started keeping an inventory of White House property, which they still do. It is illegal, of course, for presidents to gamble away White House property. Warren Harding was always popular, but most historians rate him as one of our worst presidents.

HEALTHIER STUFF IN MY CHOCOLATE ROOM.
I am making some changes in my chocolate room. A lot of people have asked for healthier products; products that contain less sugar and that are made with healthier ingredients. This is something that I have been thinking about for a long time. To begin with, I have stopped making chocolate-bottomed Rice Krispie Treats. I’ve had them in my chocolate room for a long time. A lot of people won’t eat them because they contain a number of unhealthy ingredients, including pork by-products. Kellogg’s Rice Krispie Treats are made with marshmallows, and the marshmallows are made with gelatin extracted from pigs. (That’s on Kellogg’s website.) I am not going to tell you what parts of pigs are used to make marshmallows. You might be happier not knowing, but you can find out through an internet search if you want to know. I have replaced the Rice Krispie Treats with chocolate covered Rice Chex. Rice Chex is gluten-free, lactose-free, vegan, and has very little sugar in it. The ingredients list is short and understandable. Even better, chocolate covered Rice Chex is a lot tastier than Rice Krispie Treats. I was surprised at how good it is! Other changes are coming.

THE DESPERATION OF THE WORKING CLASS.
When you look at the history of countries that were taken over by demagogues, you almost always find that the people of those countries were in a state of economic desperation when the demagogues took over. The working class had reached the end of their rope. Does this explain the rise of political extremism in the U.S. today? Just consider these 2 statistics:

1. Almost half of all Americans are broke. Every year, the Federal Reserve conducts a national survey in which they ask people what they would do if they had an unexpected expense of $400. An example of an unexpected expense could be something like a car that stops working and that needs a $400 repair. It could be any expense that is unplanned but that needs immediate attention. 32% said they could not pay an unexpected $400 expense with cash or from savings. An additional 14% said they would be able to pay such an expense, but only by selling something they own or by borrowing the money. That means that nearly half of all Americans have virtually no savings.

2. Half of all the new stores opening in the United States this year will be dollar stores. Half of all the new stores that opened in 2022 and 2021 were also dollar stores. A lot of people find this hard to believe, but it’s true. 1 in 3 new stores opening up in the U.S. in 2023 will be Dollar General stores. Dollar Tree, Five Below, and Family Dollar make up the rest. The rise of dollar stores mirrors the decline of the middle class in America. These stores pay low wages and have little, if any, fresh food. Most of the food they do sell is highly processed and unhealthy, and dollar stores quickly drive local stores out of business in poor neighborhoods as soon as they move in.

History has shown that when the working class of a country becomes economically desperate, they turn to politicians who appeal to people’s fears and passions and offer simple solutions to complex problems. Would Hitler have come to power in Germany if the people weren’t desperate? The same was true when Mussolini seized power in Italy and when Lenin took over Russia. I knew a woman who lived in Germany at the time Hitler came to power. I asked her why so many Germans supported him. Hitler made no secret of what he intended to do. She said that the unemployment rate in Germany at the time was 35%. Her father hadn’t worked in years. Her mother sold her wedding ring and her winter coat to buy food. They thought things couldn’t get any worse. Unfortunately, history has shown that when people are thinking that way, things usually do get worse.

I would appreciate your comments. If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Newsletter

THE POCAHONTAS EXCEPTION.


There has always been a lot of hypocrisy in the United States about racism. One of my favorite stories about this is the Pocahontas Exception. It’s a great story, but few people have ever heard it.

Who Was Pocahontas? Everyone has heard of Pocahontas, but most people don’t realize that she was a real and historically important person. She wasn’t just a cartoon character in a Disney movie or a nickname that Donald Trump uses to taunt Elizabeth Warren. Pocahontas was born in 1596 in Virginia. She was the daughter of an important Indian chief. When the first English settlement was established in Virginia, Pocahontas quickly learned to speak and read English. In 1614, she married John Rolfe, one of the English colonists. They had only one great grandchild, a man named John Bolling, but he had a lot of children, and they had a lot of children. Today, there are tens of thousands of living descendants of John Bolling, and therefore, Pocahontas.

The ‘One Drop’ Rule. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation laws were constitutional. This led to many states (and not just in the South) to pass laws defining who was white and who wasn’t. That was important, because in many places, the best stuff was reserved for white people only. Only white people could attend many state universities, eat at restaurants, stay in hotels, go into theaters, be admitted into hospitals, drink from water fountains, get government jobs, etc. Nearly all of these race laws were based on the ‘one drop’ rule. The ‘one drop’ rule said that a person was white if all his ancestors were white. That meant that if even one of a person’s ancestors was not white, then he wasn’t white.

Virginia. Virginia was one of the last Southern states to pass a law defining a white person. Many people in the state legislature wanted to pass a race law based on the ‘one drop’ rule, but they had a problem, and the problem was Pocahontas. Pocahontas was not white. Nobody disputed that. While most white Southerners with an ancestor who wasn’t white tried to hide that fact, Pocahontas’ descendants were different. By and large, they were proud of the fact that they were descendants of Pocahontas, and Pocahontas had many famous descendants, including Presidents George H.W. and George W. Bush, Martha Washington’s first husband, and the wife of Robert E. Lee. Thomas Jefferson’s older sister Mary Jefferson married John Bolling and had 10 children with him. Many politically powerful people in the Virginia state legislature at the time they were writing their race law were also descendants of Pocahontas. That included Harry Byrd, who later became governor of Virginia and was the father of U.S. Senator Harry Byrd, Jr. They were both overt racists, staunch segregationists, and white separatists. I have never understood people like that, people who supported white supremacy even though they had non-white ancestors themselves.

Woodrow Wilson. One of the people who was closely watching the race law debate in Virginia was President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was a white supremist, and he was the last president to publicly admit it. His wife felt the same way. They were both Virginians. President Wilson was not a descendant of Pocahontas, but his wife was. Her name was Edith Bolling Wilson. (Notice her middle name.) President Wilson let Virginia state legislators know that he was carefully monitoring the ‘Pocahontas problem.’ So, how was Virginia going to pass a race law? How could they pass a law that said that the wife of the president and many other members of Virginia’s ‘first families’ were not white? It took them years to figure this out.

The Pocahontas Exception. Finally, the Virginia legislature passed a race law in the early 1920s. It included the ‘one drop’ rule but with an exception, the Pocahontas Exception, which was designed to give legal cover to all the living descendents of Pocahontas. Without going into the details, essentially what the Pocahontas Exception meant was that a person was white if all of that person’s ancestors were white unless one of those ancestors was Pocahontas, in which case, it didn’t count. So, under Virginia law, if all your ancestors were white except for one great grandmother, who was an Indian, then you weren’t white; but if all of your ancestors were white except for Pocahontas, then you were white. Think about the hypocrisy of this law. The Pocahontas Exception was enforced and remained the law in Virginia until 1967, when the Supreme Court reversed the Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

GONE WITH THE WIND.

Have you ever seen ‘Gone With the Wind?’ It’s a great movie, one of the best ever made. This movie is about the lives of wealthy slave-owning aristocrats in Georgia during and after the Civil War. When I was a kid, I believed that this movie accurately depicted what slavery was like. If you haven’t seen the movie, in ‘Gone With the Wind’, all the slaves are content with their lives. None of them want to be free. Violence is never used against them. When the Civil War comes, none of the slaves care which side wins. Their loyalties are to their owners. Once the war is over and they are free, none of the former slaves are glad the north won the war. They were happier and better off when they were slaves. In ‘Gone With the Wind’, the Ku Klux Klan is depicted as a secret organization of chivalrous gentlemen who restored law-and-order in the South after the war was over. Well, I believed this version of history when I was a kid partially because I was a kid and because this is the way slavery and the Civil War were always portrayed in movies and TV shows. It was only when I was in high school that I figured out that this version of history is a myth, a myth that white Americans wanted to believe was true. Sadly, I hear many politicians and commentators on TV today who apparently still believe the ‘Gone With the Wind’ version of history.

HAMPTON MANSION.
If you would like to see a great example of what the lives of wealthy slave owners and their slaves were like and you are near my hometown of Baltimore, visit the Hampton Mansion. At the time it was built in 1790, the Hampton Mansion was the biggest private home in America. The Hampton Mansion is so large that you could fit both Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, plus Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, inside with room to spare. Plus, it is one of the few big plantation houses of that era where the original slave quarters are still there. Many of the rooms in the mansion still have their original furniture. Admission and the tour are free, but reservations are required.

Prussian Blue. One of things that impressed me about the mansion is that the dining room is painted in Prussian blue. Back in those days, Prussian blue paint was made by grinding up lapis lazuli, a blue semi-precious stone, and mixing it in the paint. Painting a room Prussian blue was a way to show off your wealth. Lapis lazuli pigment, also known as ultramarine, was more expensive than its weight in gold. The Prussian blue dining room illustrates just how profitable slavery was (but just for the slave owners, not the slaves.)
I would appreciate your comments. If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Newsletter

Hampton National Historic Site

IT’S FREE!

I was recently at a Trader Joe’s store. They were giving away crackers covered with blue cheese. The woman I was with picked up 2 of them. She handed me one. I declined and said: “I don’t like blue cheese.” She said: “Neither do I, but it’s free!”, and she ate both of them. I know a number of people like this. You probably do too.

VIDEO TAPES. The thing that I see most often in ‘free boxes’ on the sidewalks here in Berkeley are video tapes. No matter how many video tapes are in a ‘free box’, they are always gone within a few hours. Why do people take video tapes? Very few people own video tape players, and video tape players are no longer sold in stores. Also, video tapes deteriorate with time. If you have video tapes made in the 1990s, the odds are that some of the footage is already distorted. Most people who take old video tapes take them just because they are free.


URBAN ORE. What should you do with old video tapes? Most charity thrift shops won’t accept video tapes anymore as donations. Urban Ore here in Berkeley does accept video tapes as donations, providing they are in good condition and are in their original boxes. They have hundreds of video tapes for sale at Urban Ore, but who buys them? It turns out that there are people who make a living buying and selling old video tapes. Most video tapes are worthless, but a few of them are worth serious money. A factory-sealed video tape copy of ‘Top Gun’, shown below, recently sold for $8,600. A used copy of ‘Barney and Friends Practice Makes Music’ sold for $10,900. Very few copies of this video tape were made, but nevertheless, I can’t imagine why anybody would pay $10,900 for a Barney video tape. Many used Disney animated movies on video tape sell for $100 to $300 on eBay, even though millions of them were made. You might find a valuable video tape at Urban Ore, but you will need to know which ones are valuable. Urban Ore is a huge and unique store. It is worth a visit.


IRISH & JEWISH CORNED BEEF.
St. Patrick’s Day will soon be here. Come early March, every supermarket will have pictures of corned beef surrounded by shamrocks and leprechauns on the front page of their advertising circulars, and restaurants will be featuring corned beef platters on their menus.

Have you ever wondered why Irish corned beef looks and tastes exactly like the corned beef that you get in Jewish restaurants and delis? Even the spices are the same. Is this just a coincidence? No, it isn’t. In the 19th Century, large numbers of poor Irish immigrants came to the United States. About the same time, large numbers of poor Jews came to the U.S. from eastern Europe. A lot of employers in the U.S. wouldn’t hire Irish immigrants or Jews, and landlords wouldn’t rent apartments to them either. As a result, Irish and Jewish immigrants often wound up living in the same neighborhoods, and as a result of that, Irish immigrants often wound up eating at Jewish restaurants, where corned beef was a staple.

Poor people in Ireland could rarely afford beef in the 19th Century. Jews in eastern Europe did eat beef, but because they were poor, they could usually only afford the toughest and cheapest cuts. Beef brisket, from which corned beef is made, can be very tough, which is why it is cooked for hours. Like a lot of things that Americans think come from Ireland, corned beef is actually Irish-American in origin. In other words, corned beef didn’t come to America from Ireland. It came to Ireland from Irish-Americans, who in turn, got it from European Jews. The first U.S. president to serve corned beef at the White House on or just before St. Patrick’s Day was Abraham Lincoln. Now they all do it – especially in election years.

There are a lot of things that Americans think are Irish, but which are actually Irish-American. It was Irish-Americans who changed St. Patrick’s Day from a religious holiday into a public celebration of Irish culture and identity. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade held anywhere was in New York City in 1762. Throughout the 19th Century, St. Patrick’s Day parades got progressively bigger in the U.S., but the first St. Patrick’s Day parade in Ireland was held in Dublin in 1931. Most people in Ireland are aware of the fact that all of the fun stuff they do on St. Patrick’s Day comes from the U.S., like drinking green beer, singing Irish-American songs, and eating corned beef.


James Cagney. Like many other Catholic Irish-Americans who grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, James Cagney could speak Yiddish. He could also read Yiddish. He speaks in Yiddish in several movies. Here is a clip from the movie ‘Taxi’: James Cagney Speaking Yiddish.

DON’T SAVE MONEY.

You have probably heard that saving money is a virtue. It’s in sermons. It’s in popular literature. Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, and many other famous authors wrote about the virtue of saving money. Saving money used to be a virtue, but not anymore. It took me a long time to figure that out. The reason is inflation. Up until the 20th Century, inflation was not a problem. In 1900, a 1-pound loaf of bread cost 5 cents. That was about the same price that it sold for in 1800. Up until World War 1, most money was gold and silver coins or paper money that was redeemable for gold or silver. Now, our money isn’t tied to anything. The Federal Reserve can increase the money supply with just a keystroke on a computer. In 2020, it cost $7 to buy what $1 bought in 1970. In 1970, a Hershey bar sold for 10 cents. Look at ads below from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1972 for apartments for rent. Rents in Berkeley and Silicon Valley were even less than this.

Warren Buffet.
Most people don’t see any connection between the kind of companies Warren Buffet invests in, but they do have something in common – the ability to raise prices along with inflation. For example, Buffet owns a lot of stock in Coca Cola. How much would the price of Coke have to go up before people stopped buying it? It’s the same with nearly all of the companies Buffet invests in.

Cryptocurrency. Warren Buffet is also right about cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is far too volatile to ever be accepted as money. It is not unusual for a cryptocurrency to quadruple in price or lose 3/4 of its value in a year. Also, no major government is going to make cryptocurrency legal tender. Legal tender is something that must be accepted as payment for debts. Cryptocurrency is also not an investment. If it was an investment, how would you determine its value?  Cryptocurrency pays no dividends or interest, it has no utility, and it is certainly not scarce. There are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies, and 2 guys in a garage can create a new one with little or no capital.

GETTING RID OF ANTS WITHOUT POISON.

The reason why you are most likely to see ants in your home when it is cold and wet outside is because ants do not like being cold and wet any more than you do. When people see ants in their homes, it is most often in the kitchen, and when people see ants in their kitchens, they usually spray them with ant poison because they don’t know what else to do. You should be very reluctant to use ant poison in your kitchen, and you shouldn’t use ant poison at all if you have small children or pets in your home. I don’t know which, if any, of the ant sprays that you find in supermarkets are safe to use. Nearly all of them are illegal for use in commercial kitchens.

However, there is a very simple way to get rid of ants in your home and without poison. Get a spray bottle. Put in a cup of regular white vinegar and a cup of water. Follow the ant trail to see where the ants are coming from and spray the trail and the source of the trail. It sometimes helps to do this with a flashlight. Once you spray the ants and their trails, the ants will not immediately die as they would if you used ant poison, but they will very quickly vanish, and they will stay away longer than they would if you used ant poison. Ants hate vinegar. Vinegar not only repels ants, more importantly, it destroys the chemical trails left by other ants. The area you spray may smell like vinegar for a short while, but that odor will fade away as the water evaporates. Vinegar and water is not just a cheapskate’s alternative to ant poison. This mixture really does work as well or better than any product you will find in a supermarket for getting rid of ants.

MOLD.

Mold is a common problem here in the bay area in the rainy season. Mold is not dirt. It is a living organism. To prevent or kill mold:

1. Remember that mold needs moisture. Use your clothes dryer to dry out towels, especially if you have a lot of them in a bathroom. Mold can grow quickly in wet clothes and towels.

2. Let in sunlight! Sunlight kills mold. I know people who have not opened their curtains or venetian blinds in over 20 years. They live in rooms that have never seen natural sunlight. You may know people like that too. There are many unhealthy micro-organisms that thrive in dark places. Living in a perpetually dark room is unhealthy. If you don’t believe me, ask your doctor.

3. Don’t overheat your house.

4. Let in fresh air, particularly in high humidity areas, such as the bathroom and kitchen. Keep a window ajar or use an exhaust fan, if there is one, to allow the air to circulate.

Tenant Freebie of the Month: Mold Remover. You can pick up a free bottle of mold remover from me anytime. Just ask for it. If you prefer to buy your own mold remover, make sure that the product says that it disinfects. Be sure that you are not buying soap scum remover, which is often placed next to the mold remover in stores and often comes in very similar containers. Don’t use bleach to remove mold. Bleach is much less effective in preventing mold from returning than mold remover. Bleach may also damage the walls, and your room will smell like an over-chlorinated swimming pool when you are done. That smell can hang around for a long time too.

HOT STOCK MARKET TIPS AND FORTUNE COOKIES.

My uncle, Maurice Levie, was a stockbroker for a long time. Back when he was a stockbroker, I used to ship Maurice fortune cookies 2 or 3 times a year. I printed out paper fortunes and took them to the Kar Mee fortune cookie factory in Oakland’s Chinatown. 1/3 of the fortunes said ‘BUY’, 1/3 said ‘SELL’, and 1/3 said ‘HOLD.’ After the factory put my fortunes into their cookies, I would ship the fortune cookies to Uncle Maurice in Baltimore. He put the fortune cookies in a bowl that he kept on his desk.

Maurice was a conservative investor. He was not a speculator or a day trader; however, he had clients who were. Clients often came to Maurice with questions like: “I just got a hot tip from my brother-in-law. I want to buy 10,000 shares of the Stanley Steam Car Company on margin, but I need to know – Is it going to go up this week?” When Maurice got a question like that, he would push the bowl of fortune cookies forward and tell the client to take one. The initial reaction of people when they opened one of my fortune cookies was to either laugh or look befuddled. Maurice would then tell the client that this method of predicting what a stock was going to do tomorrow or over the next few days was as good as any other. Sometimes that got a client to rethink what he was doing. When the bowl was empty, Maurice would let me know, and I would send him more fortune cookies.

I felt the same way as Maurice about this. The fortune cookie method of predicting what a stock or the stock market is going to do tomorrow is as good as any other. The Kar Mee fortune cookie factory is now out of business, but you can still get custom-made fortune cookies at the Oakland Fortune Factory or Golden Gate Fortune Cookies in San Francisco.

FTX Fortune Cookies. In 2021 and 2022, FTX paid fortune cookie makers to put fortunes into their cookies promoting the cryptocurrency exchange. On one side was the company’s logo. On the other side was an ad promoting cryptocurrency. Millions of these FTX fortune cookies were made. They were distributed to over 20,000 Chinese restaurants across the U.S. FTX is now bankrupt, and its CEO is facing criminal charges. I wonder – Did people actually buy Bitcoin because a fortune cookie told them to? I feel pretty sure that nobody bought or sold stock because of the fortune cookies they got from my Uncle Maurice.

IS THERE LEAD IN CHOCOLATE?

People are talking about an article in Consumer Reports this month stating that their tests found lead in all of the 28 chocolate brands they tested. I am sure that’s true. However, this is not news. All foods that grow in the ground absorb minerals from the soil itself. There is a long list of fruits and vegetables that contain measurable amounts of lead. In an article in Consumer Reports back in April, they stated that: “Tests done by Consumer Reports have shown that fruit juice – especially apple and grape – can contain worrisome levels of heavy metals, such as arsenic and lead.” 

The Consumer Reports article stated that their tests showed that some brands of chocolate contained far less lead than others. I wouldn’t rely on that when buying chocolate. Major chocolate makers don’t get all their cocoa beans from one place. They buy beans from many places and mix them together. The beans that went into the Hershey bars that Consumer Reports tested may have come from a different place than the beans that went into the bars that you see in your local supermarket today.

WORST MAJOR TOURIST ATTRACTION IN PENNSYLVANIA – THE LIBERTY BELL.

I hope to cover all 50 states. I have already covered Washington – the Seattle gum wall; Massachusetts – Plymouth Rock; and California – any drive-through tree. Admittedly, my list is personal and subjective. My message is this – don’t waste your time visiting these places. Although these tourist attractions are visited by millions of people; there are other, better, and more interesting things to see nearby.

The Liberty Bell is the most famous tourist attraction in Philadelphia and probably in the whole state of Pennsylvania. The Liberty Bell is the symbol of Philadelphia. It is incorporated into the logos of Philadelphia’s professional sports teams. Over 1 million people visit the Liberty Bell every year. Unfortunately, everything that people think they know about the Liberty Bell is wrong. The Liberty Bell had nothing to do with the American Revolution. The Liberty Bell did not ring out on July 4, 1776 to announce that the Declaration of Independence had been signed, although you often see that in movies and TV shows. Besides, the Declaration of Independence was signed over a period of several weeks, not on a single day. The quote on the bell “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land” is not a reference to the Declaration of Independence. The bell was made in England more than 20 years earlier.

The famous crack in the bell did not occur while the bell was ringing after the death of George Washington or Chief Justice John Marshall. No one is sure when a crack first appeared. At first, it was just a hairline crack. The crack you see today is not a natural crack but the result of a botched repair job made by incompetent repairmen. They thought they could get the bell to ring again by creating a much wider crack and then bolting the 2 sides of the bell together. It didn’t work. The bell is also not as big as it looks in photos. The bell is only about 3 feet tall. Most people visiting the Liberty Bell stay only a few minutes. There is no point waiting for the bell to ring. The bell has not rung since the 1840s.There are a lot of great things to see in Philadelphia. The Liberty Bell is not one of them. Visit the Franklin Institute instead.

MARK’S PETTY PET PEEVES.

BLISTER PACKED SCISSORS. Last month, I went to Walgreens to buy a pair of scissors. They had several brands of scissors. Unfortunately, all of them were in plastic blister packages. In order to open any of these packages, you needed a pair of scissors. I bought a pair of scissors and took them to my nephew’s house where I was able to open the package and get the scissors out by using a pair of his scissors. It is just plain stupid for manufacturers to put scissors in packages that require scissors to open the package!

TAIL-ON SHRIMP. It annoys me when a restaurant serves me a dish like garlic butter shrimp with tail-on shrimp. The only way to get the tails off is by getting your fingers covered with garlic butter. Even if you wipe the butter off your hands with your napkin, your hands will still smell like garlic and shrimp. They should use tail-off shrimp.

I would appreciate your comments. If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Newsletter

CAN YOU REALLY SOBER UP A DRUNK WITH COFFEE?

I was watching ‘Stagecoach’ on TV last week. It is a wonderful movie (the version with John Wayne). Some people consider it the best Western ever made. In this movie, a drunk doctor quickly sobers up after drinking a pot of hot, black coffee and then delivers a baby. It is a myth that you can sober up or sober more quickly by drinking coffee. You will find this myth in a lot of Hollywood movies. Coffee doesn’t neutralize or get rid of alcohol in your body. No matter how much coffee you drink, it will have no effect on how long it takes to become sober. In other movies, someone immediately sobers up after having a bucket of ice water tossed in his face. That doesn’t work either. These myths may seem funny, but they really aren’t. There have been fatal auto accidents caused by drunk drivers who thought they were fit to drive because they were drinking coffee. Here’s my New Year’s Eve advice – If you know someone who believes these myths, you should tell him that they are just Hollywood myths.

WHY DO SO MANY COMPANIES SELL GIFT CARDS?

At the Target store in Emeryville, they have gift cards for sale from over 200 companies. Below is a photo I took there. This is just a fraction of the gift cards they had for sale. Gift cards are the single most popular Christmas present in the United States. Why do so many companies issue gift cards?  The answer is the obvious one – gift cards are very profitable. The profits from gift cards are so huge that many famous stores and restaurant chains are only able to stay in business because of the profits from their gift cards. But – how is that possible? Gift cards are usually a small percentage of a company’s total sales.

There are a number of ways in which a company makes money on its gift cards, but the 2 big ones are this:
1. A gift card is an interest-free loan to the company that issued the card. Even very big companies can’t borrow money at 0% interest.
3. The main reason why gift cards are so profitable is because so many of them are never redeemed. Retailers make billions of dollars every year from unredeemed gift cards.

Starbucks is a good example of just how profitable gift cards are. In 2021, Starbucks made $160 million profit from expired gift cards and breakage income, that is, income from gift cards that are unlikely to ever be redeemed. To put $160 million a year profit into perspective, if Starbucks was a bank, it would be among the top 10% in the United States. Starbucks customers are holding billions of dollars of unredeemed gift cards. This is a major source of financing for Starbucks. If you are holding a Starbucks gift card, then you are giving Starbucks an interest-free loan. The next time you are in a Starbucks, look around. Everything for sale: the bagged coffee, the merchandise, the pastries, the sandwiches, etc. is financed by unredeemed gift cards – your unredeemed gift cards.

What is breakage income? Suppose someone has a $50 Teriyaki Madness gift card, and he spends $49. The card now has a $1 balance. That $1 balance is unlikely to ever be redeemed. Most people throw away gift cards with balances that small. After a while, all gift card issuers write off these small balances as breakage income. Nationally, breakage income comes to about 3% of all gift card sales; however, some companies have breakage rates as high as 10%, and breakage income is pure profit.

Maintenance fees. Another reason so many gift cards are never redeemed is maintenance fees. A maintenance fee is a monthly deduction from the value of a gift card for inactivity. So, if you have a $25 gift card, and it has a $2.00 a month ‘maintenance fee’, that card will become worthless fairly quickly. Some gift card issuers call their maintenance fees ‘inactivity fees’, ‘dormancy fees’, or ‘service fees’; but they are all the same thing. These fees may seem like a scam, but retailers have a legitimate need to know what their liabilities actually are. It’s not their fault if you lose your gift cards or never redeem them. In California and a few other states, gift cards never expire, even if a gift card has an expiration date printed on it. California also bans gift card maintenance fees.


My advice. Don’t think of your gift cards as part of your savings. Gift cards do not improve with age, and many become worthless. Use or sell your gift cards. You can sell gift cards on a number of websites, like Giftcards.com. You can also donate unused and partially used gift card balances to a very long list of charities through the website Charity Choice. You can get an income tax credit for your donation.


Don’t regift gift cards like the proverbial fruitcake.
Don’t regift gift cards unless you feel pretty certain that the person you are giving it to will actually use it. Someone once gave me a $100 gift card from a tanning salon in Albany. The person who gave me the card got it from a third person who also got the card as a gift. A gift card from a tanning salon is worthless to me. Going to tanning salons increases your chances of getting skin cancer by 50% or more. I knew 2 people who died from skin cancer. Tanning salons are now subject to a 10% federal excise tax, modeled after the tobacco tax. The tax is to offset the cost to the government of providing medical care to people on Medicare and Medicaid who get cancer from going to tanning salons. It seems to me that a tanning salon gift card is a sadistic present, like bringing brownies to someone who is going to Weight Watchers. I’ve known people like that. Andrew Carnegie used to send John D. Rockefeller (whom he hated) a bottle of expensive Scotch whiskey at Christmas every year. Rockefeller was a devout Baptist and did not drink or smoke, and Carnegie knew it. Rockefeller sent Carnegie nasty Christmas presents in return. I gave my tanning salon gift card to a charity website, but looking back, maybe I should have just tossed it in the trash can.


WHAT IS THE WORST MAJOR TOURIST ATTRACTION IN CALIFORNIA? I hope to cover all 50 states.

ANY DRIVE-THROUGH REDWOOD TREE.
There are 3 drive-through redwood trees in northern California.  Below is a photo of the drive-through tree in Leggett, California. The tree has a hole cut in its base so you can drive a car through it. Cutting a hole like this will eventually kill the tree. When one of these trees dies, the owner just cuts a hole through another big tree nearby and moves the road. Leggett is a 4-hour drive north of San Francisco. The other 2 drive-through trees are even farther away. There is a $5 fee to drive through the tree. On a summer day, you may have to wait in a long line to drive through the tree. That’s because people stop their cars in the tree and get out to be photographed next to their car parked in the tree. There is a gift shop there, but after you have driven through the tree and visited the gift shop, there is nothing else to do. A lot of tourists visiting San Francisco spend a day – a whole day – just to drive through one of these trees and then return to the city. My father said that he thought that a drive-through tree was the stupidest tourist attraction in America.

You don’t need to drive 4 hours to see big redwood trees. There are a lot of places to see them in the bay area, but unfortunately, there are only a few places where the first generation or old-growth redwood trees weren’t cut down. They are usually valleys where logging trucks couldn’t get in. The best known of these places is Muir Woods, but there are other places in Marin County with old-growth redwoods, such as Roy’s Redwoods, where George Lucas filmed parts of Star Wars movies.

I would appreciate your comments. If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Newsletter

THE MANDELA EFFECT

.Have you heard of the Mandela Effect? It is something that everyone should know about. The Mandela Effect is a kind of mass delusion, a delusion in which large numbers of people share the same false memory. The Mandela Effect is named for Nelson Mandela. In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of people claimed that they remembered hearing the news that Nelson Mandela had died in prison in South Africa. These people were scattered all over the world. Many of them said that they remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of Mandela’s death. However, Nelson Mandela did not die in prison. He was released from prison in 1990 and was elected president of South Africa in 1994. He died at home in 2013.

There are many websites that list examples of the Mandela Effect. My favorite is from the movie ‘Casablanca’. When people who have seen ‘Casablanca’ multiple times are asked “What was the most memorable line in the movie?”, the #1 answer is always “Play it again, Sam.” The #2 answer is “Drop the gun, Louie.” Neither of these lines are in the movie, but a lot of people distinctly remember hearing them in the movie. Below is a picture with some examples of the Mandela Effect. How many did you get wrong?


DONALD TRUMP AND 9/11.

In the case of some mass delusions, scientists have absolutely no explanation for it; however, in the case of most mass delusions, the reason for the delusion is the obvious one – repetition of a false story. In 2015, while running for president, Donald Trump said that while the World Trade Center was collapsing on 9/11, he: “watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” The governors of New York and New Jersey both quickly said that it did not happen; however, on the following day, Trump repeated his claim. He said: “It did happen. I saw it. It was on television. There were people who were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations.” Trump repeated this claim many times while he was president, but the story was a complete fiction. No one has ever produced a photo or any other evidence that Muslims anywhere in the U.S. celebrated on 9/11. Nevertheless, a survey conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 68% of U.S. conservatives and 25% of liberals believe that Muslims in the United States celebrated the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11, and many of them said that they remembered seeing it on television.

DONALD TRUMP VS. WIND TURBINES.
Another mass delusion believed by millions of Americans is that wind turbines cause cancer. Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer. This claim has been extensively researched, and there is no evidence to support it. While he was president, Trump made it very clear that he does not like wind turbines. Trump also claimed that wind turbines destroy property values. He said: “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75% in value.” A national study by the Berkeley Lawrence Lab found no evidence that property values are affected by proximity to wind projects. He also claimed that wind is unreliable, and that people would lose their electricity when the wind isn’t blowing. Texas now gets over 20% of the state’s electricity from wind, and Iowa gets over 50%; but people in those states don’t lose their electricity when the wind isn’t blowing. However, Trump’s claims about the dangers of wind turbines are now widely believed in the U.S. When wind projects are proposed, sometimes hundreds of angry people show up at public hearings to protest against these projects out of fear that they will get cancer from living near wind turbines. Many wind projects have been rejected by local governments because of this opposition. I am not sure why Donald Trump is so hostile to wind turbines. I assume it is to get campaign donations from fossil fuel companies, but that’s only a guess.

BURN THE WITCHES!
Mass delusions are often preposterous, but they are not funny. They frequently have deadly consequences to them. Between 1500 and 1800, tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were executed for witchcraft in Europe and America. At witchcraft trials, it was common for people, sometimes many people, to testify that they personally witnessed an accused witch doing things that were impossible, such as setting a house on fire merely by looking at it or flying in the sky on a broomstick. The idea of a witch riding on a broomstick isn’t just something that Milton Hershey concocted in order to sell Halloween candy. Lots of people actually did claim at witchcraft trials that they saw an accused witch flying on a broomstick. That began in Germany in the 1450s, and this claim spread to other countries and continued for over 200 years.

WHY DON’T NOUNS IN ENGLISH HAVE GENDERS?
English is the only major European language that has no gender system. In English, everything is a ‘the.’ This is one of the reasons why English is a relatively easy language to learn. In most Latin-based languages, including French, Spanish, and Italian; there are 2 genders, male and female. German has 3 genders. In some Slavic languages, including Polish and Czech, there are 5 genders. Have you ever wondered why English has no noun genders?

English started out as a Germanic language, and like modern German, Old English had noun genders. However, after the Norman invasion in 1066, a lot of French and Latin words entered the English language, and that created a problem. French nouns also have genders, but French genders frequently don’t match the German genders. For example, consider the sun and the moon. In French, the sun is male ‘le soleil’, but in German, the sun is female ‘die Sonne.’ In French, the moon is female ‘la lune’, but in German, the moon is male ‘der Mond.’ The only way to solve this mess was to drop all the noun genders, and that began in the 12th century, not long after the Norman invasion. In order to speak some European languages, you have to learn the genders of hundreds or even thousands of nouns, and sometimes there is no obvious logic to it. For example, in German, a fork is female, a spoon is male, and a knife is neutral. Can you think of any rational reason why this should require 3 genders – or any genders at all.


WORST RENTAL APPLICATION EVER.I Have a Small Dog. A woman once called me on the phone and said: “I saw your ad. Your ad says you will allow a dog. I’d like to see your apartment.” I said: “What kind of dog do you have?” She said: “A German Shepherd.” I said: “I’m sorry. This is a very small apartment. My ad says that I will allow a dog but only if it weighs 25 pounds or less. ” She said: “My dog only weighs 15 pounds.” That left me confused. I said: “I don’t understand. German Shepherds weigh a lot more than 15 pounds.” She said: “Well, mine weighs 15 pounds. I weighed her just yesterday.” I said: “Would you email me a photo of your dog? I’d like to see what your dog looks like.” I knew something had to be wrong with this story. She said she would, and a few minutes later I got the photo. It turned out she was telling the truth. Her dog did look like it weighed about 15 pounds; however, what she failed to mention was that her dog was a puppy, maybe 1 or 2 months old. I thought about calling her back and asking her: “OK. Your dog does look like she weighs 15 pounds right now, but how long were you planning to stay here?” I didn’t do it. I just rented the place to somebody else.


I would appreciate your comments. If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Newsletter

WHAT EXPLAINS THE RISE OF POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES?

From the time the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts in 1620 until the 1970s, every generation of Americans took it for granted that their generation would have a higher standard of living than their parents. Sometimes, a war or a depression interrupted that progress, but only for a short time. But then, something started to go wrong in the 1970s. The real, inflation-adjusted income of working-class Americans started going down, slowly but steadily, and this has been going on now for over 50 years. Today…..

– 40% of Americans have no savings. Every year, the Federal Reserve conducts a survey. They ask people what they would do if they had an unexpected expense of $400, like a refrigerator repair or a trip to a hospital emergency room. 40% of respondents said that they would only be able to pay such an expense by borrowing the money or selling something they owned.
– The poor are much poorer. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that is 40% lower than it was in 1970. Think about what that means. It means that somebody who was working at a job in 1970 that paid the lowest wage allowed by law now has to make ends meet with 40% less income. The federal minimum wage would almost have to double to get back to where it was in 1970. 20 states have laws prohibiting local governments from raising the minimum wage above $7.25 an hour, and some politicians think that $7.25 is too high. In Georgia and Wyoming, the state minimum wage is $5.15 an hour, but the federal minimum wage law forces employers in those states to pay $7.25 an hour.  I believe that there is a direct connection between the rise in homelessness in the United States and the fact that the poor are much poorer than they used to be. The last time that we had large homeless encampments in the United States was during the Great Depression.
– College graduates are buried in debt. The cost of attending college in the U.S. has been rising at a rate higher than the overall inflation rate for decades. The U.C. Berkeley website currently advises out-of-state and foreign undergraduate students to budget $70,000 a year to attend UCB. (It is actually $69,801, but I added a couple of hundred dollars for trips to Peet’s Coffee.) In 2000, total student debt in the U.S. was $230 billion. It is now $1.7 trillion. That’s a 700% increase. Numerous studies have concluded that both men and women are more likely to postpone getting married, having children, or buying their first home if they have student debt, and it can take a long time to pay off student debt. While the standard repayment term for federal student loans is 10 years, it takes anywhere between 13 and 20 years to pay off $100,000 in student loans.
– More old people are living in poverty. In 1970, most people who worked for big companies in the United States got pension checks after they retired, but not anymore. In 1980, 60% of U.S. workers had jobs with defined pension plans. It is now 4%. As pension checks disappeared, senior citizens became more and more dependent on Social Security. Today, 40% of senior citizens in the United States rely entirely on Social Security for their retirement income. Social Security payments are not as large as most people imagine. The average Social Security retirement benefit is around $1,500 a month, and most poor people get less than that. That is because Social Security retirement benefits are not based on the needs of the retiree but rather how much the person earned.

One of the great lessons of history is that desperate people do desperate things. It is at times of economic desperation that people turn to demagogues, politicians who offer simple solutions to complex problems and who blame their country’s troubles on unpopular minorities. Things have usually ended badly for those societies. In the 1780s, people in France were going hungry. After a very harsh winter in 1788, there was widespread starvation in the French countryside and bread riots in Paris. This led to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror in which countless thousands of people were beheaded, including children, the elderly, and priests. In the early 1930s, Germany’s economy collapsed. The major banks failed. Money became worthless. Thousands of children died of malnutrition. It was because of this economic crisis that Hitler came to power.

So, what explains the rise of political extremism in the United States? The rise of political extremism in the United States is due to the economic pain of the working class. I think it is just that simple. I do not understand why so many smart people don’t see the connection.

WHY AREN’T MY OMELETS AS GOOD AS THE ONES IN RESTAURANTS?

Well, now on to a less depressing subject…..Last month, I covered the subject of how to make fluffy scrambled eggs. A lot of people commented on that article, so this is a follow-up. It is easy to make omelets at home that are as good as the ones in restaurants.

About cheese. Cheese is the most popular omelet filling, but that is where most people go wrong.You have to select omelet cheese carefully.
Don’t use pre-shredded cheese in an omelet. The reason why pre-shredded cheese doesn’t stick together in the bag and turn into one big clump is because pre-shredded cheese is coated with sawdust. Yes, you read that right – sawdust. Read the ingredients label. Nearly all brands of pre-shredded cheese list ‘cellulose’ as an ingredient, but what they really mean is sawdust. Cheese doesn’t melt well in an omelet if the cheese is covered with sawdust.
Use pre-sliced cheese instead of pre-shredded cheese. When making an omelet, your best options are to buy a block of cheese and shred it yourself or buy pre-sliced cheese without cellulose. Pre-sliced cheese is usually sold right next to the pre-shredded cheese in supermarkets. If there is a thin sheet of paper between the slices, that’s a good sign. That means that they are using paper instead of sawdust to keep the cheese from sticking together.
Use cheese that melts at a low temperature. Cheeses that melt well on top of a pizza may not melt well inside an omelet. It is not as hot inside an omelet as it is in a pizza oven. Cheeses that melt well in omelets include cheddar, mozzarella, and muenster. My favorite is pepper jack.
A few other omelet tips: Use the right size pan. An 8 or 9 inch pan is the best size for a 1 or 2 egg omelet. To get the fluffiest omelet, separate your eggs and beat the whites before adding the yolks. That’s what Julia Child did, but I don’t do that. It’s too much work.

Is sawdust safe to eat? I don’t know. Cellulose is a fiber that is found in many fruits and vegetables, and we need fiber in our food. That’s why people eat bran cereal. However, human beings cannot digest sawdust. We’re not termites.
What other foods contain sawdust? The list is very long! I don’t want to name specific products (my lawyer wouldn’t like that), but you can easily find that out on Google. Food processors have been putting sawdust in ground beef, sausages, and bread for centuries because sawdust is cheap. In 1901, New York City food inspectors reported that half the bread sold in the city contained sawdust. I have never seen bread or cheese for sale in a supermarket that listed sawdust as an ingredient, but I did once see a loaf of bread that listed as an ingredient ‘cellulose from a natural woody source.’ Now tell the truth – before you read this article, had you ever heard that pre-shredded cheese is covered with sawdust?

I would appreciate your comments. If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Newsletter

‘THE CONQUEROR’

I think this story says a lot about just how cavalier people were in the 1950s about atomic bombs and radioactivity. ‘The Conqueror’ was a big-budget Hollywood movie. It was made in 1956. John Wayne played Genghis Khan. (Try to picture John Wayne playing a Mongolian warlord.) Most of the movie was filmed near the town of St. George, Utah. The U.S. army had conducted 11 above-ground atomic bomb tests in the area shortly before the movie was made. The ground was radioactive, and the cast and crew knew. They had Geiger counters there. In addition, huge wind machines blew radioactive dust over the cast and crew and their food every day. Strangely, none of the people working on this movie expressed any concerns about this at the time – but they should have. Of the 220 people who worked on ‘The Conqueror’ at the St. George location, 95 died of cancer, including John Wayne and his co-star Susan Hayward. Half the production staff also died of cancer, including Dick Powell who directed the movie. Plus, over half of the local Paiute Indians who worked as extras on the film also died of cancer. The Indians played Mongolian cavalrymen. The movie was produced by Howard Hughes, who at the time, was the richest man in the world. Hughes felt so embarrassed by all these deaths (and also by how bad the movie was) that he paid $12 million to buy up all known copies of the film and had them locked up; however, after his death, Universal Pictures bought the film rights, so you can see ‘The Conqueror’ online now if you want. I’ve seen ‘The Conqueror.’ It is a terrible movie! Hollywood was still making yellowface movies, movies in which white actors were made up to look like East Asians, and like a lot of other movies, the yellowface actors speak in pidgin English. John Wayne says things like: “I greet you, my mother.”

U.C. BERKELEY CHEMISTRY LAB.

Many of my current tenants work at the U.C. Berkeley chemistry lab. I hope that they handle radioactive materials at the lab with a somewhat higher level of care than people did in the 1950s or at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant right now.

ATOMIC BOMB TOURISM.

In the 1950s, Las Vegas hotels promoted atom bomb parties. Tourists came from all over the country and spent a lot of money to attend these parties. The army’s atomic bomb test site was just north of the city. Atomic bomb tests were always conducted at dawn and announced in advance. On the night before an atomic bomb test, hotels in Las Vegas had rooftop a-bomb parties. They started at midnight and included gambling, ‘atomic cocktails’, food, and big-name entertainment. The parties ended with the atomic bomb blast at dawn. The hotels gave partygoers disposable sunglasses to wear when the bomb went off, but that was the only precaution they took. Buildings shook, and radioactive dust fell on everything, depending on which way the wind was blowing. To allay public concerns, the government hired a public relations firm to convince the local population and tourists that atom bomb tests were ‘safe’ and ‘fun.’ Over 200 atomic bombs were detonated at the site until the 1963 test ban treaty put an end to above-ground nuclear bomb tests. Below is a photo promoting an atomic bomb party. The second photo is of the Sands Hotel ‘Miss Atomic Bomb’ of 1957. The third photo is a framed piece of trinitite. These were given as gifts to ‘high rollers’ who came to atomic bomb parties. Trinitite was formed by the first atomic bomb test called ‘Trinity.’ It is now illegal to collect and sell pieces of trinitite as it is still radioactive. What a gift! I wonder what we are doing today that future generations will look back on and think are just as foolish as atomic bomb parties.

A LITTLE BERKELEY TRIVIA.

When John Wayne made the movie ‘The Cowboys’, he told Bruce Dern that his character was going to shoot John Wayne in the back, something that nobody had ever done before in a movie. Bruce Dern was an actor who was famous for playing vicious, mentally unstable villains. The movie was made in 1972, at the height of the Vietnam War. Wayne told Dern: “America will hate you for this.” Dern thought that John Wayne was joking and responded by saying, “Yeah, but they’ll love me in Berkeley.” Shortly after the film’s release, John Wayne’s prediction came true. Bruce Dern received numerous death threats. People walked up to him on the street and said things like: “I hate you. You killed John Wayne.” One passer-by punched him in the nose. Bruce Dern ‘s career suffered for a while but recovered. He appeared in several Quentin Tarantino movies in his later years, still playing nasty characters. For example, in ‘Django Unchained’, he played an old sadistic slave owner.


WHY ARE THE SCRAMBLED EGGS IN RESTAURANTS FLUFFIER THAN THE ONES YOU MAKE AT HOME?
The answer is usually that you cooked the eggs too fast or too long. Heat an 8-inch frying pan to a very low temperature. Add butter. Cook the eggs very slowly while constantly moving them around. Once the eggs look fluffy, get them out of the pan immediately or they will continue to cook from the residual heat in the pan. The difference between fluffy scrambled eggs and hard eggs can be just a few extra seconds in the pan. Here are some common problems people have.

Eggs sticking to the pan. If you put eggs in a pan just after the butter is melted, the eggs are likely to stick to the pan. Butter contains a lot of water; however, it is the fat in butter that prevents food from sticking to a pan. Wait until the butter has almost stopped foaming. That shows that the water has evaporated away. This same advice applies when pan-frying anything with butter.Weak flavor. Don’t add water or milk to scrambled eggs. A lot of recipes recommend this, but that just dilutes the flavor of the eggs.
Streaks of white. If there are streaks of white in your scrambled eggs, that just means that you didn’t scramble the eggs enough. You should beat the eggs for at least 30 seconds.
Eggs taste dry. Add salt after the eggs are cooked. Salt extracts moisture from food.
Eggs taste watery. It’s OK to add things to scrambled eggs like chives or diced scallions, but if you add watery ingredients, your eggs will be watery too. Watery condiments like salsa should be served on the side.


THE WORST MAJOR TOURIST ATTRACTION IN MASSACHUSETTS. In August, I covered the Seattle Gum Wall, my choice for the worst major tourist attraction in Washington state.

PLYMOUTH ROCK. There are a lot of interesting things to see in Plymouth, Massachusetts. There are excellent restaurants and beautiful historic homes and museums. They also have a full-size reproduction of the Mayflower in the harbor. However, Plymouth Rock is not one of the interesting things to see in Plymouth. Although it is widely believed that when the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, they stepped off their ship and onto Plymouth Rock, but there is no evidence that this rock had anything to do with the Pilgrims or the Mayflower. None of the Pilgrims made any reference to a rock in any of their writings. The first documented claim that Plymouth Rock was the place where the Pilgrims landed was made in 1741 by a church elder, but he provided no evidence. The date 1620 was carved into the rock in 1880. And perhaps most importantly- the Pilgrims didn’t land in Plymouth. They landed at Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod. A month later, they moved to Plymouth.

As a historian I just don’t get Plymouth Rock…at least the interpretive marker offers a pretty good history.

Over 1 million people visit Plymouth Rock every year, so it certainly qualifies as a major tourist attraction. Most people stay less than 5 minutes because there is nothing to do there once you have seen the rock. Plymouth Rock is a shapeless rock in a hole in the ground. It is about the size of a twin mattress. The hole has an iron fence around it, so you can’t touch the rock or be photographed next to it. Many tourists look down into the hole at the rock and say things like: “We drove 3 hours to see THIS?!” I once visited Plymouth Rock, but I only saw a piece of it. The rest of the rock was covered with trash that people had thrown into the hole. Parking is a problem. In the summer tourist season, you may have to walk 1/2 mile or more to see the rock. So what do you think? Is this the worst major tourist attraction in Massachusetts?

COMMENTS? If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Blog

AUGUST, 2022 NEWSLETTER

HOW DO YOU GET RID OF STYROFOAM PACKAGING?

One of the questions that I often get from new tenants at the start of the school year is: “How do I get rid of styrofoam?” A lot of the products that students buy when they move to college towns come packed in styrofoam. First, let me tell you what you shouldn’t do with it. Don’t put styrofoam in your recycling can. Styrofoam is on the short list of plastic products that the city doesn’t recycle. There are 2 kinds of styrofoam, molded blocks and shipping pellets or ‘peanuts’. There is nothing you can do with molded blocks of styrofoam except put them in your regular garbage can. Although shipping pellets cannot be recycled, they can be reused. When I get styrofoam pellets in a parcel, I save them in a kitchen trash bag, and when the bag is full, I take it to a FedEx or UPS shipping store. They are always happy to take and reuse them. It saves them money. Be sure that the pellets are clean, and that there is nothing else in the bag. Always bag styrofoam pellets. Never put loose styrofoam pellets in your garbage can. If they get loose when the garbage collectors dump the can, they can blow all over the neighborhood. Below is a photo taken at the back door of the Tsukiji wholesale fish market in Tokyo. On some days, the styrofoam piles are twice this high.

FAKE I.D.s
The photo below is of a bar in a college town (not Berkeley) where the owner has decorated the top of the bar with fake I.D.s confiscated from college students. In 1984, Congress passed a law making the drinking age 21 nationally. Prior to that, states had different drinking ages. When I went to the University of Maryland, the drinking age in Maryland was 21. However, in Washington, D.C., 6 miles away, the drinking age for hard liquor was 21, and the drinking age for beer was 18. Every Friday night, a caravan of cars left the University of Maryland headed for bars and nightclubs around Georgetown University and American University in D.C. Carloads of students from other colleges in southern Maryland and northern Virginia also headed for those same bars. Most of these bars and nightclubs disappeared quickly after Congress raised the drinking age nationally to 21. I have always thought it was madness to expect college students to wait until their 21st birthday before drinking their first beer.


MORE OF MARK’S KITCHEN TIPS – BACON.

CURED VS. UNCURED BACON.
What is the difference between cured and uncured bacon? You probably assumed that the answer is that cured bacon is cured, and uncured bacon is uncured, but if you did, you were wrong. The answer is that they are both cured. How can that be? First, you need to remember that the word ‘cured’ has 2 very different definitions. ‘Cured’ can mean that an animal was sick but now is well, but ‘cured’ can also mean that meat was preserved by any of a variety of methods, including salting, drying, or smoking. Cured bacon is not bacon that came from a pig that was sick but is now well. ‘Cured’ simply means that the bacon was preserved. The difference is this. Regular cured bacon is bacon that was cured with chemically produced nitrate. Uncured bacon is bacon that was cured with nitrate from a natural source, usually an extract of celery. So, both ‘cured’ and ‘uncured’ bacon are cured. They are nutritionally the same, and they taste the same. Uncured bacon usually costs more than cured bacon, but is it worth the extra money? I don’t think so. I think that labeling bacon as ‘uncured’ is just a marketing gimmick to get a higher price for the product by making the bacon appear to be natural and healthier.

OSCAR MAYER.
Oscar Mayer made a fortune on bacon. He came up with the idea of selling pre-sliced bacon and with the slices shingled on a piece of cardboard. Before that, when you went to a butcher shop to buy bacon, you got a block of bacon that you had to slice at home; however, it is very hard to cut bacon into thin even slices without a slicing machine. By the time Oscar Mayer’s competitors realized that consumers were willing to pay more for pre-sliced bacon, Oscar Mayer had cornered the market.

KOSHER HOT DOGS. People have always been suspicious about what goes into hot dogs. Perhaps that explains why so many people buy kosher hot dogs. Over 60% of all kosher hot dogs sold in the United States are purchased by non-Jews even though only 2% of Americans are Jews, and most of them do not keep kosher. Kosher meat inspectors are much tougher than government food inspectors, and a lot of people seem to know that. Blood and a long list of animal parts that go into regular hot dogs cannot go into kosher hot dogs. (I am not going to tell you what those animal parts are. It’s too disturbing.)

HOT DOGS AND ANTI-GERMAN HYSTERIA. Prior to 1917, hot dogs were called ‘frankfurters’ or ‘franks’ in the United States, but during World War 1, the U.S. government banned a long list of German words including ‘frankfurter.’ The government recommended that people call them ‘hot dogs’ instead, and the term stuck. Other words banned by the government during World War 1 included: hamburger, sauerkraut, German shepherd, kaput, kaiser roll, and dachshund. Some dachshund owners had their dogs euthanized out of fear for their safety. In 1918, the California legislature passed a law banning the teaching of German in public schools, declaring that German is “a language that disseminates the ideas of autocracy, brutality, and hatred.” California ordered schools to stop using the word ‘kindergarten’ and to scratch the word ‘Fahrenheit’ off of classroom thermometers. This may seem silly today, but people took this anti-German hysteria very seriously during World War 1.


FRENCH FRIES AND ANTI-FRENCH HYSTERIA.
In 2003, the U.S. was gripped by anti-French hysteria that was reminiscent of the anti-German hysteria of World War 1. It was triggered by French opposition to the War in Iraq. President George Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear weapons. Among major Western countries, only France voted against the war at the U.N. Jacques Chirac, the president of France, said that his intelligence service concluded that Iraq did not have these weapons and wanted to see Bush’s evidence, but Bush refused to produce any evidence. Anti-French hysteria ran wild in the U.S. Restaurants renamed french fries ‘freedom fries’ and french toast ‘freedom toast’ on their menus. Newspapers removed French accent marks from words like entrée and soufflé. A chain of stores in California’s central valley named ‘French Dry Cleaners’ were all vandalized or firebombed. The real estate firm where I worked at the time stopped using the terms ‘french doors’, ‘french drains’, and ‘facade’ in our ads. The hysteria ended after the U.S. invaded Iraq and discovered that the French were right. No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. It turned out that President Bush had been lying. There was no evidence that these weapons existed.


THE WORST TOURIST ATTRACTION IN THE STATE OF WASHINGTON.
  I am thinking about covering all 50 states.

The Seattle Gum Wall. There are a lot of interesting places to see in and around Pikes Market in Seattle and a lot of good food there too. However, more people go to see the gum wall than any store or restaurant at Pikes Market. Sticking used chewing gum on the back wall of the Market Theater on Post Alley has been a Seattle tradition for decades. In 2015, the city removed over 2,000 pounds of used chewing gum from the wall. They did this because the sugar in the gum was eroding the bricks and mortar in the wall, but more gum appears on the wall every day. This job is now done by steam cleaners in haz-mat suits. The gum is several inches thick and extends 15 feet high in places. Strangely, the gum wall is a popular site for wedding photos. It is not illegal to put gum on the wall, but the health department advises against touching it; however, you can find photos on Google of people licking the wall. What could they be thinking? If you want to visit the gum wall, I recommend that you do that in cold weather. I went there on a hot summer day, and the stench in this narrow alley was just unbearable. There may be a more disgusting and unsanitary tourist attraction in Washington state, but what could it be?


MY ‘TENANT NEWSLETTER’ IS NOW JUST MY ‘NEWSLETTER’.

You may have noticed that I have dropped the word ‘tenant’ from the name of my newsletter. Over 95% of the people on my mailing list are either former tenants or people who were never tenants of mine, so it seemed time to do it.

COMMENTS? If you want to comment on any article in this newsletter, you can do so at: Mark Tarses Blog