At the start and the end of every school year in Berkeley and many other college towns, a lot of furniture is dumped on the streets, sidewalks, and in vacant lots around town. You should never take street furniture into your home. That is the #1 way that people get bed bugs, fleas, and ticks in their homes. A piece of furniture only has to sit on a sidewalk for a few minutes for bugs to get inside. Besides, you don’t know where this thing came from. A beautiful couch that you see on a street corner may have been dumped there because it is full of head lice. For the same reason, never take in furniture from sheds, garages, basements, or unknown sources. Free furniture that you find on the street is not a bargain. It’s dangerous. When I first came to California, thrift stores like Goodwill used to sell used mattresses. It was a big part of their business. It is now illegal and has been for many years to sell used mattresses in California. Too many people got sick as a result of that business.
I have never understood why U.S. army bases are named for Confederate generals. They include Fort Lee, Fort Hood, Fort Pickett, Fort Benning, and many others. All of these bases are named for men who made war upon the United States army. But why? No country on Earth names their military bases for their enemies. I am pretty sure that there are no army bases in England, Germany, or Russia named for Napoleon Bonaparte. I am also pretty sure there are no army bases in China named for Hideki Tojo.
The Jackson-Lee Monument. I grew up in Baltimore. Maryland was a slave state, but it was also a Union state. Nevertheless, there was stuff all over Maryland named for Confederate generals. Of all the Confederate monuments in Baltimore, the biggest and most impressive was the Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee Monument in a park adjacent to Johns Hopkins University. It consisted of bronze statues of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee on horseback on a large marble base. The inscription on the base read: ‘They were great generals and Christian warriors and waged war like gentlemen.’ The monument was dedicated with much fanfare by Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro (the father of Nancy Pelosi!) I used to look at this monument when I was a kid and wonder: “What is this thing doing in Baltimore? Maryland was a Union state.”
Was Robert E. Lee a Christian warrior who waged war like a gentleman? No. During the Battle of the Crater in 1864, a large number of Union soldiers were trapped in a huge crater and surrendered. The white soldiers were sent to POW camps. The black soldiers who tried to surrender to Lee’s men were shot. This was not the first time something like this happened. General Grant wrote a letter to Lee demanding that he stop shooting unarmed black Union soldiers trying to surrender. Lee refused. Neo-Confederates often talk about Confederate generals as though they were Medieval knights or courteous gentlemen duelists, but it isn’t true. The Age of Chivalry, in which battles were fought by pious Christian knights, bound by a strict code of chivalry, came to an end long before the Civil War began.
ABOUT DOG TAGS. The Civil War was the first war in which American soldiers wore dog tags. In World War 2, U.S. military dog tags began including a soldier’s service number and his religion so that if he was killed, he could get an appropriate grave marker. Soldiers had 3 choices: ‘P’ for Protestant, ‘C’ for Catholic, or ‘H’ for Hebrew. Today, soldiers can generally get whatever they want as their religious preference on their dog tags. Some have chosen Wiccan, Agnostic, Druid, Pagan, Jediist, and Presleytarian among other things.
Presleytarians and Presbyterians are completely different. Presleytarians worship Elvis Presley. Presbyterians don’t. Presleytarians make pilgrimages to Las Vegas and Graceland in Memphis. There are people all over the world who believe that Elvis Presley is alive and that he can perform miracles. Numerous people have claimed that they were cured of diseases or a serious mental illness by listening to Elvis’ recordings of religious music. Elvis Presley recorded a lot of religious music. Thousands of people have reported seeing Elvis since his death doing things that require supernatural powers. This began when several people reported seeing Elvis at the Memphis airport shortly after his death buying a ticket and boarding a plane for Buenos Aires, Argentina. However, this story is impossible to verify because at the time, there were no international flights into or out of Memphis airport. Countless photos have been posted online by Elvis fans of someone on a street in Buenos Aires who they thought looked like Elvis. In May of this year, someone reported to police seeing Elvis getting into a car in Denver and then vanishing. The official Graceland website says that in June, someone reported seeing Elvis at the Hard Rock Cafe in Gdansk and speaking Polish. Elvis Presley was born in 1935. That wasn’t so long ago that he couldn’t still be alive. My Uncle Maurice was born in 1917, and I saw him playing chess last week – and beating the pants off my nephew.
The most common complaint about garbage disposals is bad odors. There are a number of products on the market for deodorizing garbage disposals, but the best way to solve this problem is with citrus rinds. After you have squeezed the juice out of an orange or a lemon, cut up the rind into a few large pieces and grind them up in your garbage disposal. Citric acid is a powerful deodorizer. Use cold water. Hot water will flush away the citric acid.
Every now and then, someone creates a political party or runs for head of state as a joke – and then wins or comes close to winning, shocking the nation. Mogens Glistrup was a professor at the University of Copenhagen in the 1960s when he founded the Progress Party. Most people thought the party was a joke. For example, Glistrup’s national defense platform was to abolish the Danish armed forces and replace them with an answering machine that said: “We surrender” in Russian. Remember, this was at the height of the Cold War, and Russian troops in East Germany were less than 50 miles from Denmark. In 1973, Glistrup’s Progress Party won a landslide victory in national elections, making his party the second largest in the Danish parliament. The Danish establishment was horrified, as were Denmark’s NATO allies. In case you are thinking: “This nut sounds like he came from Berkeley”, well, he did. Glistrup attended U.C. Berkeley in the 1950s.
DO YOU RENT TO CATS? I once got a phone call from a woman inquiring about an apartment I had for rent. She said: “I saw your ad for a 1-bedroom apartment for rent. I have a question. Do you rent to cats?” I thought that was an oddly worded question, so I phrased my answer carefully. I said: “No, I don’t rent to cats, but I do rent apartments to people with cats.” The woman said, in a dejected voice: “Oh, that’s too bad” and hung up the phone. I never heard from her again. Although this happened many years ago, I still think about this incident occasionally and wonder what was on this woman’s mind.
A GERMAN SHEPHERD IS NOT A CAT. On another occasion, a man applied for this same apartment. On his application form, he answered the question: ‘Do you have a pet?’ with ‘Yes. Cat’. I asked him some questions about his cat, but he gave me evasive answers, so I told him that I wanted to see his cat. I asked him: “Do you have a photo of your cat on your cell phone?” He reluctantly said that he did and pulled up a picture. I looked at the photo and said: “This is a photo of you standing next to a German shepherd.” He said: “Yeah. Her name is Sophie.” I said: “I don’t understand. A German shepherd is a dog. Why did you tell me that you have a cat?” He said: “Well, in your ad, you checked off that a cat was OK, but you didn’t check off that a dog was OK.” I said: “So you thought that if we agreed to call your German shepherd a cat, then that would make it a cat.” He said that was his line of thinking. I decided to rent the place to somebody else.
