Are you planning to travel at Christmas or during the winter break? You should never discuss your travel plans on social media websites until you are back home. If you want to show your friends photos of you skiing at Lake Tahoe on Facebook, do it after you return, not before you go or while you are there! Professional burglars are constantly scouring the internet looking for houses to rob! No foolin.’ They really do that! Criminals have software that allows them to identify people who are traveling and then identifying where they live. Yes, people actually do get burglarized this way. Also remember that a lot of burglars look for houses to rob the old-fashioned way, by driving around and looking for houses with obvious signs that nobody is home. (Did you see ‘Home Alone’?) Before you travel, arrange to have someone check your porch regularly for signs that nobody is there, like parcels sitting on the porch or Post-It notes on your front door from FedEx. Burglars also look for houses that are dark, night after night. I can lend you a lamp timer if you want to make it look like someone is home in the evening while you are gone.
It is time once again for your Christmas gifts. If you are named as a tenant on a current lease with me, you are entitled to one gift from the list below. It is one gift per tenant, not one gift per rental unit. I do not have these items on hand. Once you tell me what you want, I will order it for you. As you have probably heard in the news, because of the backup in West Coast ports, a lot of imported products are hard to get right now. If something you want is unavailable, you may have to wait for it to be back in stock or take something else. Here are your choices. Pick one and have a happy holiday season!
1. Segway Electric Scooter. Xioami (pronounced ‘shall-me’) is the largest manufacturer of electric scooters in China. Nearly all of the electric scooter rental companies in the U.S. get their scooters from Xioami, including Lyft, Lime, Bird, and Spin. The model that I plan to give away is Xioami’s Segway Ninebot ES1. This may be the most practical item on this list. Street parking in Berkeley has become far more difficult to find. Berkeley has eliminated hundreds of parking spaces in order to create bike lanes. Street parking is also expensive. A lot of parking meters are now $3.50 an hour.
2. Apple Watch SE. Take calls and reply to texts from your wrist. With GPS.
3. Cuisinart Digital AirFry Toaster Oven. Kitchen appliances take up a lot of space on the countertop, so I like appliances that do the jobs of multiple single-purpose appliances. This is a toaster, an oven, an air fryer, and a food dehydrator. It bakes, broils, proofs dough, and is big enough to roast a whole 4-pound chicken.
4. Cuisinart Elite 12-Cup Food Processor. This comes with slicing and shredding disks, a dough blade, and a 4-cup bowl for small jobs. A great time saver if you have to do a job like slicing a pound of mushrooms. Make pizza dough in 2 minutes.
5. Go Pro Camera Bundle. Waterproof. Bundle includes: 64GB SD card, floating hand grip, wi-fi and Bluetooth.
6. Roomba iRobot i4 Wi-Fi Vacuum Cleaner. I saw one of these in my cousin’s home in Montana. They had 3 big dogs in the house, including a St. Bernard that weighed more than me! This robotic vacuum cleaner worked very well sucking up dog fur, and there was a lot of dog fur in their house. The vacuum cleaner terrified the dogs. There is something about vacuum cleaners that frightens dogs. My stepmother had a dog that hid under her bed shivering in fear whenever the vacuum cleaner was turned on anywhere in the house. I sometimes crawled under the bed with the dog to calm her down until the vacuuming was done. Cats, on the other hand, don’t seem to be afraid of these things.
7. Bose Noise Canceling Bluetooth Wireless Headphones. With Alexa voice control.
8. Fitbit Sense Smart Watch with GPS. You probably know more about what a Fitbit watch does than I do.
9. iPad. 10.2 inch screen. Wi-Fi model. 32GB. The model number will depend on what’s available.
If there is nothing on this list that you want, I can make a donation to the Berkeley landlord association in your name instead. (No tenant of mine has ever picked this option.)
There is something about the way I tell history stories that makes people say: “I don’t believe that happened. Mark must have made up that story.” People often tell me that they check out my stories on Google because they don’t believe them. Have you ever checked out one of my improbable stories?
“I am the President of France.” In May 1920, President Paul Deschanel of France was traveling on his presidential train. During the night, as the train was passing Orléans, south of Paris, Deschanel opened the window of his sleeping car, leaned out too far, and fell out of the window. He suffered only minor injuries from the fall, remarkable for a man of 64. Deschanel walked up to the nearest person, a track inspector and said: “Don’t be alarmed. I am the President of France.” He was wearing nothing but his pajamas. The track inspector assumed the man was drunk and replied: “Certainly you are, and I am Napoleon Bonaparte.” The track inspector took Deschanel to his house and called a doctor. The doctor confirmed that the man actually was the president of France to the astonishment of the track inspector. When the story was published in French newspapers, Deschanel became a national laughing stock and was forced to resign.
European history might have played out very differently if Deschanel had not fallen out of the window of his sleeping car. In the French presidential election earlier in 1920, Deschanel ran against Georges Clemenceau, the principal author of the Treaty of Versailles. Deschanel was a critic of the treaty. He won in a landslide, ending Clemenceau’s career. Deschanel wanted to renegotiate parts of the Treaty of Versailles with the new German government, but those plans came to an end with his resignation. Deschanel worried that a future German government might remilitarize the Rhineland, placing troops right on France’s border. Clemenceau argued that there was no need to worry about that since the treaty prohibited Germany from ever placing troops in the Rhineland.
The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower. Victor Lustig was the most successful swindler in history. In the 1920s, Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower to wealthy businessmen. Lustig impersonated a French government official. He told scrap metal dealers that the French government was going to tear down the Eiffel Tower and sell the steel for scrap. He convinced these businessmen to pay him huge sums of money for the Eiffel Tower. The French police were aware of what Lustig was doing, but they were unable to prosecute him because his victims refused to testify against him. Lustig’s victims were prominent businessmen and did not want to look like fools in court. Eventually, the French government issued a warrant for Lustig’s arrest, but Lustig escaped to the United States just ahead of the police. In the United States, Lustig invented new swindles. Lustig talked Al Capone into investing $50,000 in one of Lustig’s scams. This was a very risky thing for Lustig to do. $50,000 was a huge amount of money in the 1920s, and Al Capone was a very dangerous person to play for a sucker. However, Al Capone never found out that Lustig had conned him. I wonder if this story was the inspiration for the movie ‘The Sting.’ It sounds very similar.
