Please don’t bring home furniture that you find on the street! At the end of the school year, there is always a lot of furniture left on street corners in college towns. Bringing home furniture that you find on the street is dangerous! You don’t know where this stuff came from or what might be hiding inside. There are a lot of nasty things inside furniture left on the street, including bedbugs, fleas, lice, ticks, and mold. I understand that most college students have very little money to spend on home furnishings but bringing home furniture that you find on the street is not a money saver. You are endangering your health and the health of all your roommates by bringing home furniture like that.

Also, college students are often offered free sofas and mattresses from friends and relatives that they have been storing in a basement or a garage. Don’t take them. Those things should go to the dump as well.

HAMBURGER. A cooked hamburger should be flat, but most people’s grilled hamburgers come out oval-shaped (higher in the center and lower at the edges) and shrunken so they are a lot smaller than the bun. Nobody likes hamburgers like that. There are several reasons this happens.

1. The hamburger patty was oval shaped to begin with. If you are forming ground beef into hamburgers with your hands, it is easy for them to come out oval shaped. Make sure your patties are really flat or dimple them in the center with your fingertips.

2. The grill was too hot. Meat shrinks when it is cooked too quickly.

3. Your ground beef had too much fat in it. The cheapest ground beef can be over 30% fat. The best ratio for hamburgers is 80/20. That’s 20% fat.

Also, don’t buy oversized buns. Bigger isn’t better. A lot of hamburger buns are ridiculously too big. Ideally, a hamburger should be the same size as the bun.

Florida and California have been rivals for generations. Warm beaches, spring break, Disneyland vs. Disney World, retirement communities, oranges, avocados, etc. However, for me, there is no contest. The quality of life in Florida cannot compete with California.

Earthquakes vs. Hurricanes. People in Florida often say that they would never live in California because we have earthquakes. Well, we do have earthquakes in California, but over the past 100 years, fewer than 500 people have been killed in all California earthquakes combined. By contrast, in Florida over the past 100 years, more than 10,000 people have been killed by hurricanes and tropical cyclones. We don’t have them in California. We also don’t have alligators.

Alligators. There are over 1 million alligators in Florida. Yes! 1 million. Alligators are in every lake and river in Florida. People in Florida find alligators under their cars and in the crawl spaces under their homes, in playgrounds, and in their swimming pools. Below is a photo of a lake in Florida at sunset. Each pair of lights is sunlight reflecting off the eyes of an alligator. Of course, these are just the alligators on the surface.

Florida vs. Communism. Southern politicians sometimes talk about public school teachers as though they are trying to turn their kids into Communists. They are especially suspicious of American history teachers – like me. Many Southern politicians sound like they have still not accepted that both the Civil War and the Cold War are over, but Florida tops the list. Florida still requires high school students to take a course on the evils of Communism in order to graduate. (No. I am not making this up!) I know a Cal student from Boca Raton who had to watch movies in class in which they showed Fidel Castro delivering anti-American speeches and people being shot trying to get over the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was demolished almost 30 years ago. This guy said that he had to watch the movie ‘I Married a Communist’, made in 1949, and write a report on it. If you want to see this movie, I can lend you a copy on DVD. Like many other movies made during the Cold War, the Communists in this movie are acting more like Mafia dons than Russian spies. The Reds make money by blackmailing people and employ hit men to murder the disloyal.

Florida’s war on Communism is not fading away. In May 2022; Governor DeSantis signed a new law declaring November 7 “Victims of Communism Day.” On November 7 of every year, public school students in Florida will spend the day studying the evils of Communism. At the signing of the new law, DeSantis said that this is a “blockbuster day for freedom.” Florida politicians sound like they are in a time warp about Communism.

Duck and Cover. My elementary school didn’t have anti-Communism classes, but we did have atomic bombing drills. When the a-bomb siren went off, we had to go into the hall and squat down against a wall. That’s what Bert, the Defense Department’s cartoon turtle, told us to do in the ‘Duck and Cover’ movies that we watched in class. Bert told us that we that we can all survive an atomic bomb blast if we duck and cover when the bomb goes off. The government stopped making these movies because of criticism that they were promoting a hoax. You can’t actually survive a nuclear bomb blast by falling on the ground and pulling a tablecloth over your head, which is the sort of thing these films told us to do. Here is one of them: Duck and Cover.

The Hiroshima bomb myth is that by August of 1945, World War 2 was almost over, and Japan was ready to surrender, so the U.S. didn’t drop atomic bombs on Japan to force the Japanese to surrender, that we did it for some other reason. I heard this myth again on a PBS documentary last week, and it annoyed me. Some people believe that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan to send a message to Joseph Stalin that we had this weapon and were willing to use it. Others claim the U.S. were using the Japanese people as guinea pigs to see what the effects of atomic bombs would have people and cities. Still others believe that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan for revenge. Americans were angry about the treatment of American POWs by the Japanese.

However, there is an obvious flaw in all these theories, and it is simply this – If the Japanese were ready to surrender, then why didn’t they? In 1943, when Italy was ready to surrender, they surrendered. In May 1945; when Germany was ready to surrender, they surrendered. When Robert E. Lee was ready to surrender to Grant, he surrendered. That’s the way surrender works!

Because the U.S. had broken several Japanese codes, President Truman knew that some people in the Japanese cabinet were ready to surrender, but they were not willing to give up the emperor. So, before Truman authorized the bombing of Hiroshima, he sent a message to the Japanese saying that if they surrendered, they could keep the emperor. The Japanese government received Truman’s message, but they chose not to reply to it. After Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb, Truman again demanded that Japan surrender, and he said that more cities would be destroyed if they didn’t, but again the Japanese government did not reply. After Nagasaki was destroyed by the second atomic bomb, Truman again demanded they surrender, but again they replied with silence.

It was Emperor Hirohito who ended the war. After the bombing of Nagasaki, Hirohito split with the military. The generals wanted to continue with the war, but Hirohito had had enough. Hirohito made a radio broadcast to the nation saying that the government had agreed to Allied demands for Japan’s surrender. So, can you think of a good answer to my question: If the Japanese were ready to surrender, then why didn’t they?

 A lot of people also think that the war was nearly over by August of 1945, but that also is not true. Thousands of people, literally thousands of people, were still dying every day because of the war. The U.S. was bombing Japanese cities day and night. Japanese submarines and kamikaze planes were sinking American and British warships. Bloody fighting was still going on in China, Thailand, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), and many other places. In addition, large numbers of people were being killed and dying of starvation in places still under Japanese control, including Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, and Malaya. The war was far from over. Plus, millions would have been killed if the U.S. had invaded the Japanese home islands and had to fight their way across them. The U.S. did some bad things during World War 2, like locking up 100,000 Japanese Americans in squalid internment camps, but we didn’t drop atomic bombs on Japan when the war was almost over, and they were ready to surrender.