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

.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

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

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.

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

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

LeConte Hall is the largest academic building in the United States.  If you have never seen the T-Rex in the building’s rotunda, you should. It’s very impressive. In 2020, UC Berkeley decided to rename the building. A permanent name has not yet been chosen. Why is the building being renamed? John LeConte was an early president of the University of California, and his brother Joseph headed the university’s physics and natural history departments. The LeConte brothers grew up in Georgia on their father’s plantation, where the family owned over 200 slaves. During the Civil War, the LeConte brothers did important work for the Confederacy. After the war was over, the LeConte brothers found Reconstruction intolerable. When Joseph LeConte was told that he had to allow black students to attend his lectures at the University of South Carolina, he resigned his professorship. He moved to Berkeley, where his brother John was already running the university. Joseph LeConte taught his theories about white racial superiority at UC Berkeley until his death in 1901.

Theistic Evolutionism. Joseph LeConte believed in both evolution and creationism and tried to find a way to reconcile the 2 ideas. He believed that God created plants and animals and then allowed evolution to take place. LeConte rejected Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but he also did not believe in biblical miracles. His geology textbooks were widely used in high schools and colleges in the United States in the 1890s. These books introduced students to the theory of evolution before that theory became so controversial in the early 20th century that most school systems in the U.S. dropped geology from their curriculums. Some states made it a criminal offense to teach evolution in public schools.

MISCEGENATION.

I grew up in Maryland. Maryland was a slave state, but it didn’t join the Confederacy. Nevertheless, when I was a kid, Baltimore schools were still segregated, only white people were allowed to eat at lunch counters, and miscegenation was a felony crime. What is miscegenation? Miscegenation is the marriage of people of different races. In many states, people of different races who were cohabitating could also be charged with miscegenation. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that miscegenation laws were unconstitutional.

The reason I bring up miscegenation is that the Supreme Court has just overturned Roe vs. Wade on the grounds that there is nothing in the Constitution about abortion and therefore, it is a matter for state governments to decide for themselves. A lot of people have wondered if the Supreme Court will apply that same logic to state laws that ban gay marriage. There is nothing in the Constitution about marriage laws, and marriage laws vary greatly from state to state. 29 states have provisions in their state constitutions banning same-sex marriage, and 17 states have never repealed their miscegenation laws. So, could interracial marriage become illegal again? Would Justice Clarence Thomas vote to allow the return of miscegenation laws? Remember, his wife is white.

California.  A lot of people assume that miscegenation was just illegal in the South, but that isn’t true. Miscegenation was illegal in every state west of the Mississippi River except for Minnesota. In 1943, the all-white, all-male California state legislature voted unanimously to toughen up California’s miscegenation law. The 1943 California law stated that ‘no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian, or member of the Malay race.’ Their definition of ‘Mongolian’ included Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. In 1945, the penalty in California for an interracial marriage was a fine of $10,000 and 10 years in prison. $10,000 was a lot of money in those days. In 1945, you could buy a house in San Francisco for $5,000. By comparison, the penalty in Mississippi in 1945 for miscegenation was only $100 and 1 year in prison.

Public schools used to have Home Economics classes where girls were taught how to cook. Home Economics courses have largely disappeared from public schools, not because of changing attitudes about gender-specific classes, but simply because cooking classes were relatively expensive. When I was a kid, my sister used to bring home things she made in Home Economics class. I still remember her crackle sugar cookies, which were very good. Below are some useful cooking basics that they used to teach in Home Economics classes. These are not recipes.

WEIGH YOUR INGREDIENTS. Professional cooks don’t measure ingredients by volume but by weight. How much does a cup of packed brown sugar weigh? That can vary depending on how firmly somebody packs the sugar. Just how big is a medium size apple? You can find volume to weight conversion charts on Google.

POTATOES. Panned-fried potatoes should be crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, but most people fail to get their potatoes to come out like that because they overcrowd the pan. Instead of getting crispy, the potatoes drown in their own juice. Use a wider pan. Allow space between the potatoes.

CHEESE SAUCE. There are 2 reasons why cheese sauces come out lumpy instead of smooth. 1. The cheese was covered with sawdust. Pre-shredded and grated cheeses are usually covered with cellulose (sawdust) or starch in order to prevent the cheese from sticking together. Read the label. This is not a problem if you intend to sprinkle the cheese on a salad, but if you want to make a cheese sauce, buy a block of cheese, and shred it yourself. 2. Too much heat. Most cheese will start melting at 90 degrees. If you add cheese to a hot liquid, cheese will lump up.

HARD BOILED EGGS. Hard boiled eggs are easy to make, but a lot of people make a mess of it because of temperature shock. Don’t put cold eggs into boiling water. The shells will crack, the white will leak out, and the shells will be hard to peel off. Put room temperature eggs into room temperature water. Take the eggs out of your refrigerator at least 2 hours before you intend to boil them. Use the freshest eggs you can. It is hard to peel the shells off old eggs.

OUNCES. There are 2 kinds of ounces, liquid ounces and dry ounces, and they are completely different. Liquid ounces are a measure of volume. Dry ounces are a measure of weight. For example, if a recipe calls for 8 ounces of powdered sugar, that means they want you to use 8 dry ounces, or 1/2 pound, of powdered sugar. Measuring cups measure liquid ounces. An 8-ounce cup of powdered sugar weighs 4.5 ounces.

KOSHER SALT. Kosher salt is not like holy water. Holy water is water that has been blessed by a priest. Kosher salt is not salt that has been blessed by a rabbi. Kosher salt is chemically different from table salt. Professional bakers use kosher salt because kosher salt does not contain iodine (which is bitter) or anti-caking chemicals found in table salt. Kosher salt makes baked goods taste better and less salty. Kosher salt also sticks to food better than table salt. That’s why most steakhouses use kosher salt. Buy iodized salt for table use. Iodine deficiency causes thyroid problems.

BAKER’S CHOCOLATE. Baker’s chocolate is not baking chocolate. If a recipe calls for baking chocolate, that means that you should use unsweetened dark chocolate. Baker’s chocolate is a brand of chocolate, not a type of chocolate. Baker’s Chocolate Company was founded by James Baker, who named the company for himself. Baker’s makes baking chocolate, but they make many other kinds of chocolate as well.

BROWN SUGAR.  Brown sugar is not natural sugar. People associate brown with natural and white with refined. White rice is made by removing the bran and germ from brown rice, and white flour is made by removing the bran and germ from whole wheat, which is also brown. However, that model does not apply to sugar. Brown sugar is made from white sugar. Refining sugar cane produces 2 products, white sugar and molasses. Brown sugar is simply refined white sugar with some of the molasses added back in.

How to Keep Brown Sugar from Getting Hard. If left in a box or bag, brown sugar will eventually become hard as a rock and unusable. Lots of websites sell ‘sugar savers’, devices designed to keep brown sugar soft. Forget about those things. There is a better way to keep brown sugar soft. Just put your brown sugar in a freezer ziplock bag and toss it in your freezer. ‘Sugar savers’ made sense back in the days before people had refrigerators with freezers, but there is no need for them now. Brown rice and whole wheat flour should also be stored in the refrigerator or freezer if you use them infrequently. The oil in the germ will go rancid with time at room temperature.

Are you interested in more kitchen basics?

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.