Category Archives: Tenant Newsletter

BE CAREFUL USING THE WORD ‘TOMORROW’ IN EMAILS.

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A lot of people have still not figured out that making an appointment by email is very different from making an appointment by telephone. When you call someone on the phone, you are in direct communication with the other person. In a phone call, ‘today’ means today, and ‘tomorrow’ means tomorrow. However, when you send an email, you can’t be sure when the recipient will get it. He may get it immediately, but if his server or yours is down or screwed up, he may not get your message for hours. Haven’t you ever received an email the day after it was sent? You should get in the habit of being specific about dates in email messages. State the day of the week you are talking about. At some point, you may get yourself into trouble, like missing an important appointment, by using words like ‘tomorrow’ in an email.

When is ‘next Tuesday’? ‘Next’ is another word that gets people into trouble in emails. Suppose you get an email on Sunday, October 10 inviting you to a meeting ‘next Tuesday’. Is the sender referring to October 12 or October 19? The dictionary defines ‘next’ as ‘immediately after’, but after what? Avoid confusion. State the date.

Business etiquette.  In business schools in Europe, students are taught business etiquette and how to write business letters. That is a basic part of a business education in Europe and Japan. Here in the U.S., business schools don’t normally teach that at all. I majored in business, and the subject of business etiquette never came up. I do recall a lecture on how to write a resume, but not how to write a business letter.

The Handshake. Shaking hands has been part of business etiquette for centuries and refusing to shake somebody’s hand has always been considered an insult. Covid has changed that. If someone offers to shake my hand, I politely tell them that I don’t shake hands anymore because of Covid. No one has yet taken offense by that. Dr. Anthony Fauci said last year: “I don’t think we should ever shake hands again, to be honest with you.” Forget about bumping elbows as an alternative to a handshake or having everybody wipe their hands with hand sanitizer before or after shaking hands. If I was running an office, I would put up signs around the office stating: ‘We do not shake hands in this office due to Covid.’

CALLING ME ON THE TELEPHONE.Before I answer my phone, I always check my Caller I.D. screen first. If my Caller I.D. does not identify the caller or says that the call is from a ‘Private Caller’, ‘Unknown Name’, ‘Blocked Number’, ‘Toll Free Number’, or just the name of a city; I will not answer the call. If you are calling me from a telephone that does not identify you, just leave a voicemail message. Do not hang up and call me back later. That won’t do any good. I check my messages frequently, and I will reply to legitimate voicemail messages. I am sorry if this seems rude, but I get a lot of robocalls, and this is the only way I can control the problem. You should do the same thing that I do about this. When you answer a robocall, you are telling the computer that called you that you answer robocalls. Doing that gets you more robocalls, calls like: “Your auto warranty is about to expire” or “Congratulations! You have been selected to receive a free…….” I recently got a robocall that said that I failed to appear for jury duty and that a bench warrant for my arrest would be issued in 48 hours unless I paid a $500 fine, a fine that I could only pay with Walmart gift cards. It seems hard for me to believe that there are people gullible enough to fall for a scam this obvious, but I am told that a lot of people do.

FORT BRAGG, CALIFORNIA.

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A couple of months ago, I wrote that a lot of U.S. military bases back east are named for Confederate generals. As several people pointed out, there are lots of places here in California that are named for Confederate generals as well. I think the most interesting of these places is the city of Fort Bragg, named for Confederate general Braxton Bragg. If you want to go somewhere for the weekend from the Bay Area, Fort Bragg is worth a trip. Although the city is very small, it has 2 major tourist attractions: Glass Beach and the Skunk Train. The Skunk Train is a 19th Century steam train that weaves through ancient redwood forests. Fort Bragg also has a beautiful coastline and great hiking trails.


California’s admission into the Union was a big factor leading to the Civil War.  Prior to 1850, all the new states in the southern half of the U.S., like Texas, were admitted as slave states, and all the new states in the northern half, like Michigan, were admitted as free states. However, California is in the southern half of the U.S., going right to the Mexican border. Slave state senators voted for California’s admission as a free state in 1850 in exchange for northern senators voting for the Fugitive Slave Act, something the slave owners badly wanted. But afterward, it dawned on the slave owners that California’s admission as a free state meant that they had no future in America’s westward expansion and that with time, slavery would disappear.

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SOUTHERN SCHOOLS.
Last month, I wrote that it seems ironic to me that many Southern states inflict harsh physical punishments on public school students for minor violations of school rules while at the same time prohibiting schools from requiring students to wear face masks. Since then, several people have told me about their experiences when they went to school in the South. A man I know well told me that he was paddled in junior high school in Texas for wearing a baseball cap backwards. The teacher claimed that it was evidence that he was in a gang. Southern politicians, including the governors of Texas and Florida, have banned face mask mandates in public schools on the grounds that “we are against government mandates”, but they defend beating up kids for minor violations of school rules. Am I the only person who thinks this seems illogical? I never hear TV newsmen questioning Southern politicians who oppose mask mandates but support corporal punishment.

P.S. – If every boy who wears a baseball cap backwards is in a gang, then there are a lot more gang members around here than I imagined!

MORE CAT TALES.

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Landlords and Catnip.  Catnip is easy to grow. It is green all year round (at least here in the Bay Area), and it has pretty pink and white flowers with purple spots. Catnip has a pleasant fragrance, and its aroma repels garden pests, like aphids. Catnip might seem like an ideal plant for use as ornamental ground vegetation, but it’s not. The photo below shows what happens when a landlord plants catnip around his building.


Cat Security Guard. There is a sign in front of the security guard station in the photo below that says in Turkish that no one can enter this building without showing an entry pass to the security guard. Surprisingly, many people did show their entry passes to the cat as they entered the building.


Civet Cat Coffee. San Francisco has the most billionaires per capita of any city on Earth – and by a huge margin. In San Francisco, there is one billionaire for every 11,000 people. In New York City, Dubai, and Hong Kong; there is one billionaire for every 80,000 to 100,000 people. Very rich people in San Francisco buy some astonishing stuff, like civet cat coffee. It is made from coffee beans that were eaten by civet cats. Civet cats eat coffee berries but cannot digest the beans inside and expel them in their poop. These beans are hand gathered from the cat poop, washed, dried, and shipped to coffee roasters. There are several places in San Francisco’s financial district where you can buy 100% civet cat coffee. It costs around $70 a cup. You can also buy civet coffee on Amazon for $700 a pound. Here is how to buy it. https://www.amazon.com/Weasel-Coffee-Special-Organic-Arabica/dp/B08HZ9PB42 Amazon calls it Vietnamese weasel coffee, but it’s the same thing as civet coffee. You can find much cheaper civet coffee on the market, but it isn’t 100% pure. The cheap stuff is a mixture of a few civet beans and a lot of regular coffee beans. (By the way, civet coffee is not kosher. A rabbi familiar with this product once told me at a trade show: “You cannot make kosher food from something that came out of a cat’s rear end.”) If someone offered me a cup of civet coffee, I would turn them down because I would be thinking about how it is produced. Would you drink it?

RENTER’S INSURANCE.

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Do you have renter’s insurance? Renter’s insurance costs between $150 and $200 a year, a small price to pay for a lot of coverage. First, you also get personal property insurance with worldwide coverage. That means that if your stuff gets stolen from your home, your car, or your luggage while you are traveling; you can get reimbursed. Second, you get personal liability insurance. That protects you in case somebody slips on your porch or trips over an extension cord and breaks his clavichord. I always advise tenants to buy renter’s insurance whenever I sign a lease, and tenants invariably tell me that they will do that, but sadly, a lot of them put off making the purchase until they have suffered a loss, and then it’s too late. That sounds a lot like the unvaccinated people in hospitals who say to the doctor just before they die from Covid19: “Okay doc. Give me the damn vaccine”, and then the doctor has to tell them that it’s too late for that. Sadly, that happens many times every day. It seems hard to believe that there are still large numbers of people in the United States who don’t know the difference between a vaccine and a cure. But I digress. Don’t wait until your stuff is stolen before buying renter’s insurance. If you don’t know where to get renter’s insurance, just go to Google, and type in ‘renter’s insurance’ and the name of the city and state where you live, and you’ll get lots of results. Renter’s insurance is not hard to find. If you are a tenant, you need renter’s insurance!


What about the landlord’s insurance? Doesn’t he already have insurance on the building?
A lot of tenants don’t buy renter’s insurance in the mistaken belief that they already have coverage because the landlord has insurance on the property, but that is just wishful thinking. Sometimes a tenant will ask me: “Do you have fire insurance on this building?” I tell them: “Yes, I have fire insurance.” However, my insurance only protects me from loss, not you. If there is a fire, my insurance policy will pay me for the damage to the building and the personal property that belongs to me, like the refrigerator in your apartment. However, my insurance policy won’t pay you for the loss of your property. If there is a fire and your computer is reduced to a pile of melted plastic, you need your own insurance policy to get reimbursed for that. As I said, imagining that you don’t need renter’s insurance because your landlord has insurance on the property is just wishful thinking. Insurance doesn’t work that way.

COVID VACCINE VS. AN UNTUCKED SHIRT

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As you probably know, the governors of some southern states are prohibiting public schools from requiring kids and teachers to wear face masks. In Florida and Texas, this prohibition is statewide despite the fact that these states have the most new Covid cases in the country. Most hospitals in Texas and Florida have no available ICU beds. The governors of Florida and Texas say that the reason they are doing this is because they are “opposed to government mandates“, but these states have the nation’s toughest school behavior mandates in the country. In a number of southern states, a public school student who is caught wearing his shirt over his pants instead of tucked in is subject to corporal punishment by teachers and school staff. Thousands of kids in Texas public schools are spanked, paddled, or beaten every year for offenses such as wearing an untucked shirt or laughing in the cafeteria. In Mississippi, elementary school students have been sent to ‘juvie’ (a jail for juvenile criminals) for wearing the wrong color shoes. In Florida, children as young as 6 are subjected to corporal punishment. There are no regulations in Florida as to what instrument can be used to beat children with, and Florida schools do not need permission from parents to beat their kids. Southerners support these very harsh school mandates, but they become enraged when they are told to have their kids wear face masks at school because “we don’t believe in mandates.” Covid has killed over 600,000 Americans, but no child ever died from wearing an untucked shirt or laughing in the school cafeteria. The logic of these people escapes me. Southerners love their children and don’t want them to get sick and die. I don’t get it. No foolin’. I really don’t get it.

About California. Here in California, corporal punishment is prohibited in public schools. When I tell my students that in a number of southern states, teachers can beat students with a wood paddle or a leather belt for wearing an untucked shirt, they don’t believe me. I can see it in their faces. They ask other teachers in the school and their parents if it is true. Once they get confirmation that it is true, they go silent and stare at me. Some of my students told me later that they made their parents promise not to move to the South, at least not until all the kids in the house graduate high school. Some adults laugh when I tell them that, but I can assure you that none of my 13-year old students laughs when I tell them that kids their age are beaten in schools in the South every day for offenses such as ‘horseplay on a school bus’, ‘flatulence in class’, wearing mismatched socks, or wearing an untucked shirt. 

THE HISTORY CHANNEL IS AN ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL, NOT A HISTORY CHANNEL.

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I sometimes wonder how many people watch the History Channel in the belief that their shows and the stories they tell are real history. Some of their shows are fairly obviously fiction, like shows claiming to be a history of alliances between space aliens, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Vatican; but many shows that appear to be real are actually faked and staged. The most popular of these is the History Channel’s show Pawn Stars. Pawn Stars appears to be filmed in a real pawn shop in Las Vegas, but it is actually filmed in a fake pawn shop next door to the real one. The people coming into the fake pawn shop are paid actors, and the items they are trying to sell have been researched in advance, which is why the pawn shop owners know so much about them. This show is scripted and rehearsed. Nothing is real. Many other popular History Channel shows appear to be real and unrehearsed but are also staged and scripted, including Mountain Men, American Restoration, American Pickers, and Ancient Aliens.

The Vatican Observatory and Space Lizards. The Vatican owns an astronomical observatory in Arizona. This observatory is the basis of countless conspiracy theories claiming some sort of alliance between space aliens and the Vatican. Several ‘reality TV’ shows claim that the Pope, Hillary Clinton, and Queen Elizabeth are all super-smart lizards from a mystery planet and that they communicate with their home planet through the Vatican observatory. If this subject interests you, you can research it yourself. There are lots of ‘exposes’ on websites, TV, and YouTube videos about reptilian world leaders. Below is a photo that appeared in a newspaper in Scotland claiming to show what Queen Elizabeth looks like with her ‘human disguise’ on and off. The idea that the Pope is a reptile from outer space was frequently parodied on the TV show Futurama; however, on Futurama, the ‘Space Pope’ was a crocodile, not a lizard. It seems hard for me to believe that anyone takes this stuff seriously, but angry pickets show up at the White House every now and then demanding that the president get rid of the space lizards in the government.


Why Does the Vatican Have an Observatory? The Vatican got interested in astronomy a long time ago, but it was for theological reasons, not to communicate with space lizards. For over 1,500 years, Europeans used the Julian calendar, which contained numerous errors. The most serious error in the Julian calendar was that it assumed that every year was exactly 365.25 days long. That overestimated the length of a year by about 1 day per century. That may not seem like a lot, but it meant that by the 16th Century, Christians were celebrating Easter, Christmas, and other holidays 2 weeks earlier than they should. This greatly concerned Pope Gregory XIII, who ordered that a group of Vatican astronomers develop a far more accurate calendar, which they did after years of research and astronomical observations. In 1582, the Catholic church adopted the Gregorian calendar, which is now used nearly everywhere in the world. As I said, this had nothing to do with space lizards.

DON’T TAKE IN STREET FURNITURE!

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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.

WHY ARE U.S. MILITARY BASES NAMED FOR CONFEDERATE GENERALS?

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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.

WHAT ARE PRESLEYTARIANS?

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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.

HOW TO GET RID OF BAD ODORS COMING OUT OF YOUR GARBAGE DISPOSAL.

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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.