No. A lot of people believe that that gelatin is made from horse hooves, but that isn’t true. Glue is made from horse hooves. Back in the old days, it was a standard joke to say that a horse was so old and decrepit that the glue factory wouldn’t take him. People have been making glue from horse hooves for over 10,000 years. In prehistoric times, horse hoof glue was used to stiffen bows and to attach feathers to arrows. Horse hoof glue is still made. It is used in cabinetry, woodworking, violin making, etc. Most commercial gelatin is made from pigskin, although it can also be made from other animal parts. Gelatin can be found in hundreds of supermarket products, not just Jello and marshmallows. The most important thing to know about gelatin is that it is not stable like cornstarch or tapioca. Gelatin gets more firm with time. Gelatin desserts are best eaten within 1 or 2 days after they are made. Once Jello is 5 or 6 days old, it starts to turn rubbery, and it gets more rubbery as it gets older.
No. It’s worse. Those specks are vanilla seeds. It is easy to imagine that vanilla ice cream with black specks in it has more flavor or that the seeds make the vanilla more ‘real’ or ‘natural’, but vanilla seeds contribute no flavor at all to vanilla ice cream. Putting vanilla seeds in ice cream is just a marketing gimmick. Vanilla is the world’s second most expensive spice. Saffron is the most expensive. Even the cheapest, lowest quality vanilla bean pods sell for over $100 a pound. In making vanilla extract, all of the flavor is extracted from the pods, including the seeds. Exhausted vanilla seeds have no flavor in them and are just kitchen trash. Top quality vanilla ice cream does not have black specks in it. It is only the lower quality brands of vanilla ice cream that resort to this marketing trick. So, who makes the best vanilla ice cream? In my opinion, among nationally sold brands, it’s Ben & Jerry’s.
As I get older, I think more and more about hiring a property management firm. I am not going to be able to do this myself forever. However, I am constantly seeing what happens when an incompetent property management firm takes over managing a property, and there a lot of incompetent property management firms out there. Some professions require licenses and tests, like plumbers, electricians, general contractors, etc.; but anyone can say ‘I am a property manager.’ You don’t have to have a license or pass a test to manage small rental properties. The problem for me is that top-quality property management firms don’t want to take on a client who owns as little property as I do. Take a look at the photos below of work done by incompetent property managers. Note the: 1. Badly designed wheelchair ramps at various apartment houses. 2. Smoke alarms. All the smoke alarms in the building were installed this way. They are supposed to be dated. 3. Seismic repair of a support column holding up the building. 4. Sandbox built over a manhole cover at a low-income housing project. 5. A Craigslist listing of an apartment for rent included this photo of the swimming pool with abandoned mattresses in it. 6. The building’s handyman didn’t know that you don’t attach a ground wire to a plastic pipe.
7. Carpet. The managers of these apartment houses used poor judgment in choosing the hall and stair carpets.
There is a serious defect in the Safeway app. It is something you should think about if you decide to order groceries using the Safeway app yourself. When you order groceries from Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh, if an item is out of stock, you get a text message telling you that the item is out of stock and asking you to approve or reject a suggested substitution. Safeway does not have that feature. As a result, Safeway pickers use their own judgment when making substitutions if an item is out of stock. I have ordered groceries twice using the Safeway’s app, and on both occasions, I got substitutions that were so awful that I threw them out as soon as they arrived. Last week, I ordered a half gallon of half & half to make panna cotta. Safeway was out of half & half, so without asking for my approval, the picker substituted fat-free half & half. Fat-free half & half (see photo below) is a horrible product. Nobody should buy or consume this stuff. I think people who buy fat-free half & half do so because they assume that it is a low-calorie alternative to real half & half, which it isn’t. Fat-free half & half is not a diet food. To compensate for its lack of flavor and creaminess, fat-free half & half is loaded with corn syrup and sugar. You are not going to lose weight putting this stuff in your coffee instead of the real thing. In order to make fat-free half & half look thick, like real half & half, it also contains carrageenan, a thickener made from Irish moss. Carrageenan is not good for you. It is banned in some countries. Fat-free half & half also contains artificial flavoring and preservatives. As soon as I saw what Safeway delivered, down the drain it went. I will not order anything again from the Safeway app until they fix this problem. As I said last month, I am a fussy food buyer.
I removed a broken drinking glass from one of your recycling cans today. Never put broken glass in a recycling can. Broken glass should be put in your regular trash, wrapped in paper and inside a garbage bag. As you know, homeless people go through recycling cans looking for cans and bottles that they can sell. They usually do this at night before collection day and when it is dark outside. Broken glass mixed in with your cans and bottles can cause serious injuries to the homeless people who pick through the stuff in your recycling can. Let’s not add to their troubles. Putting broken glass in your recycling can can also injure the people who pick up and empty the recycling cans. And don’t put tin can lids or other metal items with sharp edges in your recycling can either.
As you may know, I enjoy telling history stories that sound so improbable that people assume that I made them up. The Pastry War is one of those stories. How did the United States get California from Mexico? Believe it or not, it was because somebody swiped some French pastries from a bakery in Mexico City in 1832. In 1832, a French pastry chef named Monsieur Remontel wrote a letter to King Louis-Phillipe of France. Monsieur Remontel stated that he owned a small bakery on the outskirts of Mexico City and that one day, some Mexican officers looted his bakery and stole his pastries. Monsieur Remontel asked the king to force the Mexican government to pay him 60,000 pesos for the stolen French pastries and damage to his shop. This was a wildly inflated valuation of the pastries. Back in those days, a Mexican peso was a large silver coin. It contained just under 1 ounce of silver. 1 peso was a day’s wages in Mexico City. This means that Monsieur Remontel was claiming that the damage to this pastry shop and the stolen French pastries were worth 50,000 ounces of silver. That was, of course, preposterous. How could the inventory of a French pastry shop have been worth 50,000 ounces of silver? The appraised value of the bakery itself was under 1,000 pesos.
The Pastry War. The story of the stolen French pastries was widely circulated in newspapers across France. In 1838, King Louis-Phillipe of France demanded that Mexico immediately pay France 600,000 pesos for a long list of dubious claims, beginning with 60,000 pesos for the stolen French pastries. The Mexican government couldn’t have paid France 600,000 pesos even if they wanted to. They didn’t have 600,000 pesos. So, the king of France ordered the invasion of Mexico. Below is a painting of the Battle of Veracuz, in which the French navy bombarded the city’s fort, reducing it to rubble. The commander of the French fleet, Admiral Baudin, then threatened to open fire on the city itself unless the Mexican government immediately agreed to pay France 60,000 pesos for the French pastries. The Mexican government had no choice but to agree, thus ending the Pastry War. However, the Pastry War also led to Santa Anna becoming the dictator of Mexico again. Santa Anna had ruled Mexico before, but after losing the War of Texas Independence, Santa Anna had been forced out of power. After becoming dictator of Mexico as a result of the Pastry War, Santa Anna once again pursued disastrously bad foreign policies with the United States, which led to the Mexican War, which Santa Anna also lost. Santa Anna was a terrible general, but he didn’t know it. He called himself the “Napoleon of the West.” Well, that is how the United States got California, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah; and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. However, that wasn’t the end of the Pastry War.
The Second Pastry War. (aka The Second French Intervention) Even though the Mexican government had agreed to pay France for the stolen French pastries, they never did pay for them. As the years passed, the amount of money that France claimed that Mexico owed them grew enormously because the French kept adding interest to the debt and at very high rates. In 1861, France invaded Mexico again, ostensibly to collect the debt. Emperor Louis Napoleon of France installed an Austrian duke, the Emperor Maximilian, as head of a puppet government in Mexico City. In this second war, France had powerful allies. Many European countries sent armies to Mexico to help the French collect the money. In addition to the European armies, several thousand Confederate soldiers also fought for France. However, this time things were different. Santa Anna was gone, and Mexico was now led by President Benito Juarez, an astute politician and military strategist. The Second Pastry War was much bloodier than the first. Over 50,000 Mexicans were killed in the second French intervention, including over 10,000 Mexican civilians who were simply shot by the French. However, this time the French lost the war and were forced out of Mexico for good, and the Mexicans executed Emperor Maximilian. Hostilities between France and Mexico continued even after the French army left Mexico. Mexico had still not paid for the stolen French pastries. In 1880, the French government finally accepted that this nonsense had gone on long enough and dropped their demand that Mexico pay for the French pastries that were stolen almost 50 years earlier. I think this story illustrates how a stubborn and arrogant government can allow a small incident to spiral out of control. That has happened many times in history. Now – be honest – you’ve never heard of the Pastry War before, have you? I have never met a Mexican history buff who had ever heard of the Pastry War before, and there are a lot of Mexican history buffs here in California. I wonder how many of you are going to look up the Pastry War on Google to see if I made up this improbable story.
People often ask me where the cookies in my chocolate room come from. I don’t make cookies myself, but I am a fussy cookie buyer. A lot of commercially made cookies are made out of terrible stuff – and I mean really terrible stuff – stuff like petrochemicals and animal parts that belong in dog food instead of cookies. My most popular cookies are the shortbread cookies. I use Walker’s shortbread from Scotland, which I think is the best. They are 34% butter. That’s a lot! I get my speculaas and stroopwafels from the Netherlands. They make these traditional Dutch cookies in the United States as well, but the ones made in the Netherlands are the best. After all, who knows more about how to make Dutch cookies than the Dutch? I get some of my cookies from local bakeries, especially the perishable ones, like madeleines. I don’t buy cookies from supermarket bakeries. Supermarket bakeries are almost always the cheapest, but the quality of their ingredients is usually low, and the skill level of supermarket bakers is also usually low. Take a look at the photo below. A woman ordered 2 cakes for her kid’s birthday. She told the supermarket bakery to: “Write Happy Birthday on both.” Look what she got. That photo reminded me of another photo, also below. Exxon ordered a fleet of trucks for use in Saudi Arabia. They told the manufacturer to paint: “No Smoking in Arabic on the trucks.”
Snowball. One of the strangest rental applications I ever received was for a 1-bedroom apartment on McAuley Street in Oakland from a well-dressed, middle-aged woman. She walked through the apartment, filled out an application form and handed it to me. The first thing I noticed was that after ‘Name of Applicant:’ she wrote ‘Snowball.’ I said to her: “Is your name Snowball?” She said: “No. Snowball is the name of my cat.” I said: “But you wrote Snowball after ‘Name of Applicant’.” She said: “Yes. I did.” I was befuddled by that answer, so I read the rest of her application before asking any more questions. It turned out that all of the information on her application form was about her cat. She provided no information about herself, not even her name. For example, after “Occupation:” she wrote: “Companionship.” I said to this woman: “I don’t understand. Do you want me to put the lease in your cat’s name?” She said: “Yes.” I said: “I still don’t understand. Do you plan to live here or is it just your cat?” She said: “Oh Yes, I’m going to live here too.” I said: “Well, why do you want the lease in your cat’s name?” She said: “Well, as I understand the law, if the lease is in my name, then I’d be responsible for paying the rent.” I said: “Yes. That’s right.” She said: “Well, that’s why I want the lease in my cat’s name.” I nodded my head to indicate that I understood her line of reasoning. I thanked her for her application and told her that I would call her if I decided to rent the apartment to Snowball. As you probably guessed, I rented the apartment to somebody else.
Can A Cat Rent An Apartment? You may find this hard to believe, but people do sometimes rent apartments just for their pets. I saw an interview recently with a man in San Jose who is renting a 2-bedroom apartment for his daughter’s 2 cats. Just the cats live in the apartment. The man’s wife is allergic to the cats, and the apartment is next door to his house. Here is a story about it: Apartment Rented to Cats. However, no landlord is going to rent an apartment to a cat. All landlords require that a human being take financial responsibility for paying the rent, even if no one (no human being) is going to live in the apartment. That is because a contract with a cat is not enforceable in court. (You probably already knew that.) However, things may change if Wayne Hsuing wins the Berkeley mayoral election next week. He has some big-name endorsements, including our former mayor. Hsuing is running as an anti-speciesist. Anti-speciesists believe that all animals should have equal legal rights. Hsuing says that his goal is to pass a constitutional amendment granting all animals ‘legal personhood.’ If the Constitution was amended to say that animals are people, then cats would have the right to rent apartments, just like ‘human animals’, which is what anti-speciesists call human beings. I can foresee a long list of problems if I had to rent apartments to cats. For example, how would I get a cat’s signature on a rental application or a lease? How would I run a credit check on a cat? Cats don’t have Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers. Credit bureaus require that sort of information to run credit checks. And how would I verify a cat’s income?
Some of the most brutal and bloody wars in history started off as border disputes over a small piece of land. Hitler justified starting World War 2 by claiming that he was just trying to liberate the Polish Corridor, a small strip of land separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany. There are many border disputes in the world right now that periodically flare up in bloodshed. Look at what is going on in Armenia. Have you ever heard of Hans Island? Hans Island is a barren uninhabited island between Greenland and Canada. When Denmark and Canada agreed to a border line in the narrow strait between Greenland and Canada, they overlooked Hans Island, which sits on the line. Each country claims the island is theirs and has ordered the other country to take down its flag and leave, but neither Denmark nor Canada are willing to give up their claim to the island. In 2004, tensions between the 2 countries reached a peak when the Danish navy sent warships to Hans Island to “assert Danish sovereignty.” The Canadian Parliament responded by ordering their army to “liberate Hans Island” from “foreign occupation.” The Canadian army was preparing to invade Hans Island when both governments realized that the situation was getting ridiculous and withdrew their military forces. Today, both Denmark and Canada still regularly send soldiers to Hans Island, but never at the same time. When the Canadian army arrives on the island, they take down the Danish flag and raise the Canadian flag. They also take the bottle of schnapps left by the Danish army and replace it with a bottle of Canadian whiskey. As soon as the Canadian soldiers leave the island, the Danish army returns. The Danes take down the Canadian flag, raise the Danish flag, take the bottle of Canadian whiskey and replace it with another bottle of schnapps. When the Danes leave the island, the Canadians return. This has been going on since 2005. Now – wouldn’t it be nice if border wars were all this civil?
Hans island War News Update: The Canadian army has recently constructed a billboard on Hans Island that says ‘Welcome to Canada.’ The Danish army has not said what they plan to do about this new provocation when the Canadians leave the island and they return. Now before you laugh at the absurdity of all this, remember that some very bloody wars started over things just as trivial as this. In the summer of 1914, somebody who nobody had ever heard of before shot an Austrian archduke who nobody had ever heard of before in a place that nobody had ever heard of before, and as a result, within a month, the whole world was at war, and 20 million people were killed.
There is an appalling amount of misinformation in history books written for children. Maybe I am too fussy about this because I teach history. Take a look at the photo below from the children’s book: ‘The Lives of the Great Composers.’ Beethoven was a musical genius, but I’m pretty sure that he couldn’t write music after his death. The book also says that: “Wolfgang Mozart was born in 1756. He astonished the musical world when he wrote the Minuet in G in 1751.” Mozart wrote the Minuet in G when he was only 5 years old, which is pretty astonishing; however, it would have been even more astonishing if he had written it 5 years before he was born.
