Grocery Store Gripes, Food Labels and Common Sense

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Remember when it was impossible to misplace the TV remote? Because you were the TV remote? Remember when music sounded like this?

Remember when social media was truly social?

Doug Pike (0:17)

Hey John, how's it going today?

SPEAKER_1 (0:20)

Well, this show is all about you.

This is Fifty Plus with Doug Pike. Helpful information on your finances, good health, and what to do for fun.

Fifty Plus is sponsored by New Promise Neuropathy. Lose the pain and numbness, get your life back. newpromiseneuropathy.com. And by Honestly Texas Rice. Taste the Texas difference. honestlytexasrice.com. And now Fifty Plus with Doug Pike.

Doug Pike (0:52)

All right, here we go. Welcome to Fifty Plus again. All eyes at present on the Gulf of America, where Mississippi and Alabama look like the landing strip for Hurricane Isaias, which is, that's probably the most awkwardly spelled hurricane name I can recall in all the years that I've been watching hurricanes. But the name is just a name, and Isaias is expected to make landfall tomorrow along the coastlines of those two states, Mississippi and Alabama. Most of the models I trust show it peaking as a cat two hurricane, nothing stronger. That's way better than a three or a four or a five, but it's still a hurricane, and it's still going to generate a lot of wind and water and do a lot of damage on its way inland, where it's supposed to just fizzle and fall apart as they normally do once they hit landfalling and go north, and way, way inland, over the hills and beautiful countryside, frankly, in Mississippi and Alabama over that way. If you've never traveled over there, it would be worth driving through there sometime and just taking a look around. Got some really good fishing over that way as well, and some pretty doggone nice golf courses too. And in Mississippi, at least, casinos. So if that's your thing, then go do it. I'm not a big casino guy, frankly. I haven't been in one in probably, I'd guess, at least 20 years, somewhere in there. Back to the local side of things. Smooth sailing through the weekend, except for, and I don't know where this really comes from, a 10% chance of thunderstorms Friday evening. That's a very specific prediction, especially when it's bookended by sunshine and puffy clouds. I'm taking that almost to be, that might have been a misprint even.

10% thunderstorms late in the afternoon. No rainfall at all for at least 48 hours on either side of it.

That means, for me at least, that means not gonna be some rain on Friday, tomorrow. Next, even marginally real shots at rain around here are gonna be Monday through Wednesday, and even they aren't, but 20% chances. So in other words, make your plans for golf, for fishing, for kite flying, whatever you want to do. And I wouldn't even carry an umbrella, honestly. I think carrying umbrellas is a way of making it rain, rather than keeping it from getting you wet.

Although I will, I'll walk that back a little bit. When it comes to golf, if there is a threat of rain, I tend to put an umbrella on my bag for that particular day, because for golf at least, I think the umbrella keeps the rain away. The markets, so I can go ahead and get this out of the way, kicked off a little ugly this morning, actually. All four indicators were down half a point or so. Gold still holding around, it was a little north of $4,100, and it was up five bucks on the day once the market finally opened. Worth noting, by the way, oil was up almost $4 a barrel to $92 and change. I don't like that trend, it's still better than what we dealt with for years during the past administration. This spike has lasted months. Biden's bungling of petrochemical regulations and such under leadership that did everything it could to break the oil and gas industry and force us all into electric cars and away from having gas stoves, remember that? There was a time when we were threatened with no gas stoves, we were all going to have to go electric. And we endured four years of that garbage, and I'm quite glad it's over, frankly. So on to something I found really telling kind of about the overall intelligence of more people in our workforce than even I could have imagined. This morning, on the way up the Southwest Freeway toward the Galleria, well, two things actually, both related to signage, and I'll get to, I'll complete the first one, and then I go to the second one. So, right before I got on the freeway out in Sugarland, I heard Sky Mike over on KTRH talking about a wreck at the 610 Loop that had traffic backed up to about Hillcroft and hadn't been cleared yet. They were working on it, but it hadn't been cleared. But on the big sign where I entered the freeway down around the fountains over there on 59, news there was that the wreck at Loop 610 had been cleared. I trusted Mike, but then again, those signs are supposed to help us get around town and let us know where the problems are. And that sign said, not a problem. Let's go see, right? So I had called Mike right then, but I've seen those signs enough times to know they're, I'll be polite, they're not always right. Let's just leave it at that. So I keep driving and driving and not needing to touch my brake pedal really at all until I got almost up to West Park. And by then, everybody's playing by the rules. We're making our way and feeling pretty comfortable. And then, okay, I'll interject something here and come back to it. Another sign, this one of those temporary lighted signs that let you know about future construction or road work or whatever.