Reckless Roads, Viral Risks & Ringing Bells

**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?
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**Doug Pike** (0:52)
All right, here we go. Welcome again to Fifty Plus, land of the free, home of the gray. You've heard me say that enough times.
Before I get into the stuff for today's show, I wanna remind the people on the Southwest Freeway that if you're going to come flying up behind someone in the left lane, it wasn't me. I watched this this morning on the way into work. I literally watched this guy in a black Dodge Ram pickup truck.
I watched him come flying up in the left-hand lane, the person in the left-hand lane in front of that guy, and some dude with a beard, I don't know anything more about him than that, but an arrogant, pompous idiot, and a danger to anybody else on the road he was.
And what he did was come flying up, and bear in mind, the woman in the left-hand lane was going the speed limit, and maybe a couple of miles an hour more even. I was in the right, two lanes over to the right, and kind of saw all this coming up.
And this guy got behind that woman, and was literally closer to her with the front end of his truck to the back of her car, closer than we stood in the drugstore during the pandemic to pick up prescriptions.
He was four, maybe five feet off her tail, 60 miles an hour, inside lane of the freeway, and I'm sure I wasn't the only person a little bit scared to be anywhere near them.
He's an idiot, and I hope he's... I think he's probably too young to listen, or he might not even be smart enough to put the dial on 950 I'm not really sure. Either way, he was an idiot, and if I could have taken a picture of him, I think I would have. All right, now give me a minute to climb down from my soap box, I guess.
In case you've missed it, the Northwest has been hit by wildfires that already have destroyed somewhere around, I don't know, close to 18, 20,000 acres. Maybe more than that. Very reminiscent of the Pacific Palisades fires in California a while back. I am unsure what started these latest fires, but I do know that wildfires are just among the most dangerous natural disasters on the planet. So far, you saw what happened at Pacific Palisades, and that's exactly what's happening up in, I believe it's Washington or Oregon. I can't remember where exactly, but whatever it is, the scenes after the fire has come through are very much similar to any wildfire disaster. I can't imagine the fear that would wash over anybody who looked out the window and saw fire very high and very wide and throwing smoke 1,000 feet into the sky.
I can't imagine how that would feel and what a sense of urgency that would wash over you would make you do and want to do and wish you could have done later. That's the hardest part. When you have to leave like that and you have a minute to figure out what you're gonna grab and carry with you, you know, doggone well, something important is gonna be left behind. And I feel so sorry for those people.
I pray for anybody who has to go through something like that. Down here, we are more susceptible to flash flood than to wildfire, really. And at least after a flood, there's a chance you might be able to recover some of your belongings or maybe some meaningful paperwork. Wet can dry.
Something gets wet if you can get to it before everything smears and becomes just a pasty wad of gooey paper, there's a chance you can split the pages very gently and carefully and maybe recover something.
Something at least. But man, oh man, burned to ash is just, it's final. Homes that are destroyed by fire before firefighters can do anything to stop that fire, they're gone. And everything in them is gone. I hate seeing those houses where nothing's left standing, but the chimney or the slab. It just shows you how intense those fires are too. And the cars that are in these scenes, it's just horrific. I can't imagine that.