A Phone by the River

Today, Doug Pike discusses a lost phone, the Baby Boomers, and the American Prarie Reserve.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hey John, how's it going today?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Well?

Speaker 2 (00:20):
This show is all about you, only the good. This
is fifty plus.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
With Doug Pike, Helpful information on your finances, good health,
and what to do for fun. Fifty plus brought to
you by the UT Health Houston Institute on Aging, Informed
Decisions for a healthier, happier life, and now fifty plus
with Doug Pike.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
All right, here we go. Tuesday Afternoon starts right now,
got it right this time? I'm not going to try
to say it again either. I'll say the M word
because it was that just about five minutes ago. Got
lots to unpack again this morning, as usual, especially on
a Tuesday, because I missed all the juicy stuff for Monday,

(01:06):
some of which I'll cover, some of which I'll let
sit unless anything else happens with it. And still at
least a couple of more really nice days to come.
We've got some clouds to keep the temperatures down a
little today, and for the first time in a long
time this morning it was nice to not have any
moisture on my windshield and the driveway felt really good

(01:28):
to tropics. Still not wanting to give up the ghost
just yet, but the two hurricanes currently in the Atlantic
Ocean just don't pose any threat. Honestly, They're both expected
to do this. They danced their way across the Atlantic,
got kind of close to us, maybe dabbled a little

(01:50):
bit down in the Caribbean with churning up some waves
and some rucus, as they say, and now both of
them are effected to turn hard to the north and
then even harder back to the east and just disappear
into the Atlantic Ocean like so many storms have done

(02:11):
so far this year. Knock on wood. I don't want
to jinx anything, but I'm really happy to see the
outcome of these two, especially since the one behind Gabrielle
what is that, I can't remember the h a cane,
whatever it is, but the long and the short of
it is it's now steering itself away from where my

(02:32):
niece and her family live, So that's also good news.
Markets were down across the board, as you just heard
a minute ago, not significantly, but down nonetheless, and red
as red oil was down a buck and change as
you heard. I think it was inside of sixty three
dollars a barrel just a minute ago, and gold up.
But it was up about twenty bucks a little while ago,

(02:54):
but not nearly so high as it's been in the
past month or two. Room for improvement across the board.
Moving on, the Texas Tech University System has directed its
faculty to recognize only two sexes, male and female. This
in response to President Trump's executive order intended to defend
women in their privacy in private spaces. The university recognized

(03:20):
First Amendment rights of its employees in their personal capacity.
The story said, but since they worked for the state,
they must comply with state law when performing their duties
at work, and I don't think that's too big a
hill to expect these people to climb. After seeing this,

(03:40):
I found interesting and I moved it up a few
notches on the list this morning after seeing the success.
Federal help has been to slow crime at a bunch
of big cities d C. For one, The Governor of Louisiana,
Jeff Landry, has formerly requested now as many as a
thousand louis A National Guard personnel under Title thirty two.

(04:04):
It's kind of waving the white flag. We need help
with our crime problem. It's up statewide violent crimes, carjackings, homicides,
all kinds of things, and the governor sees federal help
as a way, hopefully to offset manpower shortages in local
law enforcement. This is something that is I don't I'm

(04:26):
not really a big fan of this, but when local
enforcement can't enforce the law and criminals are in the
case of Louisiana, Louisiana compared to other states forty four
point eight percent higher for violent crime thirty point I
think it was thirty points something maybe seven percent higher

(04:47):
for property crimes than the entire rest of the country
than all the other states. They need help, they really do,
and they're not being They don't have the resources to
do it themselves apparently, So I think to bring back
the safety of the people who live there, maybe we

(05:07):
need to ramp it up a notch. And again, it's
not my favorite thing to see, but if local law
enforcement can't or won't or or has its hands tied,
like happens in so many big cities where the police
are arresting bad guys as fast as they can, but
the judges they see turn them loose. And as I've

(05:29):
talked about, as I learned from my friend who was
in HPD for twenty five years, that's their job. When
those criminals are acting as much as they're doing, that's
what they do twenty four seven, well not twenty four
to seven, but that's what they wake up and go
to work to do, is commit more crimes. And unfortunately
they don't get caught nearly so many times as they

(05:52):
commit crimes, Otherwise they just might finally wind up in
jail or prison or wherever they belong for doing what
they're doing. Pretty rough, Pretty rough. From Breitbart, comes word
that the Senate Minority Too, think you will, Senate Minority
Leader Chuck Schumer is pushing for a government shut down,

(06:13):
and they say it's The story says it's for fear
of being challenged in a primary by AOC. He is
trying to appeal to this this hard left bunch that
wants a bunch of money for their whatever they wanted
for and hopefully according to well, that's what he was,

(06:34):
that's why he's doing this. According to Senate Intelligence Committee
Chair Tom Cotton, the left wants it's one point four
trillion dollar package, so that they can fund free health
care for illegal immigrants, they can fund money to keep
PBS and NPR and their one sided views on radio
and television. It's a temper tantrum really thrown by Schumer

(06:56):
and a couple of other og Democrats who kind of
got used to getting whatever they wanted for the past
four years, and only now there's somebody standing in the
way and they flat don't like it. So as as
has become custom on that side, they're going to do
whatever they can to find some payback for President Trump

(07:17):
and all the good he's trying to do and all
the things he's trying to accomplish to turn this country
around before it turned on its own ear, if this
government shuts down, by the way, from a story from
The Daily Caller, the Senate Campaign Group has planned a
two day I guess you could call it a placation

(07:38):
at a five star restaurant or not restaurant, five star
resort out in the right in the middle of Napa
wine Country in California. Also, several key dims expected to
and supposedly expected to pop in and say hello, They're
going to a five star resort for a couple of days.
Just have a little fun. You know, governments shut down,

(07:59):
we don't need to be there. We can go play.
I certainly hope that's not on taxpayer money, but I
wouldn't be surprised if it was. Alrighty, we're at the top,
or not the top, but at the bottom of this segment,
and on the way into it, on the way into
the next one, I'll tell you about berry Hill Baja
Grillz family run restaurant on fifty nine in sugar Land
that's been around for some thirty, I don't know, thirty

(08:22):
something years. Been the best fish tacos you can find
out that way for the past twenty something years. I'm
sure my wife and I found berry Hill more than
twenty years ago. And now it's your turn to try
a casual, family friendly restaurant. You don't have to get
dressed up. You just go in kind of as you are,
and there's family stuff, tables and boosts to the left,

(08:42):
there's a sports bar to the right, and outdoor dining,
which is going to be really really comfortable over the
next couple of months. It's going to get better and
better as the weather lends itself to outdoor dining. If
you are new to Sugarland. Go in there and just
kind of announce that. And when you're placing your order whatever,
look over to that sports bar part and sa, hey,

(09:02):
by the way, I'm new around here. Can anybody? Can
anybody let me join them? And I'd almost bet you
someone will. I did see that happen one time. I
witnessed it, and it was pretty pretty uplifting, to be honest.
Everybody nobody turned around and looked at that person like
they had two heads. There were a couple of hands
went up in the air. Come on over here. That's
the way berry Hill's been. That's the way it'll always

(09:24):
be as long as Wendy and her son are running
that place. And I think that's going to be for
a long time to come still. Berryhill Sugarland dot com
is a website great traditional tex mex food with a
little berry Hill twist from the two people who have
been in that kitchen each for more than ten years now.

(09:45):
They're very good at what they do. Berryhillsugarland dot Com
aged to perfection.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
This is fifty plus with Doug Pike. All Right, welcome
to fifty plus again. Thank you very much for sharing
your afternoon with us. I'm gonna go get some lunch
after this. I'm kind of hungry, and I didn't eat anything.
I didn't need anything substantial this morning.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
I read somewhere that I need to be I need
to be eating this that and the other at this
that and the other time of day. And I want
to do all that, but sometimes it's difficult to squeeze
it all in before I go to any other kind
of down putting news I want to. I'm gonna try
to balance it out today with some good stuff and

(10:29):
then also some kind of just interesting fun facts to
know and tell them. Under the header of strong phone endorsement,
I wrote this one had taken from a story from
the Good News Network. I love that little website. It's
it's very uplifting. There's all kinds of interesting stuff. Some
of it's kind of nerdy. There's space news and things

(10:51):
like that, and I actually have some of that, but
much of it is about breakthrough science and just you know,
and I know, the stuff that balances the universe with
all the bad that's going on. So anyway, somehow this
guy from New Jersey loses his phone an iPhone on

(11:14):
the Delaware River. Fourth of July was back in the
middle of the year. That phone was found and recovered
from the bottom of the river, presumably in pretty shallow
water more than two months. In more than two months
in the river, found on September nineteenth by a woman

(11:34):
who was floating down the river, I guess, or wading
in the river whatever with a family member. They took
it home. They plugged it in and it turned on,
and the woman's son, she's about our age. The woman's
son showed her how to find the emergency contact information.

(11:54):
They called this guy and said, hey, man, we got
your phone, and they met up. He's the phone. And
his response after being asked, okay, how bad is it?
The only real flaw it had after I think it
was eight nine, ten weeks in the water somewhere in there.
The only thing was a little flaw in the camera

(12:16):
operation and how it registered light. All his photos are
still there, all the contents still there, all the apps
still there. The only downside for him, there's no way
he went ten weeks without a phone, So he's out
the cost of that new phone. But I guess for
sentimental it's a good story. It's a good icebreaker story.

(12:40):
Next time they're at the river, Well, guess what happened
to me? Or at a party, a barbecue at work
around the water cooler. Do we even have water coolers anymore?
We kind of have a cooler here, but it's not
the old school style that you see in old movies
and whatnot. This this is kind of a of sorts

(13:02):
officials in Ohio, Ohio. It says here pleading with people
to quit stopping in the middle of the highway. What
it sounds like, and what the law enforcements finding out
from some of the incidents and accidents that have happened here,
or that people are realizing they're about to miss their exit,
literally stopping on the highway and then making ninety degree

(13:26):
turns to get to the ramp. I saw one of
those once about probably, I don't know, it was several
months ago now, on fifty nine, and I saw this
guy in the left hand lane all the way over
on the shoulder of the left hand lane, and I

(13:47):
went by and realized that he was rolling. And I
looked in my rearview mirror, and quite a way's back,
it seemed. But at freeway speed it doesn't take long.
I see traffic coming up in pretty much all the lanes,
and the guy on the left hand shoulder thought, surely
he's not going to do this, and I just kind
of put my nose back in front of me, and

(14:09):
I was praying that this guy was going to make
it across. And then the next thing you know, I
look in my mirror and there are cars spinning and
bouncing in all directions. That guy had tried to make
it all the way across the freeway and caused a
horrible accident. I didn't really see exactly at impact or
how it happened, but man, what a mess that was.

(14:32):
And I just pray nobody got seriously hurt. But at
the speeds they were all going, somebody bound have been
banged up pretty bad. In a new survey, this I
find not surprising at all. Eighty six percent of people
say they feel concerned about their own health when a
coworker comes to work visibly sick. You two will bother

(14:56):
you somebody If I'm in here coughing thumbs up, all yeah,
I'm the same way. And I think most people ever
since COVID, we've really gotten aware, and I think we've
actually probably hurt the pediatric's business, well, especially our own
general practitioners. We're not nearly in there as often as

(15:18):
we would have been. I know I used to get
I had problems with sinus infections for a long time,
and immediately I would get an appointment. I had a
doctor I had connections with through his nurse I had
heard direct number, and she would get me in same
day because she knew how important it was for my
voice to work. So I never really came to sick work.

(15:39):
I'd get a steroid shot and get on the antibiotics
before anything could really get a good grip on my throat.
And now I feel I feel like just because everybody's
washing their hands, everybody's doing the things they need to
do to stay healthier, the world is a healthier place.
And I'm really glad about that. Admit, they think less

(16:03):
of a coworker, of a coworker who knowingly shows up
sick by the way and around here and correct me
if I'm wrong. Will But we hear all the time.
I got a little scratch in my throat, but it's nothing.
I got a little scratching my nose, my nose is running,
but it's nothing. A couple of sneezes, but it's nothing.
And most of the time. Now, everybody who's in that

(16:27):
little circle and ends up getting that kind of stuff
knows that they do have allergies. I get allergic reactions
to I think it's mold and ragweed, and I don't
think pollen. But in the springtime, in the fall, I
go through I go through the zertech and stuff to
keep the symptoms at base. So nobody thinks I'm crazy
and shouldn't be here. Oh mercy, how much time do

(16:50):
I have? Will not much? I bet three minutes. Good.
Let's go back to the big pages, shall we? Late
Night host Jimmy Kimmel. It's kind of kind of made
me smile a little bit. His big, briefly, very briefly
awaited comeback. He was on, he was off, and then
he was kind of halfway on and halfway off, and
then all of a sudden he's all back and back

(17:12):
there and ready to go, and he's on the air again. Well,
that comeback kind of fell on mostly deaf ears and
closed eyes. According to the ratings. There was a brief
spike just right at jump. I guess people wanted to
There were a lot of people probably who never had
watched him much, if at all, and wanted to see
what he was about. I watched him enough to know

(17:34):
that he spent the majority of his time bashing our president,
and that that was off putting. I don't think that's
what's His original show premise was going to be. His
original show mission was going to be, but he turned
it into that. And this time it spiked a little

(17:54):
bit after that recent suspension, which was, by the way,
because of insensitive comments about the killing of Charles Kirk. Anyway,
the new numbers show that he has lost more than
sixty percent now of his audience. I think it was
sixty four percent total, and the networks in the stations
can't make money off those numbers, not even late at night.
I would be surprised if if anything positive for him

(18:20):
comes out of the tremendous Witch. That's like the number
of people moving out of California, which is gonna keep
going up if they keep coming up with some of
the plans they have. I had, I don't know if
I have it with me. I had something from the
other day that came out of California. Just yet another
goofy plan they've got, and none of it's gonna work.

(18:41):
It's really not speaking of television. By the way, that
the season premiere of Law and Order airs this week
and portrays ice agents as villains in the story storyline.
It's a pretty complex plot line, really, but it clearly
shows that just the disdain of writers and producers for
federal law enforcement and just like that this long running series.

(19:06):
My sister in law actually, by the way, had a
speaking part in a speaking part in an episode of
Law and Order many many years ago, So hats off
to her for her acting on network television. That was
kind of cool. But anyway, I got a hunch they're
gonna shed a lot of viewers after that one. Let's

(19:28):
go to Country Boys Roofing, shall we? John Heiman and
his son Zach running the show. Now, they've got crews
who can take care of any roofing need you have.
What you need to do first is get somebody on
that roof of yours from Country Boys Roofing to give
it a full diagnosis, front to back, side to side.
They're looking for little things that could become big things.

(19:48):
If there's a hole in your roof, you know it.
If there are shingles falling off, you know it. But
there's stuff that they can see from up there on
the roof, giving it a good close inspection that you
might miss, maybe a little hail damage whatever. Some hail
in here I don't know about six weeks ago now
in the Greater Houston area, and the people who needed
help I'm sure have gotten it. Country Boys Roofing will

(20:11):
help with whatever you need, whether it's a very small
repair or a total roof replacement. In the event you
do need a total roof replacement, John and his crews
will use the best materials, they'll give you the best deal.
They'll help you out as well as they can. And
if you are military past or present, if you are

(20:31):
a first responder, or if you are an educator, you
can get fifteen hundred dollars off that new roof replacement,
even if you don't qualify for any of that too.
This is something I like and I appreciate him doing it.
Even if you don't qualify as one of those things,
you can just drop my name and he'll scratch out

(20:52):
the price he had given you and take one thousand
dollars off. Very simple. He's got a financing company too.
If you can't write a check for that whole roof,
that's not a problem. He's got a financing company he's
working with now that can help spread those payments out
a little bit and make it a lot easier to
get that brand new lid on that house. Here is
because you know you need it. Countryboysroofing dot com Country

(21:14):
with a K, boys with a Z. That's for you
millennials and Gen xers and Gen z's and all that.
For US boomers, you can just spell it the traditional
way country Boys Roofing, and you'll see his site right
below something else. It's there, Countryboysroofing dot.

Speaker 1 (21:30):
Comyn They sure don't make them like they used to.
That's why every few months we wash him, check his fluids,
and spring on a fresh coat o wax. This is
fifty plus with Doug Pike. All right, welcome back to
fifty plus. Third segment starts right now. I got an
email this morning from Aaron, and Aaron borrowed it from

(21:54):
the Eagles Trace Facebook page, and I've seen it before,
so I think it's I don't know.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
This may be a revised version, but anyway, what it
does is share for those of us who maybe have
started to forget a little bit or or don't really
realize what our generation, and the one before and the
one after. Kind of somewhere in there has been through.

(22:23):
And so I'm going to kind of just roll through
these things and share what is in this post. And
it just starts off saying many of our friends are
no longer with us, and those of us still here
lovingly called the elderly. I don't know if that's lovingly
all the time, but it is anyway. And even I

(22:44):
don't like that word. I kind of cringe at that word,
but it says what a journey it has been. Born
in the forties, fifties, and sixties, grew up in the fifties, sixties,
and seventies not so bad, studied through the sixties, seventies
and eighties, fell in love, built families, or chose our
own paths. In the seventies, eighties and nineties, we settled

(23:07):
into two thousands, We grew wiser in the twenty tens,
and here we are still going strong into twenty twenty
and beyond. It shows how long ago this was written.
Think about it. It says we've lived through eight different decades,
two centuries, two millenniums. We have truly seen it all.

(23:28):
We went from making long distance calls through an operator
to holding the world in the palm of our hands
and making video calls. Handwritten letters to instant messages, black
and white TV to three D vinyl and cassettes and
then CDs to streaming music online. From standing in line

(23:49):
at a video rental store to watching anything we want
on Netflix. Learned on typewriters and punch cards. Today we
carry gigabytes in our pockets. We lived through polio, meningitis, tuberculosis,
swine flu, and even COVID nineteen, went from tricycles to

(24:10):
hybrids to electric cars, played marbles checkers of Monopoly on
a table. Today kids play candy crush on a phone,
drank lemonade from glass bottles, and ate vegetables fresh from
the garden. And through all of that we adapted. We're
the generation that witnessed the birth of molecular biology, the
discovery of DNA and RNA, and the rise of gene therapy.

(24:33):
Where the generation that has lived an analog childhood and
a digital adulthood faced more chains than any other generation
in history, and we made it. Well a life, what
a story, what a gift? It says here. Yeah, we
are kind of unique in that in that way, there
there's no more, no more undigital. You can't turn back

(24:55):
the clock on any of this stuff. And true, the
truth is that before Will's generation and the ones between
him and me one or ones, I don't remember where
there's a couple of them, before those kind of fizzle out. Indeed,
there will be more change, things that we can't even

(25:15):
conceive of just yet. Something new and unique is gonna
happen for them, just like it happened for all of us.
If you go back far enough, you look at airplanes,
for example, now you've got the big jet engine airplanes.
Not that long ago, back in the fifties or so,
and maybe the early sixties even yeah, I'm sure of it,

(25:37):
there was still a whole lot of airplane or mostly airplane,
passenger air flights, no jets pushing people around around the
country at several hundred miles an hour. You had to
get on an airplane, hope all four engines started, Hope
all four of them stayed running all the way to
where you were going. It wasn't that scary, really, but

(25:59):
still it was. That was the problem. And now that
the jets that are up there now can run, they
could probably limp back home on one of four engines.
I would imagine automobiles the same way we went from
In my day, we had some really cool cars, went
through the muscle car phase, and a lot of my

(26:19):
high school buddies whose families had a little money, bought
them some really really fast cars, and sometimes they got
them out and back unscathed. A lot of times they
banged them up a little bit because it was just
that much power in the hands of teenage drivers. And
fortunately they had the reflexes most of them to get
the things back home in one piece, but some didn't.

(26:39):
Some didn't. A lot of stuff going on. There's a
huge comment, by the way, fast forwarding to today. Uh so,
just big giant, pretty prominent space thing, and the experts
believe it just may be an artifact of ancient l
E eighty, not alien alien technology. This thing said to

(27:03):
weigh thirty three billion tons. I don't know who put
it on a scale. I guess they get that through
density tests or whatever. And it's supposed to be about
three point one miles across. Now it is not expected
to get near enough to us to be anything to
worry about. But the fact that there are some really

(27:25):
smart people. Considering even the possibility that this thing is
ancient alien technology. That gets my attention. I believe there's
room in an open mind for faith and for big bang,
and I truly do, and I've reconciled all of that.

(27:48):
I've asked myself a million different questions over the years
i've been on this earth, and I've got a pretty
good handle on where I am with this. But if
it really proves to be ancient alien technology and we
can somehow make that turn that into reality, boy won't

(28:08):
that be a headline. I'll be interested to see how
it played it, how that plays out. Let's go back
to the fun stuff for just a second. Mmmm, tiktuk
tic duck tick duck tik tuk. Oh No, wow, this
is interesting. A man claiming to be Colonel Sanders great
great great nephew says KFC blocked him for complaining about

(28:34):
them sexualizing Colonel Sanders. I didn't even know that it happened,
did you will? No? I didn't think so. So guess
what he did. According to this story, he leaked the
secret chicken recipe. Now I can't I can't imagine that.
It's like super top secret I'm sure many efforts have

(28:54):
been made in the past and come very very close
to the secret recipe of the Colonel. But nonetheless, if
he actually leaked the real recipe, that could be a
little bit of a problem. That could be a little
bit of a problem. I don't want to do that.
Just yell one minute, will or kind of a part
of a minute, Okay, I'll do this. There's a new

(29:15):
cancer treatment. A Polish woman became the first person treated
at Northwestern University. She came all the way over here
for this because she has this very rare eyeball cancer
and they treated it with something called the Hepsido kit
to cure it, and it's showing great signs of actually working.
This thing's been around. The kit whatever it is, has

(29:38):
been around for a while now, and it delivers drugs
directly to the tumor somehow. Don't ask me how they
do this stuff with eyeballs and tiny little body parts.
I really don't know. But I'm so glad there are
people who can research all this and make it come
into reality, because we're gonna save a whole lot of people,

(29:58):
and at some point, who knows, we may need all
those people we need them all for now, that's for sure.
I'm really happy when anybody who suffers from some horrible
disease gets at least some remission, at least some relief
from whatever pain it's causing, and they can go on
to live a much better quality of life. Champions Tree Preservation.

(30:23):
That's Erwin and Robin Castelana's up there on the north side,
up in Champions, as you might suspect, And what they
do is drive out to your house, take a look
at all your trees, and then tell you what's right
or wrong with them. Sometimes they just need feeding, Sometimes
they need more water. Sometimes they need less water, which
I didn't know was a thing with big oak trees.

(30:44):
I thought they could soak up a swimming pool full
if you'd put it on them. But that's not true,
according to Irwin, and I certainly trust him. If you're thinking, well, good,
we're done with storm season now, what you're quite wrong.
Actually we're still in it officially until November, which sounds crazy,
but it's true, and it's not a bad idea to

(31:06):
make sure your trees are going to be good not
only through the end of that but right on through winter,
when they can also experience some real stress if we
get a bad, bad coal snap like we had a
couple of years ago. Champions Tree Preservation. If they need
feeding your trees I'm talking about, If you need feeding
for your trees, they can send a crew out to
do that. If you need a couple of limbs taking off,

(31:28):
if you need some pruning, if you need Heaven forbid.
They don't like it, but sometimes a tree he just
has to go. It can't be saved. And they have
the crews and the equipment to come do all of that,
and then once that tree is out of the hole,
if it has to come out. They also own a
tree farm that grows native Texas trees and they can
plant something for you that can handle everything nature has

(31:49):
to throw at it around here two eight one three
two zero eighty two zero one two eight one three
two zero eighty two zero one, or go to the
website and take a look there for Championstree dot com.
Championstree dot com Old Guy's rule.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
And of course women never get old if you want
to avoid sleeping on the couch. Okay, well, I think
that sounds like a good plan.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Fifty plus continues. Here's more with Doug final segment for today.
Hopefully there'll be another one tomorrow. God willing h let's
go where I want to go. I put quite a
few things to this is interesting I found after watching
the the division and subdivision of the Katie Prairie for

(32:39):
so many years and feeling so I don't know, I
can't say let down because it wasn't my land. It
never was. It wasn't my It wasn't what I and
all the people who had such great times out there
back from the roughly from about the seventies through the
well through the turn of the sin there was a

(33:01):
lot of outstanding outdoor activity out there on that prairie,
and now it's mostly warehouses and neighborhoods, and it just
it saddens me. But on the flip side of that,
up a lot farther north than where we are, for
many many years, this group called the American Prairie Reserve

(33:23):
had been trying to acquire parcels of land in hopes
of joining and just creating one giant piece of land
that's wide open to the public, that it would connect
two of our country's national treasure sy Charles M. Rushall
National Wildlife Refuge and the Upper Missouri Breaks National Monument

(33:45):
in Montana. And finally, when a very long hesitant owner
agreed to sell this last bit of land that actually
blocked a three point eight mile access road, all of
a sudden there's full on access from end to end
of this beautiful, beautiful piece of the United States of America.

(34:10):
That road blocked. That road was blocked for so many
many years. And now the people who are in Montana
and Idaho just have a straight shot right into the
interior of that monument and through that National Wildlife Refuge.
That's a fantastic bit of work on their behalf. I
wish the Katie Prairie Conservancy had had a shot at

(34:33):
doing something like that. I don't think the money would
have been easy to find, because once the developers saw
the growth westward out past Highway six, they started buying
up anything and everything out there and throwing up houses
as fast as they could. That's where much of Katie
came from, is that was on the other side of

(34:58):
the Attics Reservoir. But they've built pretty much as close
into it now as they can and built right out
to the edge of it. As anybody who goes down
Highway six between roughly between I ten and what maybe
West Timer. There's a lot of a lot of ground
that got eaten up out there. I used to hunt

(35:19):
very close to I guess the first hunting idea was
just a little ways west of Highway six, actually north
of I ten, west of Highway six, and then west
of Highway six, also off west Timer what's now Wes
Is it West Timber Parkway passed there or just ten
ninety two? I can't remember exactly, but the first few

(35:40):
waterfowl hunts I did out there weren't very far off
of Highway six north or south of I ten. And
beautiful land out there, tons of agriculture. And now we've
got shockingly low rice prices and a surplus really this
year because the technology that's available to farmers now has

(36:03):
enabled a roughly doubling of the yield from that crop.
And who boy, how did I get talking about rice farming?
Good Heavens, here's some good news for the remaining few
surfers in this audience, or the relatives of them, and
especially in case you're gonna be surfing outside of Texas,
where there might be some really big sharks hanging around

(36:26):
over in Australia, there's research tested four new fabrics to
be used in wet suits, each of which is believed
to be capable of stopping and is so far in
the testing stopping most of the penetration of shark bites.
Now that that might not prevent a big shark from
breaking bones with just the sheer power at its jaws,

(36:47):
but if it can deflect the teeth and keep them
from puncturing and getting into and cutting up arteries and
veins and whatnot, that greatly reduces the chance of serious
blood loss, which is always your concern in shark attacks.
Around here. It's mostly small sharks, so it's not that
big a deal to be in the water. As I've
said for thirty years, maybe close to forty now counting

(37:11):
the newspaper time. Sharks and snakes and all sort spiders, scorpions,
all of that, all of these things that bother us,
hornets and bees and whatnot. You don't have to be
afraid of them, but you darn sure better respect them
and know how to avoid them, and know how to
get away from them if they happen to give you trouble.

(37:31):
So anyway they're testing on that probably save a few
lives a year if people are wearing those things. That
all depends on how much they cost and how effective
they end up being. I saw a piece of technology
that I'm not so sure we really really need, but
it's coming close, and that is the possibility of holograms

(37:53):
on our phones and our pads and even laptops. I
would imagine. I'm not so sure that's a good idea,
to be honest, unless they can be automatically deactivated in cars.
I don't want. I don't want some teenage driver trying
to learn a new dance move from a hologram while
he's driving down the street anywhere near me. I'm not

(38:18):
gonna mess with that. I'll tell you what. Let's go
ahead and punch out. I am feeling pretty good about
breaking out of here and then getting bat real quickly.
How many seconds? Well, can I bet I can do it? No,
I can't. Oh twenty yeah, I can. Quick list of
autumn safety checks but we all need to do in
our homes. Check your heating system, We're all supposed to
do that every year. Check your chimney, make sure that

(38:40):
it's gonna be clean and wide open. Check your smoke
detector and make sure you're outdoor walk wayser lit. That's
some good old folks advice. Huh, we're out see tomorrow, Audios.