Lionfish

Today, Doug Pike discusses lionfish, lost earrings, and skydiving.

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, 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 brought to
you by the UT Health Houston Institute on Aging, Informed
Decisions for a healthier, happier life, and now fifty plus

(00:43):
with Doug Pike.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
All right, here we go. Thank you for joining me
on a Wednesday, smack dab middle of the week. I
guess it is if you're just rolling out of bed.
By the way, you missed some fog this morning, but
not a whole lot more. It wasn't cold, It wasn't
even cool. It was pretty neutral. I guess as temperatures
go around here, we're looking at maybe a high of

(01:06):
eighty at a low tonight of sixty seven. I think
it was about the same as yesterday and the same
as tomorrow's forecast. But tomorrow brings an increasing chance of
rain all the way into Friday, and then that kind
of tapers off as another little front blows through here

(01:26):
and takes our temperatures and drags them down about twenty
degrees on both ends of the day. The highs will
be in the actually for several days once this thing hits,
we won't even get to sixty degrees if they're right,
and then low's overnight in the low forties, which is

(01:47):
not a threat really, not a threat to any plants
you've probably got in your front yard, not a threat
to golf courses, not a threat to much of anything
growing out there. If they can't take forty degrees, you
probably shouldn't growing it in Houston off to market, I
can just I just heard the announcement from the Fox
News broadcast. Actually the Dow was off a couple of

(02:09):
hundred points, I think something like that. But that's just
profit taking, really, and I don't I don't foresee that
as anything to even worry about unless you are a
like a day trader maybe, and you you just turn
on a dime to make a few dollars in profit
off of a buye you made yesterday a little or

(02:32):
two days ago, you probably sold off this morning, and
if enough of you did it, that's a little bit
of what we're watching this morning. Also some profit taking
by the folks who threw money at gold recently. Announce
of gold lost more than forty dollars early I think
it was still though at the last time I looked
this was earlier this morning. I'm not I'm not addicted

(02:55):
to this stuff, but I do check it once or
twice before the show. Last I looked, it was at
forty four fifty four announce, which is still when you
think about it's a staggering amount of money for an
ounce of gold, something that would fit in a thimble basically.
But that's what buyers and sellers are agreeing is a
fair price today. So if you want to sell some,

(03:15):
go sell it. If you want to buy some, go
buy it from somebody. I've been talking back and forth
with Brad Schweiss from over to Houston Gold Exchange again
about some things, and he he just he's been in
this business for fifty something years and it really doesn't
matter to him what the price is today because he
knows that if he just sits on it long enough,

(03:37):
it'll be higher sooner or later. But if you're looking
at gold that you bought many many years ago for
three four five hundred six hundred, even one thousand dollars
an ounce. You can quadruple your money. It's it's a
fascinating thing. And the only I didn't start really watching
the price of gold until I met Brad and got
to know him. And now that I know, well, I

(03:59):
don't know how it's been business work, but now that
I at least I understand a little bit of it.
Not much, but I understand a little. And it's kind
of fascinating to watch it go up and down and
up and down. Oil speaking of down back into the
mid fifties now, and it looks like President Trump's negotiated
exchange of about thirty to fifty million barrels of oil,

(04:20):
which he says is what we need from Venezuela to
recoup our costs for removing Maduro from office. Over there.
That country's sitting basically on an ocean of oil, but
the chemical makeup of that oil makes it tougher to refine.
It's what I believe the term is sour crude, and
it takes extra steps in the refinement process to make

(04:43):
it usable. They've got tons of it, though. The short
term plans are to begin importing Venezuelan crude, and then
we can refine it if we need to along the
Gulf coast. And then a longer term there's likely going
to be some new refining capability back in Venezuela where

(05:03):
they just don't have what they need to ship out
a better product than they're shipping out now. Either way,
short term price is likely to stay about where they
are for a while, which is good for folks who
drive a lot, but not great for the companies that
explore and drill and extract and refine anytime it gets

(05:24):
It's not dangerously low yet, but it's still low enough
that I bet there's some I bet there are some
big rooms full of smart people in the exploration business saying,
you know, we might want to just sit on this
for a while. Finally, slightly downward ticking mortgage rates too,
and forecasts are for the federal interest rate to drop

(05:46):
another full point this year, which is good news for
a lot of goods and services, especially hiring products like
houses that'll help those guys a lot. By the way,
before we get to the news part, I wanted just
to remind you guys that all of us here, all
of us behind the microphones here at iHeart. We love

(06:08):
working for business owners. We love helping share their products.
The sponsors that I have on this program, a lot
of them I've worked with this one in the Outdoor
Show as well. A lot of them I've worked with
for a very long time, and I've gotten to know them.
I've had personal experiences with them, and that's what makes

(06:28):
our connection valuable to your business. I don't just get
Let's say one of the sellers comes to me and says, hey, well,
you do commercials for X y Z. Well, not until
I know more about X y Z. I want to
meet X Y and Z, and then I want to
talk about their X y Z gadget, and then I

(06:49):
want to understand how that works and how they are
with customer relations and all of that stuff is important.
It truly is. And I take great pride in getting
to know my endorsement people, whether it's by phone or
whether it's a face to face. I've got a face
to face meeting with a person I think maybe become
a new client this afternoon. As a matter of fact,

(07:11):
all you gotta do is get in touch with me too.
That's the only phone call you have to make to
get this all started. Just call me your email me
Doug Pike at iHeartMedia dot com, and we'll see if
it's a good fit. And if it's not, I'll tell
you if it's not something that I would be comfortable with.
I doubt that any of you have anything like that though,
But if it's not something that is a good fit

(07:32):
business wise for you, I'll say so and we can
maybe look at it again six months from now, a
year from now. But all of us here want to
make sure that we are able to speak for people
who would like us to help with their marketing, because
that's what we do. I've been doing this for twenty
six years. Twenty six years, well almost twenty six. This

(07:54):
is year twenty six, so I'm right there, all right.
We got to take a little break here. Speaking of
outstanding sponsors, this one is I think ten years plus now.
Ut Hell's Institute on Aging. This collaborative of providers from
every field of medicine, literally every field of medicine. There's
somebody who has to get this credential, if you will.

(08:16):
I don't think there's a membership card or a secret
handshake or anything like that, but the association with the
Institute on Aging comes from going back and becoming more
educated in your specific field. Whether you're a cardiologist, a pullmonologist,
an orthopedic surgeon, a trainer, a personal a psychologist, a psychiatrist,

(08:41):
whoever you are, optometrist, ophthalmologist, you have gone back and
learned more about how seniors work and how you can
apply your knowledge to seniors. That's who these people are.
They know us better than we know ourselves, clearly, and
they are all over town, mostly in the medcenter. As
you might imagine this, that's the hub of that's the

(09:02):
epicenter of Southern medicine, is our medcenter. But a lot
of these providers also work in outlining clinics and hospitals
and whatnot. So you know that you can be seen
if you want to, by somebody who is part of
this Institute on Aging without having to drive into the
medical center. And a lot of us don't like to
go down there. Ut dot edu slash aging. Start there,

(09:25):
take a look around, start just scrolling through all the
resources they provide at that website, and then go from
there to looking to find the right provider for you
who could help you keep living longer, keep living happier, healthier,
more productive lives, ut dot edu slash aging.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
Now they sure don't make them like they used to.
That's why every few months we wash them, check us fluids,
and spring on a fresh code O wax. This is
fifty plus with Doug Pike. Thanks for listening, certainly to
appreciate that. Now for the news, and I'm going to
change my twenty twenty six template. I very briefly mentioned

(10:06):
that to Will, but didn't tell him what I'm gonna do.
And it's nothing, it's nothing major, but I just want
to keep the show more balanced overall. And so instead
of kind of front loading most of the news, the
newsy news, the.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Real juicy stuff that everybody's talking about add nauseam, and
I've tried to limit how much I get into that,
and just enough to encourage you guys to go look
for yourselves, because I trust you to have your own opinions.
I respect all of your opinions, no matter what you
find and what you determine to be your opinion about

(10:44):
something that I mentioned here, it's your opinion and it's
just as valuable as mine at any rate. What I'm
gonna do is alternate between kind of these hot topics
from politics and crime and immigration and finance and whatever
between them, and good news or other not so hot
but nonetheless interesting stories, at least interesting at least to me,

(11:08):
I guess, and I hope ultimately to all of you.
So right off the top, we were still dealing with
this arrest and extradition of Dictator Maduro from venezuela man
who pretty much destroyed a once very magnificent country and
who knew exactly how his country was being used as
a loading dock for Narco terrorists. And so we went

(11:30):
over there and arrested him, which is what some Democrats
called for pretty much right up to the top, or
right up to the time that had happened. And now
they're complaining about Trump doing exactly what they said he
should have done not long ago. President Trump also got
a call from New York City's socialist mayor, Mom Donna

(11:51):
yesterday to express his displeasure with that arrest. I doubt
that he even got Trump on the phone. He probably
had to leave him message, like all of us would
if we called the White House. Can I speak to
President Trump? Who are you? I'm the mayor of New
York City? Click? Why would I you know? I give

(12:16):
President Trump credit for even inviting Mom Donnie to the
White House. That was clearly a strategic move and one
that I don't know whether it served mon Donnie well
or poorly to have done that, but it just I
found it interesting. And then I checked myself and realized

(12:36):
that I'm watching a chess game. I'm watching a chess game.
It's very interesting, it really is, anyway. So I just
don't understand why why anybody would be upset when a
man whose country was a launching pad for boats loaded
with drugs that kill a few hundred thousand Americans young

(12:57):
Americans every year. That's a major problem, right. The Left
is defending, in essence, the delivery by supporting Maduro. They're
defending the delivery of fentanyl to our country where it
kills all these people more than any war ever has.

(13:18):
And it happens every year, all these young people die.
It's just not making the news as much as it
should be because it it's not politically popular to talk
about that. Oh, I've still got people running around this
country thinking Maduro is the greatest thing since sliced bread
for Venezuela, and it's not. I think we're I have

(13:42):
some numbers here, I have them, Yeah, here they are. Okay,
so more than eighty percent. I think it was eighty
three percent. I read this morning, eighty to eighty three
right in there. It's more than eighty and less than
eighty five. That percentage of Venezuelans have been plunged into
poverty by Maduro, and fifty three percent of that country's

(14:06):
population live in extreme poverty. Means they got nothing. They
barely get enough to eat to keep them alive, they
barely have sufficient shelter to be comfortable day and night.
And I don't even know what that amounts to in Venezuela,
and I'm kind of glad I don't. I wouldn't mind

(14:28):
understanding it better, but I wouldn't want to live in
those conditions. But they've been left with no choice. Okay.
So now here's where I flip to something that's just
more interesting than global news. And I'm not entirely up
to speed on this one. This was the first mention
I've seen of it, actually, and I hope it's not
kind of like electric cars or global warming or something

(14:50):
like that. But France has banned forever chemicals, and I'll
explain what those are soon they've banned those chemicals throughout
the country. Now there's an asterisk there, and I'll explain
that in a second. Two. These chemicals are used to
make things water resistant, basically waterproof clothing, nonstick pans, ski wax,

(15:11):
firefighting equipment, a lot more than that. But they're kind
of getting into everything and getting into us, and worth noting,
by the way, the law that bans those chemicals in France,
which went into effect when the calendar flipped, excluded thankfully
firefighting equipment, and thankfully, I guess nonstick pans they're preempted.

(15:35):
They don't have to do that. I guess. Well, you
know how the French love their crapes. Similar bands expected
here in Maine actually was the first put one in place.
Already there an alliance of twenty three brands Nashally. They
got eighty four thousand stores and do more than a
half a trillion dollars in annual sales. They too, plan

(15:56):
to ditch these forever chemicals as well well, and are
they're also in stain resistance products, and I don't understand that,
nor do I understand why they have to be in
industrial carpet fibers. I guess it's just to keep the
the to limit penetration of anything that would discolor or

(16:17):
weaken those fabrics and stains and whatnot. I'll tell you what,
I'm gonna go ahead and jump out here and be
a little bit ahead for Will in case I spend
too much time talking about Alan Nancy Kibbie in their
place over on Trinity Bay, which is Cedar Cove RV Resort,
right at the end of Tri City Beach Road, near

(16:38):
Thompson's Bake Camp, right on Galveston Bay. All the amenities
you can imagine in a place like that, Park your
RV for a night a week, all winter long, if
you if you dare. Cedar Cove's got electric water and
sewer hook up at every single site, plus Wi Fi
free Wi Fi all the time. They got a big
bathhouse there, full showers and what not to clean yourself

(17:01):
up after a long day, maybe jogging along the shoreline
or maybe wrestling big red fish out of that water.
It's pretty good fishing along that shoreline this time of year.
You know what you're looking for and know what to
throw at them. Concrete roads and slabs throughout the property,
and there's even a convenience store to help you pick
up what you forgot, because you always forget something when

(17:21):
you go on a trip like that. If you don't
have an RV, not a problem. Alan Nancy have made
arrangements to rent one to you. It sleeps for people
very comfortably. Bring the fam a standard at standard American Family,
take them down there. Park that thing, well, they'll park
it for you. It'll be ready. You just roll up
in the minivan and they'll tell you which one's yours.

(17:44):
Go over there, hop in and enjoy that lifestyle without
having to actually go out and drop a ton of
money on an RV, and then find out you might
be the only person on the planet that doesn't like
just listening to the rustling of the fronds and the
palm trees, or the little lap of tiny waves slapping
onto the shoreline in the evening. By the way, they

(18:05):
have a noise restriction ordinance. That's not ordinance, it's a rule.
The noise stops at ten, it doesn't restart until eight
o'clock in the morning, so you've got a good chance
to get a nice comfortable night's sleep. And the temperature,
boy open the windows, gonna be beautiful over there for well.
It'll be a little chilly next week, but it'll get
right again. Cedar cove Rvresort dot com. Check it out.

(18:28):
Tell Alan Nancy I said hello Cedar cove Rvresort dot com.

Speaker 1 (18:33):
Aged to perfection. This is fifty plus with Dougpike. Fifty plus.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Thanks for listening. Third segment starts right now thanks to Sammy. Ah,
Where do I want to start here? What was I on?
What was I on when I left? Will? I can't remember?
Hold on, I'll see. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It was
about the chemicals that provide water protection or moisture barriers.

(19:02):
They're not using them in no stick pans. You don't
have to worry about that. In fact, I got as
a Christmas present, my wife remembered that I had talked
long ago about getting a really high grade, high tech,
if you can call it, that omelet pan. That's what
I wanted, and she nailed it. She got me one
that I think it's the same kind that I've seen

(19:26):
at high end brunches on Sundays when I've gone to those.
I don't make many of those, and I know I'm
pretty sure it's the same pan that the guy who
makes omelets at Moody Gardens was using this past year
when I hosted or mced the Fly Fishing Film Festival

(19:46):
down there, which is coming back. I'm pretty sure I
don't have the dates on it yet, but as soon
as I find out, I'll let you guys know, because
the really cool way to enjoy that weekend is to
stay at least one night there and see both presentations.
There are different films that show on Saturday and Sunday,
and they're not long. It's not like you're gonna be

(20:08):
there for Gone with the Wind and Titanic. We're talking
about a couple of solid hours of entertainment each night
on what I believe to be the largest movie screen
in the entire state of Texas. It's cool, it really is,
and I hope a bunch of you can come down
there and join us. Anyway, back to it, I got that,

(20:31):
got that? Yeah, here we go. So back to the
news news, and actually back to Venezuela. Armed men on
motorcycles down there, now, this is this is the kind
of thing that is gonna impede the rejuvenation of that
country if they can't put a stop to this. But
there are armed gangs. If you will riding around on

(20:51):
motorcycles and stopping people at random looking for those who
supported the arrest of Madure in an effort to they
want to maintain control. They want to intimidate anybody who
wants change for that country, change that would get in
the way of all the bad stuff that's going on.

(21:13):
And so many of them now are they're just scared
to leave their own homes. I really feel sorry for
the people of Venezuela, the good people of Venezuela. Anyway,
they're scared to leave home because if they do, somebody
might stop them like that, an armed person might stop them,
say give me your phone and open it up and

(21:33):
just scroll through there and see if they can find
anything that is a positive mention of what's happened down there.
And from the same story on Wednesday, and arm group
briefly detained fourteen journalists. I don't know what that did
except give fourteen people great story material on just how

(21:53):
bad it really is down there. Once they got out
and once they got home or back to some safe
haven somewhere, it's very frustrating and frightening. Okay, so now
I'm gonna flip the script again. I'm gonna go to
something a little bit lighter. You don't need to take
notes on any of this. If you can remember one
or two keywords out of a story I talk about

(22:14):
today and just send me an email to Hey, what
were you talking about when you were talking about this, this,
and this, I'll send it to you. If you've never
heard of lion fish, you know what they are, will, Yeah,
I'm sure you do. Uh, here's your introduction. Okay. They're
a very highly invasive species, actually pretty cool and colorful.

(22:34):
They're beautiful fish. They inhabit warm water reefs around the
world basically, and are also a highly When they come in,
everything else gets pushed out. Basically, they're gonna nudge out
anything that competes with them for food or habitat. Lionfish
round ups have been around for quite some time. Or

(22:57):
we'd be going out to reefs and other areas that
support fish and all we would see would be lionfish.
I think it would be very horrible. The round ups
are held almost at least once a year, maybe twice
in some parts of Florida. Divers go out there and
skewer these things and bring them back and off with

(23:19):
their heads. Probably they're very very toxic to the poison
and the spines on their backs. If you look them up,
you'll see the spines coming off of their backs. And
even if you just barely brush one of those and
it gets anywhere inside your skin, you're gonna wish it
hadn't happened. Like I said, they're really very, very invasive.

(23:43):
They're the feral hogs of the sea. That's a good
Texas reference there, because we'll never get rid of the
feral hogs now, and we'll never get rid of lionfish.
On the plus side, they are very tasty too, but
like I said, dangerous to clean because even a slight
little touched to a spine's gonna make you hurt a
lot in Cyprus halfway around the world. Though lionfish are

(24:06):
on the Menus now have a bunch of restaurants there
and the demand for it. It's a very tasty fish.
You can manage to get one cleaned without having any
of that toxing in it. Demands helping lower the number
of linfish off that coast, probably not enough to really
make a difference, but hey, it's a start. Kind of
like what they did with nutrients and the nutrient the

(24:28):
Great chef's competition to make the best nutrier recipe over
in Louisiana. That's been gosh, that's been at least twenty
twenty five, maybe thirty years ago. I didn't mention Minnesota's
fraud scandal yesterday, but I will today. US tax dollars
being dished out there talking about it in Washington, DC
right now, dished out like dollar bills in a strip club,

(24:49):
making it rain. Just money that was supposed to help.
This is These dollars were supposed to help recovering addicts,
provide one on one therapy for autistic kids, run daycare centers,
meals for hungry children, billions of dollars, about nine billions
so far and still counting. That made countless bad people

(25:11):
filthy rich without ever lifting a finger. Jewelry cash, luxurious
cars and homes and vacations, and wire transfers to China
and East Africa. That according to a Fox News story.
And every time investor investigators have turned a page lately,
they just trip over more abuse. Governor Tim Wallas up

(25:34):
there's distanced himself from this one about as fast as
he could, but he's doubling down and going the other
way now. And man, he's already in the rip current
and he doesn't he's not wearing a PFD. He's I'm
kind of curious to see which way this goes for him.
Speaking of fraud from a viewer story, California already has

(25:57):
conceded that it lost fifty five billion dollars in unemployment
benefits since the pandemic, mostly funneled into the accounts of crooks.
Preliminary report from two candidates for state office, by the way,
based on whistleblower reports, estimates that the statewide fraud could
be as high as two hundred and fifty billion dollars.

(26:18):
That's a big number, and there's still lots of work
to find the actual number. But even if it's half
that much, that's that's a giant chunk of tax change
that didn't land where it was intended to land and
never helped anybody it was intended to help. That's a shame.
We got to take a break. We'll do that. We'll
be right back to wrap it up. You're listening to

(26:40):
fifty plus on AM nine to fifty KPRC. What's life
without a net? I suggest to go to bed, that's
sleep it off.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Just wait until the show's over sleepy back to Doug Pike,
as fifty plus continues, all.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
Right, welcome back, thanks for listening. Certainly to appreciate it.
Every time I hear that song, I think of my
grandmother's house over in New Orleans, down close to Gosh.
I don't remember the exact main drag that it was
close to, but there was a trolley line on it,
and she was just a few blocks off that trolley line.
So if you had, if you needed back when she

(27:16):
and her husband bought that my grandfather bought that house
a million years ago. My father was raised in that house,
and when they bought it, I'm sure a lot of
people walked to work or got on that trolley and
it was a nice short ride. Get your umbrella out
when it's rained, which it does quite a bit in
New Orleans. Beautiful place. I saw photographs of that house.

(27:42):
I looked it up a while back on one of
the real estate websites, and turns out that house, which
I would be willing to bet anything and everything, that
that house when it was built probably sold for less
than twelve thousand dollars, and currently it I said about
four fifty four seventy five something like that. I don't know.

(28:04):
It's a very modest shotgun house, is what they call them.
They're just long and skinny and got some good memories
from over there, really do now. I favored I wouldn't
have told either one of them this, but I favored
my parents, my grandparents down in Florida because they lived
on the water and I had short ride with mom

(28:26):
or dad or my granddad or my grandmother up to
the pier on the Atlantic Ocean, where I spent an
inordinate amount of time. But yeah, that was all fun. Boy,
those are good times. Cast some great fish down there
in Florida too. Holy cow, my first tarping, my first snook,
my first king mackerel, first red snapper, all of those things,

(28:51):
all those first big fish too for a little bitty kid,
I probably I bet I didn't weight sixty five pounds
soaking wet the last year I was there, all right.
Back to the the news, dujure and to the lighter
side again. I actually did kind of two rough and
tumbles back to back, and I apologize for that. I
don't know how that happened. Really, something, this is something

(29:12):
that I would bet maybe maybe at most ten percent
of you knew before. I'm gonna tell you I didn't
know my hands in the air. I had no idea
about this. Well, how much do you know about birds
of paradise? On a one to ten scale? Three you
kind of know what they look like. Okay, here's something

(29:33):
you may not have known, and I want you to
give me by a thumbs up. Yes, I knew that.
Thumbs down, No, I did not. Did you know that
those beautiful feathers on the bird of paradise actually are biofluorescent?
I didn't either. And there's a photograph that there were
some ichthyologists doing studies of fish and their bio illumination.

(29:54):
And then there's some stuff that jellyfish kind of do
that in the Gulf of Mexico at night they laid
light up on under certain conditions. But anyway, the photographs
of these birds with their feathers all splayed out and
their tail feathers do it. The crowns on their heads
do it. The fluffy patches on their shoulders and breasts

(30:16):
do it. They just glow bright, bright, shar truce in
I'm presuming ultraviolet light really kind of cool, really is
So there's one that, yeah, I would get you think
it's lower than ten percent new that will probably I
bet it was only like two or three. An ichthyologist

(30:38):
and an avid birder might have known. Well, a lot
of people know about bio illumination but or biofluorescence, but
not many of them know that the birds have it.
So anyway, there you go. Remember the story. But and
this is real quick because it broke this morning. But
we all saw it coming that Hilton branded I think

(31:00):
as a Hampton end that refused to provide rooms to
ICE agents, after which Hilton issued a statement said no,
we don't do that. We welcome everybody, and we told
the owner to cut it out the very next day,
And this is all happened in the last seventy two hours.
Very next day, an undercover guy went in a reporter
and identified himself as working for DHS and for ICE

(31:23):
and asked if he could get a room. Clerk said no, no,
we don't do that. The owner told me not to
do that, and so Hilton yanked that property's affiliation, which
I think was the only possible right thing that they
could do in that situation to keep from keep from
having At the corporate level, it's not that huge a problem.

(31:44):
So long as that other owner says, okay, I'll I'll
go back and do it the way the company says
to do. But when he said no and that guy
got refused, they've got to do that or they face
a nightmare of boycott. Woman in Iowa needed an X ray.

(32:06):
How much time do I have? Will three? Four? Four? Good?
Because I'm gonna need this? And then another one a
woman and Iowa needed an X ray for something who
knows what, And she had a pair of earrings on
that she had to remove for the X ray. These
were not just any earrings, though they were left to
her by her grandfather. It doesn't say any more significance

(32:28):
than that. But they were left to her by her grandfather,
I presume, formerly in her grandmother's ears. And she put
them in a little napkin and kind of folded it
over so as not to make them terribly visible in
a tempting target. That's the world we live in now,
right And anyway, as she was dressing and ultimately left

(32:49):
the room, she forgot the ear rings, and she remembered
when she got home that she'd forgotten them. She remembered
when it was or where they were and she also
remembered tidying up the room by taking that napkin and

(33:10):
maybe another one or two that she had used for whatever,
and tossed them into a trash can. And she even
remembered hearing an unusual sound when it turned out to
be the napkin with the earrings hit the bottom of
that metal trash can, but she just dismissed it as
it was something in the can and not necessarily whatever

(33:32):
was in that napkin. Bottom line is, she calls a
hospital says, hey, look, this is what happened, and rather
than just say too bad, so sad, these folks up
in Iowa, employees from top to bottom in that institution
ultimately passed metal detectors over nearly sixty bags of hospital garbage,

(33:55):
and I'm sure there were some other pieces of metal
in that garbage, and they finally whittled it down to
about eight or nine bags, where those ear rings probably
were in one of those, if they were ever going
to find them. And then one of the technicians in
there brought in actually brought in not a metal detector

(34:15):
but a portable X ray machine and ran it methodically
over all of those bags of garbage back and forth,
back and forth. No, that one's clear. Take it out,
back and forth, back and forth. Check that one, throw
it back in the stack, and ultimately they found those
ear rings. That was pretty good. Good story will make
you feel good about the world. Yeah, ambivalence, that's fine.

(34:40):
The wildest story I've seen in a very long time.
To have a full minute, I'll say, Okay, I got
a minute and a half. This is perfect. I don't
have to rush it.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
Then.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
So down in Australia, that's a long ways away. Right
down in Australia. This guy's a skydiver and he and
a couple other skydivers and a pilot are up at
fifteen thousand feet. This guy bails and as he does,
that little thing that they throw out that helps the
parachute open, that kind of a little, tiny, little baby

(35:10):
parachute on top of the big mama parachute gets tangled
up with the tail of the airplane. Tangled up with
the tail of the airplane. Now they're at fifteen thousand feet,
pretty big deal. Planes reacting very badly to the new
drag at the tail end of it. Pilot was about
to jump. He'd already called the tower and said look,

(35:30):
I can't control this airplane. I'm about to bounce. But no,
they said, just just hang on to it if you can.
And so this guy, Adrian Ferguson used his little hook
knife to cut all eleven lines on that one chute
and get himself free of the airplane, after which after
which he released his backup shoote and ended up landing safely.

(35:53):
The other two people they probably did jump. It doesn't
say what they did, but I would imagine if that
plane was still a hot mess, they might have bailed too.
In any event, even with still some stuff hanging off
that airplane's tail from the original shoot, they got home
safe and sound. All's well, that ends well, we'll see tomorrow.

(36:13):
Thank you very much for listening. Audios