Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005 | 11:02 a.m.
Nobody is immune from doing dumb things along the road of life.
In my case, lapses into stupidity are pretty common.
I remember once grabbing a hamburger at a local fast food restaurant in a fit of hunger and noticing that it was only half-cooked. It was seared on the outside, but bright red inside.
Flashes of the Big Hamburger Scare a few years earlier raced through my mind, along with the education I received about the potentially deadly bacteria, E.coli.
If I had been smart, I would have driven back to the fast food place and asked for another hamburger. But I was too lazy to do that, and boy was I hungry. So I took my chances.
Today I still remember waking up violently ill in the middle of the night. It took me two days to recover.
But I learned a big lesson -- just like the lesson learned by the latest wave of dumb drivers who got stuck in floodwaters last week and had to be rescued by emergency front-liners.
If you've lived in Las Vegas for any length of time, you know how stupid it is to try to drive through a flooded street. But every time the rains come people still do it, and the rest of us end up footing the bill for their stupidity.
Yet I have to applaud local authorities for not trying to revive the so-called "Dumb Driver Law" that was tossed around here a few years ago in the aftermath of another period of intense flooding. The law sought to fine motorists who ignore flood barricades and charge them for the cost of being rescued.
They actually have a law like this in Arizona. In theory it sounds great, but authorities there have no way of measuring whether it has been an effective deterrent. People haven't stopped driving into floodwaters when it rains in Arizona.
I tend to subscribe to the theory that you can't legislate against stupidity, especially in a state like Nevada that prides itself on its independent spirit.
You can, however, point out stupidity when it has a detrimental effect on the public, as in the case of drivers who act like idiots when the floods come.
There's nothing more humiliating for a dumb driver than being captured on the front page of the newspaper or on the evening news clinging to the roof of his car with floodwaters all around him.
I like the Regional Flood Control District's idea to mount a public awareness campaign to get the word out about the dangers of driving into flood zones.
But putting up billboards or airing television commercials simply saying it's a "bad idea" isn't much of a deterrent.
Imagine the attention the campaign would receive if the flood district published a list of drivers who were rescued at public expense or displayed mugshots of the morons in its television spots.
Let's see how many motorists act like idiots when they know the rest of us are watching.
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