And the moral of this story is...

...if something is on fire, don't stand close enough to get burned!

Yesterday I was driving home after a rather long meeting.  I was anxious to get back to Nilai to pick up Trip so that we could get home.  I was trying to hurry but got stuck in the beginnings of rush hour traffic, so it took me 20 minutes to drive 2 blocks to get onto the highway.  When I finally got on the highway, I was feeling totally irritated at all the lame drivers who don't know how to merge properly and caused the jam in the first place.  Well, as I was thinking my negative thoughts I started to notice that a lot of people seemed to be broken down on the side of the road.  I passed a big truck pulled over with a repair man looking at the engine.  I also passed a minivan that had pulled over and just flagged down someone to help.

Then I noticed a column of smoke coming from traffic going in the opposite direction.  I managed to see a sedan with its engine engulfed in flames.  I have never seen so much fire coming from a car before.  The most interesting part was that, in the couple of seconds I had to see this before turning my attention back to the road in front of me, I saw a little crowd of people standing near the burning car.  They were clustered around it and standing much closer than I would have.  I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if the gas tank caught on fire and the car exploded with all those people standing right there...sometimes I have to question the intelligence of people.