This has been pretty entertaining today. I’ve been catching a bunch of Nick’s videos in between stories, and holy smokes – what he’s finding doing his trademark wander around and knock on doors is, well, classic Shirley.

That sweet face and so innocent, pre-pubescent teenage boy’s voice, ‘If I open a hospice, can I get a brand new Maybach, too?’

The kid is a treasure.

This is where it all starts. He’s at what looks like an old, rundown two-story motor inn. The kind you might remember from trips as a kid, where you drove through some sort of an arch into a courtyard sort of parking lot, and all the rooms faced inward.

The problem is that there are no guests, and, astonishingly enough, all the hotel rooms seem to be hospice businesses. There’s, like, thirty of them in this one motor lodge.

There are also very many nice, shiny new cars.

WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

How peculiar.

If you’ll remember, back at the end of January, Dr. Oz was loudly rebuked and condemned as a racist for going to a four-block area of Van Nuys, California, where he found forty-two hospices that had soaked taxpayers for some $16M already.

WHAT WERE THE ODDS?

It turns out that Shirley is the latest to discover the booming dying people business in California. A week ago, even CBS News decided that rather than call someone racist for looking, it was time they went looking themselves.

What they found blew some corporate minds.

CBS News

@CBSNews

CALIFORNIA HOSPICE FRAUD: There’s a stretch in Los Angeles with 500 registered hospice companies within just three miles of each other. And 89 in a single building. But when we visited, we found empty offices, piled-up mail, and phone lines dead.

WHAT WERE THE ODDS?

This fellow was awfully cranky. And to be honest, were a loved one of mine in hospice, not exactly the comforting presence I envisage, you know?

He could at least take a bath or something.

And let me tell you – the fraud numbers we’re talking about in greasy Gavin Newsom’s California should make every American sick to their stomach.

Being the thorough sort of fellow Shirley is, he decided to find a business partner and go into the hospice business himself.

Of course, he wanted to do it correctly, and for that one needs advice from experts.

So he and Derrick, his partner, went to one of the businesses advertising themselves as ‘hospice consultants’ to see if they could get some tips on how to get started.

Wait a second – it’s almost as if this ‘consulting hospice business’ didn’t really have anything to do with hospice consulting.

The young girls seemed very nervous and confused for secretarial help.

How peculiar.

Undaunted, Nick finds a fellow back at the motor lodge who is willing to sit still for a little quizzing about how business is going.

DO YOU LIKE TAKING CARE OF OLD PEOPLE? ARE YOU THE ONE WHO GOES OUT TO VISIT THEM?

But all good things come to an end, and somehow, word got around to all the rooms…oh, excuse me. Hospice businesses. That the little guy in the parking lot was asking questions.

Suddenly, there was a rush for the expensive cars and the freeway.

Nice rides, though.

Shirley’s whole forty-minute report is here when you have time. And blood pressure meds are close by……SNIP