What I Learned Today

Yesterday and this morning, upon returning from The Walk, I settled into the recliner for fifteen minutes with a bottle of water and Dan Patrick before crawling upstairs for a shower.

ESPN generally bores me, the NFL Network at this time of year is filled with dribble - top ten this , best that, MSNBC is too heavy after a walk so, in stumbling around the 40 million channels we get I caught Dan Patrick.

I love Dan Patrick. At least I think I do.

He and Keith Olbermann were the most creative, funny, intelligent and informative sports reporting duo I have ever enjoyed on ESPN. The current crop and almost everybody since are a bunch of Keith and Dan poseurs who are nowhere near as funny, not as intelligent and definitely not as creative.

They are sheep.

We are a million miles down the road from the Keith and Dan days and they each now do their own thing.

Olbermann is now on ESPN2 and is still Keith Olbermann. I just discovered his show the other night and I dig it. He flaunted his intelligence as usual, and indulged in his sarcastic sense of humor, which I love.

I sacrificed Around The Horn to watch him and was not disappointed.

Dan Patrick is different.

He seems wimpier, less cocky, his show is the typical sports talk show with four sycophantic guys at the controls who he incorporates into the show.

Can' quite put my finger on it but he seems to have less bite than he did years ago.

However I learned important stuff today.

During one of those random discussions you always get on sports talk radio because they have so much time to kill, I learned where the expression "blowing smoke up your ass" comes from. And I discovered a new website - todayifoundout.com.

todayifoundout.com - "Back in the late 1700's, however, doctors literally blew smoke up peoples' rectums. Believe it or not it was a general mainstream medical procedure used to, among many other things, resuscitate people who were otherwise presumed dead."

It was done with a tube, a bellows and a fumigator and was typically used on drowning victims. It was believed the tobacco smoke stimulated the heart to beat faster, resulting in respiration.

The origin of this practice appears to be Native American customs of using tobacco to treat various medical ailments, which European doctors picked up on "and began advocating it for treatments from everything from headaches to cancer."

I imagine they prescribed sugar for diabetes patients as well.

When the proper tools were not available, blowing smoke was sometimes done with a pipe. A common, tobacco filled smoking pipe.

Take a minute to think about that. No matter how much you hate what you do for a living, be thankful it doesn't require you to insert your pipe into an orifice for which it was not intended while blowing on the smoldering, tobacco filled end.

Unless you're into that kind of thing.

In 1811, English scientist Ben Brodie discovered through animal testing that nicotine was toxic to the cardiac system.

It took several decades for the practice to die out after that.

Decades.

So there you go. That is the kind of meaty and pertinent stuff you learn on a sports talk radio/TV show.

I haven't played around with the todayifoundout.com website much, as I am a highly motivated and exceptionally busy man.

But it seems promising.