I received an email this morning that sort of hits the current nail on the head.  Thanks Cody!

I listened to the BS from our President last night and thought how well he spoke.  But then what he was saying wasn’t making a whole lot of sense to me.  If we are so over the top with debt and big government, why on earth would his speech be so filled with New and exciting government programs?  Where is the cutting going to take place?

Of all that he said the only real thing I heard him say was he wanted to fix the infrastructure of our major highways….especially the bridges and over passes.  Didn’t we do that when he first got into office?  Wasn’t that one of the big stimulus programs?  Didn’t we see hundreds of Hispanic people working to fix up the bridges and overpasses in this state?  What I saw back then was a few construction companies with many, many hired Hispanics working to fix up the over passes on I-15 and I-80 through Utah.  I’m sure the other states had the same thing going on.

So, who really benefited by that stimulus?  I don’t feel any safer crossing over an overpass now than I did then…oh well.  I think he has some sort of fetish about over passes and bridges.  Maybe he got an “A” once on a paper he wrote in the third grade or something.

Anyway, back to my writing….the email I received this morning had a picture of something I had never seen or heard of before.  Not that I have seen and heard of everything, but in my desire to find something interesting for you on this site, I do discover lots of stuff that is unusual.  This one is a great find.

Back in the day when the folks arrived in this country for the first time, the Native Americans brought out some smoking materials and shared it with their newly found white friends.  Tobacco.  The new people soon learned that this plant was used not only to smoke, but to heal the ill in a lot of ways.  When they left to go back home and tell the home folks what they had discovered they also took some tobacco with them.

Back home the tobacco was shared among a lot of people and some of them began to dissect it and study what it was made of and what it could be used for.  They too started to use it as a medicine and even to fumigate homes where some dreaded disease caused someone to pass away.   It was thought to heal lung ailments, stomach problems, gout, cramps, coughs and even female diseases.

Now, you might find this unusual, but I have grown tobacco before and trust me, the leaves are very large and very sticky.  When you are going to use it as a smoking material, you first have to hang the plant upside down and allow the leaves to dry out.  Once that is done, you cut the leaves off the main stem and stack them while they continue to cure.  They will dry to a very brittle state and then along comes a humid day (and it doesn’t take much) and suddenly the leaves are moist and flexible again.  That is when you process them into smoking material or roll them into cigars.

So, now that you have this knowledge; these old timers would take the leaves and moisten them up and put ointments on them and heat them and use them as wraps to help heal wounds and ward off the unknown bugs that were causing the person so much grief.  Tobacco was a cure all, sort of.  Now days we know it doesn’t cure much of anything except to kill off a few thousand people every year.  But is that helping with anything?  I think not.

So, here is the picture that was sent to me this morning:

Pretty cool looking doctors case with a bunch of who knows what in it.  But for sure we all recognize the bellows, the big thing in the middle.  Bellows are used to keep the fire going in a blacksmiths shop.  By blowing on the hot coals it increases the intensity of the heat and super heats the metal he is going to pound into some sort of useful tool.  It was used by the ladies to help get supper ready faster in the fire place…the rich ladies had these, the poor folks just had to wait a little longer for their porridge to heat up.

Well, this little device used tobacco smoke to help with a medical procedure.  The tobacco would be placed into a device to get it smoking, then it was transferred to the bulbous unit you see on the lower left.  Then that was attached to the bellows.  The long protrusion pipe on the other end of the bulbous thing was then inserted slowly (I hope) into a persons rectum and the bellows would then be squeezed causing the smoke to enter into the sick persons body….hmmm…I think I would rather have a stomach ache and take care of it naturally.  A smoke enema.

And so I will end this by comparing our Presidents speech last night with this medical devise…Someone is blowing smoke up your butt!

Bears Butt

Feb. 13, 2013