The morning is damp and cloudy. Gracie has been outside most of the time since we woke up around nine. She hadn’t been feeling great the last couple of days but today she is her usual self. She played with half a dog biscuit for about 15 minutes, ran around the yard until her face was filled with disgusting spit and wiggled her whole butt when I was talking to her. That’s my Gracie.

The Patriots are underdogs for Sunday’s game. That got me to thinking about where the word came from in the first place. Why dogs? I know people sometimes refer to feet as in my dogs are really tired and I know a dirty dog when I see one, canine visibly but human usually hidden as in sneaky. I’ve been with guys who have gone to see a man about a dog. That one puzzles me even more. I like the tail wagging the dog as a neat metaphor, the same with a dog and pony show. Then there’s top dog, the opposite of what started this weird conversation with myself. It was then I decided to stop wondering as it was only getting worse so I started hunting but not with a dog. According to The Times of India, never a source for me before, “The word ‘underdog’ comes from the language of dogfights in the late 19th century. In those fights, two dogs attacked each other and the loser was termed the ‘underdog’. The winner was termed as ‘top dog’. However, though the expression is originally American, the first recorded use of underdog was seen in descriptions of people by British newspapers.” That’s one mystery solved.

Every Christmas when I was a kid one of my favorite gifts was that year’s Information Please Almanac. Think of it as a compendium of information, a mini-Google on paper. I’d spend hours combing through the different sections. The book satisfied my curiosity about so many things and introduced me to so many more. It was my go to it proof for some facts I could spout from memory. I learned state mottos, the GNP for a variety of years, World Series champs and the amount of wheat produced in the US year by year. I used to open a page at random and read whatever was there. Sometimes it was really boring but other times I learned neat things. One year my mother gave me the 1947 Information Please Almanac in my stocking. After thumbing through, it seemed as if I had been born in the olden days. There were pages of average prices for consumer goods. A gallon of gas was 15 cents, and you could park your car in front of the new house you bought for around $6000. You ate lunch using pieces of the loaf of bread you bought for 15 cents. Your salary?Around $2800.00.

I love Google for all the same reasons I loved that almanac, but now the whole world is my source, and I get pictures to boot. Wow, to boot, where does that come from?