Colon Blow

I was in my hotel room this morning, just waiting around and I had finished my newspaper and had a few minutes. After skipping over the running 30 second soundbytes festival that is Today, I came across an infomercial that immediately made me stop and take notice. It was two guys around a table, one of whom was a dead ringer for James Lipton. They were plugging (pun intended) a colon cleanse product. As Lipton was acting like he'd never heard about the product, the inventor was going on about how good it was and they had a screen crawl that had an amazing statistic: "Most Americans have between 5 and 22 pounds of impacted fecal matter in their colon." That blew me away, in part because I think there is no way that could be true. I know that things can get more dense in the colon, but that's like having 88 Quarter Pounders with Cheese sitting in your bowel. I just think that's impossible, unless you're dead or dying. Can anybody let me know a bit more about that? Also, they said that there's an old saying: "Death begins in the colon." Maybe it is, maybe it isn't...I tend to think it isn't.
Other random thoughts: I'm listening to Chris Matthews (he's the keynote speaker here at my conference) and he's a windbag [edit: not only is he a windbag, he wasted our time - I think he spoke for 20 minutes and didn't say anything insightful at all]. Also, I love the DC restaurant The Prime Rib. It's worth getting dressed up and paying a lot once in a while when you have what a lot of people consider to be the best Prime Rib anywhere in the world.