Every so often, perhaps once in a coon’s age, I’ll hear an idiom and
wonder where it came from. Let’s look at the age of a coon for example. My first question when hearing the phrase, “I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age”  is, “How long do coon’s live?”

I answered this question by looking it up on the internet and found that raccoons live from 5-7 years in the wild and 14-17 years in captivity. If you tell someone who you haven’t seen in 25 years that it has been a coon’s age you would technically be wrong. You should say “It’s been a coon’s age plus a dog’s age since I saw you.”

I have often wondered about the accuracy of the phrase, “You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.” Was a scientific test conducted to prove the preferred lure for flies? And if it was, how in the world did dog poop not make the list? Truth be told, you can catch way more flies with dog poop than you can with honey, vinegar, and potato salad combined.

What about the phrase, “I say this tongue in cheek.” It’s means that you should not take that person seriously. Have you ever tried to talk with your tongue in your cheek? Go ahead, try it now. You sound funny don’t you? Hardly intelligible. When you say things tongue in cheek, nobody is going to take you seriously anyhow because you will sound ridiculous. This phrase is unnecessary and needs to be done away with. I thay this tonginshee.

I hate it when someone says “I’m head over heels in love.” I have nothing against love, and agree that it is something very special. That’s why it bugs me when I hear “head over heels in love.” That’s not special. Your head is always over your heels. It’s supposed to be that way. Look in a mirror, you are head over heels right now.

If you walk around on your hands all the time, the term “head over heels” is applicable to you. For the rest of you, please start saying that you are “heels over head in love” which now that I wrote it, conjures up a delightful image.

Finally, I have to object to the phrase, “Drunk as a skunk.” It is a direct slam at our pungent friends because they are well known tea totalers. Skunks do not get drunk. Skunks get funky, but do people say, “You got the funk of a skunk?” No, they say “drunk as a skunk.”

It is time for sober skunks across the land to rise up on their hind legs and proclaim “We stink, don’t drink, get used to it.”

I have only scratched the surface of annoying idioms and I know there are plenty more out there. Goodness knows they are not rarer than hen’s teeth. If you have any phrases or idioms of which you wonder about their origin, email me at dale@daleirvin.com and I’ll make something up for you.

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As we approach the Fourth of July a.k.a. Independence Day, we are reminded that John Hancock was the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence and that Benjamin Franklin invented fireworks. Hancock went on to open a big Insurance company. Franklin sold his fireworks the idea to the Chinese and got his picture on the $100 bill.

Fireworks are a big part of every Independence Day celebration. Cities try to out do each other with elaborate fireworks displays that light up the night across the country. This is nice.

Fireworks are also a big part of a lot of backyard celebrations and that’s the part I don’t understand. First of all, I grew up in Ohio where fireworks were illegal. Of course they were readily available from nearby Pennsylvania, or, if you knew a guy who knew a guy.

We didn’t blow off fireworks at home when I was a kid. My dad knew a lot of guys who knew guys but he just wasn’t interested in blowing off his own fireworks. This is a trait I inherited because I don’t get it either.

When I was a kid on the Fourth of July, the big fireworks activity at our house came in the form of snakes and sparklers, neither of which made any noise. Everyone knows what sparklers are but snakes are passé in today’s fireworks world, like bell bottoms in the world of fashion. They made no noise and just grew into long black earthworms that were not very exciting.

But when it got dark, my dad would bring out the granddaddy of all holiday fireworks, a 30-minute railroad flare. The kind you see thrown around traffic accidents. He put our flare upright so we could ooh and aah at the white hot light that could be used for emergency welding. At the end of the 30 minutes, we all had watermelon and went to bed…which was not a smart thing to do after you just had watermelon.

I see the fun in Roman candles and sky rockets, but from a safe distance, not ground zero. Need I remind you that these fireworks were made overseas, by poorly paid employees, some of whom may not be fully concentrating on the day your firecracker was made, and it could explode in your hand.

Every July Fourth there are numerous reports of people suffering firework-related injuries including missing fingers, missing toes, burned hair, and having an eye put out. Why are you doing this to yourselves. If you like this kind of pain, marry a Kardashian or volunteer for an IRS tax audit.

In closing, let me say that if you are inclined to buy some fireworks to use in your own backyard this week, please don’t. Somebody’s gonna get an eye put out.

Thanks a lot Ben Franklin.

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Like most people, I don’t like what I don’t understand. It’s not a good trait, but it’s a universal one. One of the things I don’t understand is our overwhelming need to be liked, therefore, I don’t like it.

If you wander anywhere near the virtual neighborhood known as Facebook, you will discover that everybody wants to be liked. They want their posts to be liked, their pictures to be liked, and their web page to be liked. That’s a lot of liking, and that’s just from the people you know.

Eventually total strangers will come up to you and say, “Like me.” Like you? I don’t even know you. How did you get in here? Who are you? Why should I like you?  How small is your self-esteem that you need me to like you?

It used to be that you didn’t have to ask people to like you, they either liked you or they didn’t and there wasn’t much you could do about it. But now we plead, beg, and cajole in order to be liked. We firmly believe that having a large number of likes is positive justification of our existence. We’re liked, therefore we are.

We even go so far as to ask people who like us to ask other people that we don’t even know to like us and it’s driving me nuts. I admit that I once liked somebody I didn’t know for no other reason than they asked me too. I’m not proud of that fact. It was careless and irresponsible behavior but I did it and so did you.

Admit it, you have liked somebody you don’t know because someone else who likes you asked you to like the third person. This goes on and on until you either run out of people who like you, or realize that the progressive math could feasibly lead to everybody in the world liking everybody else which is preposterous.

I suppose being liked is preferable to being disliked but I still think there should be a dislike option on Facebook. If you can like somebody, you should be able to dislike them as well, and when I say this the pages for politicians and the Kardashians come to mind. The mind bogles at estimating their dislikes.

I hope that I have been able to prove my point about not liking the like but I certainly do not want to hold you back from liking others. In fact, I wouldn’t object to you liking this post. What’s it going to hurt? Go ahead, you know you want to do it. Push the like button now!!!

Thanks for liking me. I know it’s sincere.

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You can’t always depend on a robin to be the harbinger of spring. Sometimes they stay in Mexico for a few extra weeks, and who can blame them?

You can’t count on tulips to be the harbinger of spring because you forgot to plant them last fall. You can’t even count on Spring Break to be a harbinger of spring because you’re too old to twerk.

The one sign of spring that we have always been able to depend upon, no matter what, is baseball’s Opening Day. The opening day of Major League Baseball is a sign that spring is here. Before you know it, the weather will get warmer and everything will be back to normal and it’s all due to baseball. All hail the boys of summer. There must be magic in them bats.

The previous paragraph is the only possible logic I could see for paying a bunch of baseball players salaries that are equal to, or greater than, the gross national product of the country they come from.

When ball players salaries are discussed, they are talking about tens of millions of dollars. I’m sorry but nobody short of the guy that invents eternal youth is worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Even the minimum pay is great. Guys at the bottom of the list make half a million dollars…for playing a game…for six months.

My question is why are the owners paying this much money to guys who are lucky to hit the ball a third of the time? I don’t know the answer to this question but I have an idea to saver them some cash.

I think baseball players should be paid for their performance. At the end of every game, players would line up and receive their pay for that game. Base pay would be $1,000 per game just for showing up. If you don’t play, you still go home with a grand in your pocket and you got to watch the baseball game from a really cool seat. It’s a win-win.

For every hit you make, you get a bonus. $500 for a single; $1,000 for extra bases, and a cool $5,000 for a home run. Similar performance levels would be placed on defense and of course pitching a no-hitter would be a big payday.

At the end of the day, a good player could go home with thousands, and that’s just for one game. Double headers mean serious cha-ching.

Of course, if a player screws up, it’s going to cost him. An error on the field is a$5,000 fine. If the error cost the team a run, it goes to $10,000.

This all makes perfect sense which is why it will never be implemented. At least we still have opening day.

On opening day we take the day off from work and head out to the ballpark so we can pay $100 for a seat, $12 for a hot dog, and $10 for a beer. But we gladly do it because opening day is a day of renewal and we are renewing our credit card debt. It must be spring.

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White is a ubiquitous color this winter. When you step outside, you are surrounded by white. There are white trees, white roads, white rooftops, white everything. Everything outside is covered with snow and it is time for the snow to go.

I don’t know what it’s like where you live, and if you live someplace where it is sunny and warm right now, I don’t care. This article isn’t about you so get over it.

In most of the country, this overbearing winter season has brought snow, even where it doesn’t usually snow. In the midwest and the east coast, we have gathered an over abundance of the white stuff and quite frankly I’m getting tired of it. As of this writing, Chicago is having it’s 5th snowiest winter of all time and I’m hoping we don’t make it all the way to number one. That’s a gold medal we don’t need.

The snow was nice at Christmas. Having a White Christmas is very important for some people but I don’t know why. I don’t think it was snowing when Jesus was born but I could be wrong. I wasn’t there.

But snow is always nice at Christmas time be it for historic or nostalgic reasons. Snow on New Year’s Day is also accepted, although no one has ever yearned for a White New Year. As far as whiteness in concerned, New Years should be the end of it. But not this year.

We also had a White Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and that could be seen as either contradictory or ironic but there was snow on the ground.

Next up we had a White Groundhog Day. It’s no wonder that when Punxsutawney Phil came out of his den that he saw his shadow. There was white all around him and everything cast a shadow.

Last week we had a White Valentines Day, and on the heels of Valentines Day we got a White President’s Day which again, is odd phraseology. Unfortunately, I don’t see the insanity ending there. It is very possible that we will have a White St. Patrick’s Day. This has got to be the limit.

St. Patricks Day is a day to be green. You wear green, drink green, and you’ll even turn green on St. Patricks Day. In Chicago we even dye the river green. There is no room for white on St. Patricks Day but if it snows and everything stays white, it will stand as proof that God may not be Irish after all.

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