My name is Dale and I don’t like rodents. I never have and I never
will. It’s just the way I was raised. I do not like rats because they were responsible for the Bubonic Plague in 1347, and if they unionize, they could do it again.

I don’t like mice because they get into your house, and eat your potato chips, and poop all over the place.

I’m neutral on squirrels, porcupines and beavers. If they leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone. But the minute a beaver gnaws his way into my living room, all bets are off.

And I think guinea pigs and hamsters are just creepy pets. That statement may ire some of you, so just to be fair, I think snakes are creepy pets too.

If you had to put me in a category, I would declare myself as an anti-rodentite, and this week my vexation is focused on the the chipmunk. In case you didn’t know, the chipmunk is a major rodent. It is nothing more than a fat mouse in a fancy striped fur coat. It is a pest.

This chipmunk is an omnivore, which means it will eat just about anything, making it like a small furry teenager. Because a chipmunk is too short to open your refrigerator door, he will find his food outside, in your yard.

A chipmunk’s diet includes everything from bugs to birds eggs but its favorites are seeds, nuts, fruits, and vegetables. This covers everything that I have growing in my yard which explains why my garden has become the Chipmunk Costco. And since I put considerable time, effort, and money into my garden, I don’t cotton to no fuzzy rat. It’s war.

There are many ways to rid yourself of chipmunks. Most methods involve poison or traps, but the most ecologically friendly method is the cat. A cat will spend all day chasing chipmunks, catching them, torturing them for a while, and then putting them on your doorstep. It’s good exercise for your cat too. Something for them to do during the one hour a day they are not sleeping.

Since I didn’t want to use poisons or traps, and I don’t have a cat, I have chosen to get rid of my chipmunks through birth control.

Instead of a contraceptive, I am armed with a paintball gun. When I spot a chipmunk on my bird feeder, eating the seed I bought for the birds, I let him have it. The shot knocks him off the feeder, but when he hits the ground, he runs away with a big orange spot on his ass which he then has to explain to the other chipmunks. All of the girl chipmunks will look at him as a risky provider seeing as how he already got shot once, and look elsewhere to have their babies. When I get all of the males “spotted” the females will be so despondent that they will move to somebody else’s yard to look for action and a place to stay. The remaining males will eventually die of embarrassment and extreme hornyness.

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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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