Da-da's Super Summer Gopher Garlic Gristle

Ok, so Da-da blow-dries his gophers before he banishes them. He just wants them to do well.

Summer means gophers. And gophers mean MORE GOPHERS. And MORE GOPHERS means... oh, forget it. Sure, gophers are cute when they do the gopher dance, but those pesky mounds of dirt can be... well, pesky, making Da-da's impeccable fairy garden a pesky mound-y nightmare of impeccably redundant peskiness.
 
Da-da tried every kind of anti-gopher defense. Gopher granules, to make the grass "taste bad" to them. (Uh huh.) And then there were those expensive vibrating stakes. (Nope.) Da-da even tried gopher bombs (which he'd really been looking forward to), as well as those creepy and rather dangerous spring-loaded spiky gopher death traps. (Negatory.) And then, in desperation, Da-da fell to the hose-in-the-hole water drowning method, which was admittedly pretty pathetic. (Zip.) That's right, none of these techniques yielded a single gopher.

After seeing four new mocking mounds pop up overnight, Da-da went into the garage and seized two giant road flares and an old bag of 100 peeled garlic cloves that he'd been saving for a special occasion. Well, Da-da found one.

He shoved 50 cloves of garlic into the largest new gopher hole and followed it with a 30-minute-burning road flare, then covered the hole with a nice wet mud pie. Da-da did this in another hole and covered the rest with more wet mud pies. Soon, the glorious smell of burnt garlic wafted from underground... and Da-da has not seen a gopher since. This actually transpired LAST SUMMER, and this summer is 100% gopher free. People of Gilroy, CA, please accept Da-da's humble thanks.

To sum up, here's Da-da's 100% Guaranteed Gopher Garlic Recipe for zero gopherage:

100 Cloves of Garlic + Two Road Flares = ZERO GOPHERS

Now all Da-da has to do is...

...get that giant octopus out of the foyer. No problem. Da-da's got it covered.

Hey! Cotton-butt! Lay off the salad and go get a Tako!

Pay No Attention to the Clown Tunneling Beneath the Curtain

Are tunneling clowns inducing weird vibes? Da-da doesn't think so, either.

Da-da takes everything at face value, as the world is too weird and open to too much interpretation to do otherwise. He's also too tired from speed-crawling the 24/7 parenting treadmill, so Da-da's gray matter might be a little vitric and incapable of following the latest-greatest. Indeed, Da-da often gets his news these days by way of his 4 and 6YO charges, Bronco and Nagurski, who occasionally have odd bits wash up on their rarified playground shores. Da-da sees this as a reliable filter, as whatever's important or interesting often shakes to the surface of playground immediacy.

That said, playgrounds in Da-da's event horizon are abuzz with stories of humming and vibrations in the sky and underground, driving people crazy in Russia, Europe, the U.S., etc.  These unusual events have been reported by multiple credible witnesses (in some cases by whole towns, mayor included), but no one seems to be offering any solutions. How could they? So, since these kids' ideas and opinions are just as valid as that of the NY Times (perhaps more so, as kids have no agenda), Da-da asked his boys and their 4-6YO classmates just who or what they think is causing the humming and/or vibrations, and recorded the kids' list of responses.