http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfKCcSPCOQo

According to the news, we all have bedbugs. The evil, almost invisible parasites are everywhere from hotel rooms to your bedroom. Headlines call it an epidemic. A guy on the news just told a story about bedbugs in his car. Another woman said they followed her from place to place “stalking” her. Said she felt possessed. I see a movie coming. As the video above shows, you can be bitten as many as 500 times in a single night. And the bugs feed on human blood. There you go, the perfect news lead-in.

Are these bedbug stories related to the ridiculous popularity of another blood-sucking cultural phenomenon all over TV these days (no, not politicians) – vampires? True Blood, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, Being Human, reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade with Wesley Snipes before tax troubles and now each night on the news, bedbugs. Vampire Bill is under the sheets, having his way with Sookie on HBO while Bedbug Bob is under the sheets, having his way with you. Is it entertainment turned infestation or vice versa? It does not matter. Bedbugs pull ratings.

Why are humans so fascinated by anything that will drink our blood, as if the hydraulics of our simple biology holds some divine meaning? Because we think we are special beings on earth. Come on, people, our blood is just fast food for bugs or vampires. When you notice how people line up at the local drive thru every day it not hard to imagine why cows, pigs and chickens look at us the same way we look at bedbugs. If Turkeys had a TV channel, the gobbler version of Anderson Cooper would be live on the scene of the Thanksgiving Day Massacre year after year.

Bedbugs are damned near impossible to eradicate, too. Perhaps they are payback for all those cans of Raid we have used over the years. And unlike the vampires on TV, bedbugs are uglier than their 3rd cousins, ticks. Vampire bats are cute, little pets compared to these devious bastards because bedbugs even suck the blood of bats in caves. That’s hardcore.

On tonight’s news, the daily bedbug story involved Willie, a bedbug-sniffing dog used by exterminators to pinpoint the exact location of the insects. The reporter hid some bedbugs in a hotel room to see if the dog could find them. Willie took less than two minutes. Meanwhile, those planted bedbugs probably took over the entire hotel. Try that yourself. Tell the manager you’d like to bring some bedbugs, a dog and a camera into his hotel. See how that goes over.

Interestingly, the bedbug scare came just after the Gulf oil spill horror died off. News has to have villains, whether it is BP or bedbugs.

“Coming up tonight at eleven! If you have toenails, fingers, eyebrows or have eaten today, should you be worried about this? Find out! Stay tuned.”

News is a lot like bedbugs, feeding on our fear while we lay in bed, remote in hand, wondering what is eating us while we try to sleep.

Mid-stride, Rudy jerked as if strafed by a .50 caliber, his yelp echoing through the calm twilight, a spasm propelling him into a rolling heap of Jack Russellian pain, confusion and horror carving his snout into a morbid WTF snarl.  I yelled his name, but he was too far into his grief to hear me. I thought he had broken his left leg running through a dip or perhaps had stabbed himself on a stick. Every move he made was unusual and undogish, his normally smooth motions clipped, staccato and awkward, telling a violent story with no words.

Leaping up, he twisted in a fit of tail chasing Tasmanian fury, whipping his face and ass into a blur, making it difficult to tell which end was which. All I saw were his reactions to something brutally invisible in the gloaming.

I ran after him to understand his injury and try to rescue my old friend from his torture. Within five long strides, I entered the line of fire, quickly gaining absolute understanding of the situation. Yellow jackets. Hundreds of them. Smacking my head. Stinging my arms. Bouncing off my swinging hands. Below me, Rudy flipped in a double-full like a gymnast. Even in such a nightmare circumstance, it was an impressive fete for an eight year-old dog.

Screaming for Rudy to run to the house, I battled the same striped demons he had already outrun in a hunching, tucked-tail sprint. I was not as fast, unfortunately, and the little bastards overtook me again halfway to the house. I killed two, maybe four. Rudy saw me in mid-fight and turned around, barking and biting valiantly at the buzzing squad. With each one he bit, he took a stinger in the mouth, yelping, but never stopping until I was on my way to safety. It was heroic and I heard music in my head like in the final, sappy scene of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie when the good guy wins.

Running up the steps to the deck, I yanked open the sliding glass door, Rudy bolted in, and I slammed it behind us with several trailing yellow jackets in full-on chase mode ricocheting off the glass behind me, thudding like bugs on a windshield.

Inside, my family stared in shock as Rudy and I rolled into the kitchen nursing our wounds. I’ve never heard a dog curse before, but while he licked his leg, I distinctly heard Rudy murmur,  “Son-of-a-bitch!”

Standing to tell the story of what had happened to us, I realized just how many yellow jackets had Trojan-Horsed their way into our house – in my pants. Instead of saying, “We just got attacked by yellow jackets,” what came out was a reiteration of Rudy’s previous verbiage: “Son-of-a-bitch!”

The burning stings came instantly below my knees and I knew exactly what was going on as I danced my pants off into a denim heap on the
floor, stomping in my underwear, pissed-off jackets escaping into the dining room, Rudy going medieval on them once again and getting stung
even more as he chomped with angry gulps.

After the crunching of little striped bodies ended, Rudy and I nursed our swollen, red whelps and I took Benadryl. This morning, we saw two more of the attackers trying to hide in the bathroom. After dispatching them, we noticed Rudy standing at the back door, shaking with renewed anger and growling toward the spot where the yellow jackets live.

Only a few stings will convince the average person that yellow jackets are the winged spawn of Satan, but now the ones in our yard have a deviously torqued-up Jack Russell as an enemy. Yellow jackets are fast and carry serious firepower on the tips of their asses. They almost  always overwhelm their foes unless it is a can of Raid, and even then, it’s a tricky maneuver to take them down. But when a Jack starts planning revenge, my money is on the dog. It did not take long.

After easing out the back door this morning, Rudy stalked his way to the hole from which the yellow jackets had emerged. Silently he turned around, careful not to disturb their underground activities, aimed his butt over the hole, and in a quick and accurate drop, filled their little front door with yesterday’s dinner. His work done, he ran from the scene and waited at the edge of the steps, watching to see if any jackets escaped. None did.

He and I slowly walked out to admire his handiwork together, like old war buddies visiting the grave of a vanquished adversary. Still no yellow jackets. Rudy’s face was confident. Under the earth, I could hear a slight buzzing that sounded a lot like insects saying, “Son-of-a-bitch!”

“Jimmy, that’s a damned fine mattress you have there.”

“Thanks, Jen. We saved $4,900 and we don’t have to make a payment until August!”

Jimmy was not the only person jazzed about his new mattress. The announcer was pretty excited about the deals on these mattresses as well. I know because he said this sentence with the conviction of an evangelist talking about money.

“Imagine a comfortable mattress made of pure, natural latex!”

Say what? Pure, natural latex? He made it sound like this stuff grows in protected forests in Patagonia. Then I Googled it. Perhaps it does grow on trees. Seems there is a difference between synthetic latex and “pure, natural latex.” I’ll be damned.

Natural latex is sucked from the base of a rubber tree and is, in fact, perfect for people with allergies. It is made from a colloidal suspension of elastic hydrocarbon polymer. That is also known as natural latex. It comes from a plant. Duh.

I never learned this in chemistry. Then again, I only took enough chemistry in school to set fire to the building and blow up a small shed. Natural latex was not part of my curriculum. Hydrochloric acid? That I know about.

Latex allergies are deadly (as in latex gloves at your dentist or that “other” exam). Synthetic latex gloves can cause anaphylactic shock. According to Wikipedia, “Guayule latex is hypoallergenic and is being researched as a substitute to the allergy-inducing Hevea latexes. Additionally, chemical processes may be employed to reduce the amount of antigenic protein in Hevea latex, yielding alternative materials such as Vytex Natural Rubber Latex which provide significantly reduced exposure to latex allergens.”

There you go.

I no longer make jokes about latex. I respect its awesome power. In fact, I am kind of scared of it now.
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Over the holiday season, I visited the deepest of the Deep South. I was in half a dozen Southern cities, including the one that introduced fire ants (from South America) into this country in the first place, Mobile, Alabama. Besides the overabundance of deer now roaming the highways, I paid attention to the ground. December temperatures hovered near 80º for over a week. I walked about 20 miles through the woods. It is no secret that fire ants are doing what Al Gore had difficulty doing – convincing people of global warming.

Fire ants should be far underground in winter. But that’s the problem, the winter. There hasn’t been much of one down there. I am no biologist, however, I have spent years in a moral struggle with fire ants and this year it appears that they are winning.        

Forget zombies and robots from space, fire ants should have their own disaster movie. During my Gulf Coast trip I saw 5,569,867 fire ant mounds (or beds, as my mom calls them). I counted them (or came close). If you are a fire ant, I-65 looks like the Rocky Mountains for fire ant mounds.

Usually in winter, if you kick a fire ant mound, it looks abandoned. Kick one now and they will swarm like August. Beside I-85, I-65 and I-10, mounds are pushing a foot tall. There are dozens every ten feet. My mom’s yard is filled with them. My mother-in-law’s yard is crawling. Our farm is mounded up like an old Matthew Brady Civil War photograph with tents stretching to the horizon. Walking around them is like strolling through a minefield. Think global warming is a farce? Step in a fire ant mound in the middle of winter and tell me again. The red chompers will be up to your knees before you can deny that we’ve screwed up our environment.

Growing up in Alabama in the 1960’s and 1970’s, we had fire ants – but not at Christmas. Just take a stroll today and feel the pain. Rudy (our Jack Russell) did and he has the red whelps to prove it. We are not in an environmental cycle, we are in a pivotal moment in history. The normal cycle was left behind years ago. What humans are doing to the earth is not religious or political, it is biological and chemical. It is crawling all over right now. 

 

What I saw is a shift from anything I have ever seen before. In a few years, when fire ants are building mounds in Central Park in December, maybe it will be hard to ignore. When Canada gets a few mounds, then we’ll know just what we have done to Mother Nature. Then again, some people can ignore hurricanes the size of the Gulf of Mexico, so perhaps not. 

 

One is good for business. The other is bad for bugs. What’s the relationship?

First, the bugs. According to the few experts there are, fireflies – or lightning bugs, as many children call them – are just not showing up anymore, chased away, in most estimations, by artificial light. One of the problems basically is that the insects won’t mate under the spreading soak of suburban floodlights and sprawling shopping center halogen. Would you?

We can’t stop kudzu, fire ants, mosquitoes or snakehead fish and we can’t cure cancer, heart disease or end our addiction to foreign oil, but we can rid ourselves of one of the friendliest things that shares our habitat? We can’t stop murder and poverty but by-god, we can un-light the fire of those dreaded fireflies.

It is kind of embarrassing to be a human when you think about that.

The glowworms possible extinction isn’t just an American phenomenon but a worldwide reality. Some species of fireflies are gone entirely.

Since we can’t eat them, why should you care about those lights in the gloaming when there’s twelve channels and pay-per-view of two tattooed behemoths, face-pounding and head-locking into a high-def, bloody pulp on cable?

“Toss me another beer, y’all. Meat-locker Jones is about to uncork a can of whupass on that ol’ boy next to the fence over there.”

Those who ignore the possibility of global warming and turn their backs on any suggestion of human responsibility for abusing the earth and squandering the resources that keep us alive sometimes point out that this type of bleeding heart, tree-huggery is no big deal. After all, there are approximately 2,000 species of the insect we’d call a firefly. But the math is not on the fly’s side. Seventy percent, for instance, have disappeared completely from entire cities in Thailand. Researchers across the United States have noticed precipitous drops in lightning bug populations as well.

Sorry, you say, we have more important things to think about than fireflies, spotted owls and two-headed frogs sucking up spun-off neutrons down by the iridescent river. We have pro sports, for instance (which sort of includes college football, college basketball and maybe the Olympics).

That brings us to Ultimate Fighting – which is, by the way, illegal in the State of New York. Even old fighters like John McCain called it “human cockfighting.”

“You got beat into a lobotomy and all I got was this crummy t-shirt.”

It’s not that crummy, however, when people buy $22 million a year worth. Brands like Tapout (when a combatant can’t take the punishment anymore, he taps out) are unloading logo’d MMA apparel in 20,000 stores nationwide. I bet my 80-something mother would take a few pop-knots inside a chain-linked square for less than 22 mil.

I’m not sure exactly what it says about us as humans when we would rather beat the hell out of each other than chase fireflies through the woods, but maybe it just fits with our desire to dominate, well, everything, until it taps out.

Are local laws keeping you from throwing down on your neighbor when his backyard grill smoke drifts over and disturbs your hammocky slumber? Install 40 floodlights on the roof eaves and give those damned fireflies a beat-down they will not soon forget. You’ll feel much better.

Angry at that rush hour jackass for driving too slowly, cutting you off or snagging your favorite parking spot? Don’t get road rage; get even with an entire species. Field-dress a few fireflies with a klieg light. After all, they’re just screwing around out there anyway. If we can’t keep national politicians from having rampant affairs, the least we can do is put an end to firefly whoopee in our own backyards.

“Can I get the horsefly onion soup to go, please?”

It’s technically called Entomophagy. Sounds sort of scientific, doesn’t it? Eat a handful of sautéed ants and you feel like applying for that rocket job at NASA.

Mealworms make a meal. Grubs as grub. They are not pests when served with some chanti and fava beans. In the future, the Terminix guy will use a fork and wear a chef’s uniform. Bug spray will be replaced with salad dressing. A termite infestation will be an all-you-can-eat buffet. Grab a spoon, crawl under the house. Joke while you can, in a few years, insects will be what’s for dinner.

“Hey, what are you guys doing this weekend? Wanna come over for some barbecued scarab beetles? Bring the beer.”

I missed the Broad Appetite Food Festival here in Richmond a while back. I wanted to go, had it on the calendar, but I was in Haiti, where people are eating dirt. People in Richmond that day, according to Time, were eating bugs.

If you are freaked-out by bugs, don’t be. Most of the world eats them — and loves them like pork rinds. Flip the remote to the Travel Channel and watch Andrew Zimmern eat every six-legged thing that can be woked.

“Pass the garlic grass hoppers when you get a chance there, pal.”

The cost of raising bugs is much less than cows and pigs according to people who know. Just keeping a large animal’s body temperature normal requires tremendous amounts of food. Bugs are the inconvenient truth about a balanced meal. They are energy efficient and turn huge percentages of what they eat into edible mass, namely: Protein.

“This is the best scorpion soufflé I have ever had.”

Here’s the truth, like it or not, German Cockroaches are farmable, edible and convert over 4 times the food they eat into body substance versus a cow. I can see billboard with cows painting misspelled words, “Eat mor roches.”

When I was in college, I could have survived on the little bastards living under the sink. They were well-fed too — pizza, sandwiches, cereal and milk left in bowls, we had a farm going in that joint.

“Larry, you gonna eat the rest of that tomato hornworm?”

Bugs are low fat, low cholesterol, high protein, and there are no vet bills. They are environmentally friendly to raise and require little work. Leave a crumb on the counter and insects will show up by the millions. Try that with cows. Get on the Bug Watcher’s diet and you’ll be thin and trim in no time — and save the world while you’re crunching through spiced exoskeleton.

I woke one night on a camp-out to find a roach the size of a hotdog wiener sleeping in a stale bun someone had left out on a table. All I needed was some mustard and he’d have been a midnight snack if I could have stomached the thought and fought off the 42 million ants that were carrying him along like the queen.

“Sorry sir, we’re all out of moths. Can I suggest a nice weevil instead?”

Things will change. They’ll have to. Livestock is responsible for nearly 20% of the greenhouse gases. Bugs? Zero. Food is running out around the world as we use it for biofuel. Insects are endlessly plentiful and if cooked right, tasty and safer than most things we eat at a drive thru.

With corn and soybeans going in our automobile tanks, what will we feed the livestock? Bugs are nutritious no matter who’s chewing. Maybe you’re saying, “eww!” right now, but I promise you in ten years, you will be opening a bag of Whacky Worms from the snack aisle down at Larvae Land.

The Gnat Line, as I have read about it and heard talk of, is the new demarcation boundary of the South as a region. Homogenization has smeared all kinds of lines from the past and much of that smearing is a good thing. Some of the Old South’s ideals were hardly something to be proud of. But in this instance, I’m talking about gnats. Not that we’re proud of them either.

Growing up in Alabama, we had our share of the little ear-whizzers. They get in your eyes, your ears, your mouth, and any other orifice they can reach. That gnatty whistling sound alone can slowly drive a human insane and I expect more than a few Southern eccentrics used gnats as an excuse for their odd behavior.

Texas gnats were tougher than horsefly jerky. I saw a Biblical plague of gnats descend on a high school football game one Friday night in North Carolina that would make Cecil B. DeMille proud. It made me wonder why more Southern teams (besides the Savannah Sand Gnats minor league baseball team) aren’t called “The Gnats.” No, Washington fans, “The Nats” don’t qualify without that “G” spot up front.

Calling the place where the North meets the South “The Gnat Line” is, to me, a little misleading in an insectful manner. I just made that word up, but it fits because gnats aren’t just one fly. Gnat is a catchall moniker for several types of little flappers and if you want the gnatoid details, Wikipedia them.

New York City, hardly a Southern town, had a few gnats when I lived there, but I think they called them something else: Gnyats.

St. Louis had sneaky little gnats that worked in tandem like a sports team. They’d all show up, do their gnat-ish jobs (basically pestering anyone involved with soccer) and go back to little gnat neighborhood bars to celebrate. In fact, it is biologically known that male gnats like to hang out in swarms when mating – sort of an Alpha Delta Gnata fraternity looking for trouble. Something to think about when they get in your mouth.

The largest and most belligerent gnats I have ever swung at lived in the Maryland suburbs, north of Washington, D.C. Those gnarly gnats were big and thuggish and tried to arm-wrestle any person who attempted to swat them. We tried gnat repellent and they thought it was dessert topping. This was back about ten years ago, before those suburbs were 8-laned over and the lush cornfields west of Gaithersburg (Gnatville) were condo’d into concrete planned communities. Somehow, I bet there are some holdouts gnat gangs still operating in that area.

So, as far as the Gnat Line goes, the South can hardly claim exclusivity on the ubiquitous gnat anymore. The pesky buzzers are headed north and west like Kudzu and fire ants, both once uniquely Southern pests.

Personally, I’ve always seen a gnat as the stupid third cousin of a fly and the nicer uncle to mosquitoes. If Jack Black is a horsefly, gnats are Will Ferrell. Which, when you think about it, explains why there have been no movies about gnats.

In a post-Mason-Dixon world, let’s come up with another name for the Gnat Line. The Y’all Line is already in the Urban Dictionary. How about the Biscuit Line? The Cornbread Line? The MoonPie and a RC Cola Line? Do I hear a vote for the Collard Greens Line? The Deep Fryer Line? The Jeff Foxworthy Line?

Or maybe there isn’t a line anymore. Which just may be the way it was supposed to be all along.

I walked out the back door barefooted, toting a PBJ sandwich and looked into the dark. Texas nights are awfully dark, darker than when you sleep face down. Leroy directed his barking straight into the ground, snout pressed to earth like he was trying to communicate with China. I casually strolled over to have a look and found myself standing in a congregation of fire ants. Familiar feelings raged up my feet and legs and a few other worse areas and grabbed my brain by the stem. The directions were clear:  Throw the sandwich, lose the pants, slap the ants!

I know fire ants like nobody’s business. It is impressive how fast you can get your clothes off when a horde of angry fireballers move into your drawers and give the signal to unload the serum.

I jumped and slapped and stripped and knocked and smashed fire ants while dancing one-legged and, suddenly, something hot shot up my leg that made the fire ants seem like a nice bowl of orange sherbet. This was not normal pain, this was pain with several extra letters added and a few fishhooks and some habaneros and a bunch of gasoline and matches igniting all at once. I stumbled backward and fell through the door and into the den floor. My pants were still outside. I writhed and moaned. It was pathetic.

“What is wrong with you?” said my wife. “Where’s your pants?”

“Something… in… my foot.” My tongue tried to grab some words but the words were having no part of it.

If Satan could poke his pocketknife into a person and twist it, that might begin to approximate this pain. The hurt gouged at my foot, raged up my right side, burned my neck and right arm in explosions and spasms of hellish stings. I’ve been chewed by dogs and cats and spiders to opossums and hornets and wasps and fat-bodied bumblebees and yellow jackets and little snakes and some linebacker from Greenville, Alabama in a pile-up on the 10-yard line in 10th grade. If all of them were put together and wrapped in electrified barbed wire, they couldn’t come within 3,000 miles of this horrible hurt.

Seeing me act like a wounded and talentless ballerina, Leroy really went nuts. Grabbing my discarded pants, he slapped them like he was beating a brush fire. My wife turned on the light and there it was, the source of my displeasure, ready to rock, tail arched over its back, pinchers spread out, scooting across the concrete. A scorpion.

“You stepped on a scorpion!” she said. “Should we get you to the hospital?”

“No, no,” I mumbled. My heart was beating like an angry drunk on a dorm room door and my chest ached. Seeing the forked perp strutting across the patio, Leroy attacked the scorpion straight up. Somehow, even though dogs don’t really have lips, Leroy peeled his skimpy little doggy non-lips back, exposed his teeth, and chomped the evil thing to death. He avoided the tail better than I had.

We killed at least a hundred scorpions in that house. We found them on the table, in the cabinets, under the bed covers or crawling up our arms while we watched that fine drama, “Dallas”.

As I lay on the floor for an hour wondering when the pulses of pain would stop, I wondered if the scorpion’s brother would try to exact revenge. Then the pain disappeared just as fast as it had come. There was hardly a mark on my foot, which made me feel like a size 42 long wimp, especially since Susan, while telling the story to her friends, made sure to use the word “whimp” at least four-hundred times over the next week.

Texas is a beautiful place unless you count the weather and the animals and the bugs and the heat and the cold and the things that happen in the dark in your backyard.

Fire ants are originally from South America. The first one showed up in the U.S. on a ship in Mobile, Alabama, in 1918 (his name was Ernestoohh). Calamine lotion was invented shortly thereafter.

These beasts are like ant kudzu, building their sneaky nests fast and furious –– furious being the key word. Step in one of their humble abodes and they will emerge ready to make like Lawrence Taylor after a weekend at a Richard Simmons conference.

Adding to the fiery conundrum, the miniature hell injectors have a keen sense of communication that allows the snarling pyro-arthropods to sneak into an intruder’s pants and, when their numbers are sufficient to inflict a torso-full of itch, they all whistle and chomp down like a 50-gallon bucket

of pain. They are legendarily talented in delivering mind-altering doses of hurt.

Oddly, the fire ant has inspired celebrations all over the South. There’s the Turner County Fire Ant Festival in Ashburn, Georgia; the Marshall, Texas, Fire Ant Festival; the Hilton Head Fire Ant Festival; and, in Austin, Texas, a Fire Ant Frolic Weekend. Such a deep identification with such a mean creature would seem to make for more opportunities than just a funky little festival. And that’s my point.

Fire ants are scary. They strike fear in anyone who encounters them. When you consider that fire ants caused about 34,000 people to get medical help last year alone and stirred up around $2 billion in property and equipment damage in that same twelve-month period, you’d think that more Southern sports teams would use the ants to scare the pants off their opponents. Yet I cannot find even one team anywhere using this fierce rascal as its mascot.

Check out a grimacing and chewing Bobby Bowden on the sidelines of a Florida State game. Remind you of a particular multilegged, red menace? Here’s your mascot.

At Alabama, it could be a Crimson Tide of fire ants, right? Makes more sense than a red elephant. I have never seen one real red elephant in Alabama. But there are more fire ants than Bear Bryant memorabilia.

Look closely at that Arkansas Razorback. Looks an awful lot like a raging fire ant to me. Texas A&M Aggies –– is that short for Agonies? With the fire ant on their helmets, it could be.

Let’s start a write-in campaign for the fire ants. The Demon Deacons of Wake Forest? Fire Ants would be better. If the Hokies were Fire Ants, swarming the punter would be an every-game block. Surely Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, Texas, could look to the mighty fire ant and lose the Flying Queens. Geez. The sports teams at Centenary College of Louisiana are called the Gentlemen. Are you joking?

Here’s a list of active college sports team mascots that, in my humble opinion, a Fire Ant on a jersey would beat, stinger down: Anteaters, Koalas, Jumbos, Johnnies, Jimmies, Jennies, Jaspers, Ichabods, Tommies, Hustlin’ Quakers, Hustlin’ Owls, Herons, Hatters, Hardrockers (I’m serious), Governors, Gorloks, Golden Gusties, Geoducks, Dirtbags (Cal State U, baseball team, seriously, look ‘em up), Bonnies, Black Flies, Battlin’ Beavers, Moundbuilders, Muleriders, Nads (no joke, Rhode Island School of Design), Praying Colonels, Preachers, Skylights (say what?), Squirrels, Sugar Bears, Trolls … and there’s 69 teams that currently have no nickname at all. At least one of those 69 mascotless teams could step and make the Fire Ant legit.

My audacious goal is to get a team to adopt the Fire Ant before end of year. College sports and this animal need to get on Match.com, – hook up, make a love connection. It’s going to happen. Stay tuned.

Read the Brand Garage discussion on the fireant.