I need help.  No, not the psychiatric kind, too late for that.  I need advice from the most innovative problem solver on the planet, the Golf Course Superintendent.

For over a year, I've been engaged in a bitter struggle with my neighbors, an inconsiderate group of loudmouth, sex-crazed members of the Order of Anura.  What a bunch of toads.

Some durn fool constructed one of those waterfall ponds--yes, the kind I've been trying to ridicule out of existence in the golf world for 25 years--and he built it within two feet of my house.  If the added humidity, increased electric bill and general noise of artificially produced tumbling water wasn't enough, the various frogs and toads have destabilized my mind.

It's not just one kind of frog/toad.  There are bullfrogs with a subwoofer in their necks and tree frogs who ululate a high-pitched quavering call capable of triggering seizures and facial tics in even the most sedate individual.  The current amphibious demon makes loud clucking noises like a 300 pound chicken.  When one variety ends their campaign, they tag-team and another takes over.

I can't sleep.  Momma can't sleep.  We are close to the edge.

My usual strategy of unconventional tactics in problem solving has had no effect.  An experienced frog-gigger, I have barely reduced the population of toadian demons and have only a broken gig for my trouble. A few days ago, a female bullfrog deposited about 50,000 gelatinous eggs in the pond--which is only about the size of the hood on an F-150--and I freaked out.

(You've heard the story of 102 Cane Toads released in Australia in 1935 to combat beetles and now there's 1.5 billion of them?)

I immediately recruited the entire family into an emergency bucket brigade/hand pumping attempt to produce a dry pond, which would surely produce an exodus to another poorly situated fake pond in our neighborhood . . . but within minutes, El Nino came through again and filled the pond in three hours.

The incessant toadian clucking, which in my endless state of sleep deprivation, sounds like My Sharona performed by a choir of hogs on meth, has increased exponentially since the failed attempt at pond draining.  I cannot leave my windows open at night, and I have developed some kind of Pavlovian response to frog clucking, which involves running outside at all hours, in various states of nekkidness, waving searchlights, pitchforks and shovels.

I cannot use a shotgun.  In these mountains, that sort of thing has a certain contagion to it.  (Sort of like when one dog starts barking . . . )

At this point, I have begun to hear frog voices everywhere, even in the Piggly-Wiggly.  There's an interesting irony here, as I remember poking fun at a TurfNet member's homeowner complaint regarding noisy nocturnal frogs keeping folks awake.  For the film, I wrote some flippant line about importing "Australian Whispering Toads".  I have karmic teeth marks in my posterior.

So, here I am, pleading for help from the TurfNet Borg.  Resistance is futile.  Somebody out there must have the answer.  I am open to all sorts of ideas, except I'm not really a pesticide guy.  Especially after reading the research about atrazine's ability to turn male frogs into offspring-bearing female frogs.

Say . . . I wonder if this whole "sissifying" of golf is a byproduct of--no, never mind.