Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2006

Extra! Extra! Read All About It

I started writing headlines in 1977 and am still at it. I’ve gotten a bit better at it over the years and now and then try to come up with something creative, even amusing. But having spent my entire career in journalism in Stratford and Perth County in southern Ontario, Canada, the opportunities for me to write some real zingers have been few and far between. This is because we have a dearth of really crazy news around here, for some reason.

And so I live in envy of the editors who got to write the following headlines on these very true stories that happened around the world this week.

Woman in alleged hammer attack over gas
(She allegedly beat a convenience store clerk on the head with a hammer after he turned down her demand for free gasoline).

Drinkers earn more than nondrinkers, study says

Penis transplant reversed over psychological problems

Gas station owner accused of vandalizing rivals
(Man allegedly put glue in their credit card readers, sprayed foul-smelling deer repellent on pumps and threw beer bottles through windows).

Dancer allegedly gets human hand as gift, and keeps it

Hiker hopes to endure bare feet feat
(Man set to hike the entire Appalachian Trail in his bare feet).

Parents in alleged kidnap of daughter upset over boyfriend’s race
(A couple accused of tying up their 19-year-old daughter, throwing her in their car and driving her out of state to get an abortion were upset because the baby’s father is black).

Hawks attacking residents in Rio
(A pair of hawks have attacked dozens of residents, scratching their heads and faces).

Home sellers bury statues for good fortune
(Boston Catholics selling homes by burying statues of saints).

Tuxedo-wearing robber nabbed after chase

Shark that walks on fins discovered

Man says he was too “lazy” to deliver mail (Mail carrier stuffed more than 500 items of undelivered mail into garbage bags in a storage shed behind his house).

Man out to break eye-popping record

Man says he’s fine being almost 7-foot-9

Goat turned into corpse, suspect claims
(A murder suspect accused of killing his brother with an axe says he actually attacked a goat, which was only later magically transformed into his sibling’s corpse).

Argument over toupée led to heart attack, suit claims

Pig withstands Taser shots during highway ordeal

Residents asked to report dog droppings
(Organizers of a campaign trying to clear Vienna’s streets of dog droppings are urging residents to record how many droppings they see in the space of five minutes).

Woman paid about 14K to rent rotary phone 42 years

Woman gives birth to baby weighing almost 15 pounds

Father breaks leg trying to cure daughter’s fear of heights
(A father talked his daughter into jumping off a bridge; she landed safely, but he broke his leg).

Man reprograms ATM to give out 4 times more cash

Woman faces prison after setting boyfriend’s penis on fire

Judge boxes in car parked in his space

Falling pigeons mar festival

Man won’t shave until bin Laden is caught

Man says naked and scantily-clad men attacked him

Raccoons keep girl from her homework
(Raccoon fell through Florida girl’s ceiling into her bedroom, she can’t get schoolwork done).

Contest winner can’t afford to live in new house

Panda bites drunk Chinese man, man bites panda back at Beijing zoo

Man charged with impaired driving after slow-speed tractor chase in Nanaimo

California man charged with smuggling exotic cats through L.A. airport

Pennsylvania police chief turns in his own son for bank robbery

No, I don’t get to write amazing headlines. So, for me, it’s back to “New program will help everybody” and “Two hundred show up for spaghetti fundraiser”.

The best l ever managed was one on top of a story about a Monkton-area woman who lost her wedding ring while planting flowers and found it 40 years later in the same flower bed. A root was wearing it.

By Jim Hagarty
2015

I have officially embarked on The Flashlight Years, the period in a man’s life when artificial beams of light are his only hope for survival. Without them, he cannot expect to find the potato chips in the cupboard and without potato chips, of course, he will eventually perish. Without light he is apt to dab the wrong ointment on the wrong wound and put his underwear on backwards. Not even necessarily his own underwear.

I don’t know if girls and women have the same kind of relationship that boys and men have with flashlights but I suspect they don’t. The ones I know seem to have the ability to snatch a flea off a black cat in a dark room in the middle of the night but maybe some of them are light challenged too.

With males, there is a lifelong fascination with the idea that when you press a button, a light beams its way out of a little cylinder. If childbirth is a mystery to the female, a flashlight is perhaps the male’s equivalent, minus the baby shower.

I have loved flashlights since I was a boy and have been surrounded by them all my life but strangely, I have hardly ever bought any of them. They just show up. Like the heavenly gifts they are.

And this Christmas, not just one but two flashlights ended up under our tree with my name on them. The bigger one was thought out in a lab somewhere by the smartest person in the world. It uses LED (Light for Every Dude) and has several intense magnets strategically placed on it, allowing me to attach it to practically anything. I have carried this thing with me day and night since I opened my gift and seemingly can’t even find a spoon in the cutlery drawer without it now.

But the smaller package that was wrapped and stuffed in my Christmas stocking held the best surprise of all. A flashlight that attaches to the peak of my caps, allowing me to feel like a coal miner 24/7. It has three LED bulbs on it but here’s the best part. I can make them flash.

A man walking his neighbourhood at night with a cap flashlight blinking is a wealthy man indeed, although his ability to sneak up on people, assuming he might want to do this, is somewhat
impaired.

But let’s face it, he has the world by the tail (and if that tail has a flea on it, he’ll spot it right away.)

After their 11th child, an Alabama couple decided that was enough as they could not afford a larger bed. So the husband went to his veterinarian and told him that he and his first cousin didn’t want to have any more children. The doctor told him that there was a procedure called a vasectomy that could fix the problem but that it was expensive. “A less costly alternative,” said the doctor, “is to go home, get a cherry bomb (fireworks are legal in Alabama), light it, put it in a beer can (Coors), and then hold the can up to your ear and count to 10.” The Alabamian said to the doctor, “I may not be the smartest tool in the shed, but I don’t see how putting a cherry bomb in a beer can next to my ear is going to help me.” “Trust me,” said the doctor. So the man went home, lit a cherry bomb, and put it in a beer can. He held the can up to his ear and began to count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 at which point he paused, placed the beer can between his legs, and continued counting on his other hand. This procedure also works in Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, parts of Georgia, Missouri, West Virginia, and all of Washington, D.C.

By Jim Hagarty
1991

I’m as friendly as the next guy, I guess. I say “hi” to total strangers on the street, I hold doors open for men, women and kids and I nod and smile appropriately when the situation calls for it. I’ll even shake hands all around if shaking hands seems to be the thing to do.

But I’m afraid I’ve had just about enough of this hugging thing that’s sweeping the nation. Women hugging women, men hugging men, men hugging women, women hugging men. People that are strangers one day, are molesting each other in public the next.

These are not just casual hugs I’m talking about, you understand, where an arm is thrown around a neck, a shoulder is pulled to a shoulder and a cheek brushes an ear. The latest thing is the full-body embrace where the huggers stand toe to toe, shin to shin and other parts to other parts and squeeze together closer than plaster to a wall. And the modern hug is not something that can be accomplished in a hurry like the handshake of old but instead, it’s a long drawn-out phenomenon. In the old days (as in good, old), the strength of a person’s grip during a handshake indicated how much that hand shaker liked you, resulting in well-liked people receiving many hand injuries. Now, the length and tightness of a hug is a sign of how much affection the hugger feels towards the huggee.

Therefore, I submit, today’s hug is not meant to spread cheer or love, but it is offered instead as proof (to the world) of how deeply loving is the hugger and is therefore, primarily, a selfish act. It also serves to make non-huggers feel awkward, isolated and even guilty for being so aloof.

In any case, it’s an insidious practice and these days, I find myself forced to be in a state of constant vigilance, lest huggers sneak out from behind doors and walls and leap upon me with a body lock. I’ve suffered enough of these hugs in the past few years to know I’d live in total peace if I was lucky enough never to get another one. But, alas, I know there are more to come.

The war cry I hear in groups of people these days goes like this:
“Hi! I’m a hugger!” says Person A as he approaches Person B. Before Person B can respond to that information, Person A has his limbs tightly locked around Person B who couldn’t escape if his last name was Houdini. So, the fact that a person is a “hugger” has apparently bestowed on him the right to grab people at will and throw them into physical positions not unlike that attained by professional wrestlers in the ring. Like smokers who take it for granted everybody’s eager to breathe in what they’ve just breathed out, huggers believe they’ve earned the right, being so full of love and all, to embrace other human beings whenever the urge overtakes them.

Personally, if you haven’t gathered by now, I object. Serious physical contact, I believe, beyond the traditional handshake, should be saved for people whose long association with each other along with the obvious bonds of affection between them, have earned them the right to press body to body. I refer, I guess, to family members, husbands-wives, very close friends, that sort of thing.

This all came to mind for me the other night when I was at a gathering where huggers abounded. They were grabbing each other like teenagers at a drive-in theatre. I feared for my safety and fled to a corner to stay free of the flailing arms, necks and legs.

Towards the end of the meeting, I happened to remark to a friend: “Well, at least I managed to make it through this without getting hugged.” In retrospect, I wish I’d said that to someone other than this friend. As I went to leave the room, he and a buddy jumped me, and against my struggling, we were soon locked together closer than three bear cubs on the first day of winter.

In a future column, I shall discuss another blight on modern-day society – the indiscriminate holding of hands.

Hang on, Association of North American Hermits. My membership fee’s in the mail.

By Jim Hagarty
2011

A farmer in Perth County, Ontario, Canada, sold 335 acres of prime farmland divided into three farms in the late 1970s for just under $300,000, a pretty good figure at the time.

According to a recent story on land values in our local newspaper, that farmer today, if he could get top dollar, would walk away with a cheque with the figure $4,690,000 written on it. If that farmer were still around to read about this, he would probably be crying big salty tears in his beer. On the other hand, he paid only $4,500 in the early 1940s for one of those three farms (100 acres) which he sold for $75,000 eventually, so that must have seemed almost more amazing to him then than today’s figures would if he could learn about them. (Update: In 2018, those 335 acres could fetch as much as $7 million.)

Another farmer in the same area sold his farm a few years earlier for $19,000. He was going to buy a house in town with his money which he could easily do but the new owner said he wasn’t going to use the farmhouse so the farmer could just stay as long as he wanted to. So, the farmer did. I don’t know whether or not he paid rent but after a few years, he decided to move to town. Unfortunately for him, house prices had zoomed past him so quickly in those few years that his $19,000 wouldn’t buy him a house by then. If he was still around, with that money he couldn’t even buy a decent van to live in down by the river.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

There is a cat show in my hometown Sunday and it’s been suggested to me that I spruce up my old pal Grumbles and haul her growly self over to the Fairgrounds to let people oooh and aaah over her.

I gave this thought some consideration – five seconds’ worth, I think it was – before deciding the only spectators she’ll be showing herself to on Sunday will be the sparrows sitting around the fence in my backyard. I have several reasons for knowing I made the right decision. First of all, having total strangers stick their admiring faces within a few inches of my temperamental cat with the Wilkinson Sword teeth would be like telling a friend who borrowed a table saw: “Blade guard? Nah! Don’t need one. You’ll be all right.”

Secondly, there’ll probably be about $5 million worth of cats at the show that would be worth about $5,000 after my peevish little scrapper broke loose and went around rearranging the ribbons and bows around their furry necks.

And thirdly, for me to put her through all that misery would earn me a cat chaw on a thumb or finger that would make the shark victims in the movie Jaws look like they’d suffered a slight scraping on the skin of their legs. This wound could come any time within a day of taking her to the show, as she remembers injustices and is patient in meting out her revenge.

But (can’t you just feel this building to a crescendo?) my biggest reason for not entering my critter in this ego-feeding frenzy for felines is my certain knowledge that the little grey bundle of fury that can shred paper towels, woodwork and upholstery faster than a Vegomatic can slice through a tomato, would come in dead last in the competition, embarrassing herself and her (somewhat reluctant) owner. Oh, she might pick up a point or two for her cute face and a few more for her street smarts – she can tell time, especially breakfast time, dinner time, supper time, etc. – but at 10 years old, she’s starting to show the effects of her battles. Some unfriendly neighbour pet made off with with a part of one of her ears one night and a big black dog chewed on her midsection for a while another time. I’m convinced when I look at her sometimes that her face is on crooked and as I watched her fall out of a tree on Saturday, I thought that maybe she’s losing her grip.

My cat’s belly sags now like the underside of an old cow, the effects of age and too many patch-up jobs at the vet’s. Her day’s work, which once involved chasing down and murdering creatures smaller than herself, now is made up almost solely of finding a nice warm place for her increasingly chilly frame. She spends a lot of her time now down in the basement on our huge, white cat warmer which also doubles as our water heater. And she actually lets our other cat walk by her from time to time without rushing out and getting him in a headlock.

Another pleasant feature is how her stomach disturbances burst forth into the air as she reclines on my chest with her hindquarters an inch away from my face while I lie on my couch trying to watch TV. She also coughs up fur balls and breakfast with disturbing regularity and in the most obscure locations around the house.

Ah, she’s a dandy alright, this little companion of mine. But sometimes when I’m sitting in the backyard and she crawls up and sits down beside me, looking off in the same direction I’m looking, I know darn well we won’t be missing much on Sunday. No fancy-pants cat with a Princess Diana manner about her could take the place of one, well-timed headbutt from dear old Grumbles, no matter how big a butthead she can be.

By Jim Hagarty
2013
Every once in a while, when I open the fridge door, a housefly comes staggering out, barely able to stay aloft. I am sure his fly mind is saying WTF? This has happened a few times now, and I am starting to wonder if it’s the same fly that flies in when the door opens. If so, this fly is (a) not very smart or (b) the smartest fly in the world. While all his fly buddies are sweatin’ it out with the rest of us, he’s found his own little air-conditioned Shangri-la. On the other hand, sometimes he’s in there for up to eight hours straight between fridge door openings. I do not believe this is good for a fly and therefore I predict his ultimate demise. At his funeral, I promise to sing, “Why can’t I free your doubtful mind, and melt your cold, cold heart.”