Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2017
So you are considering setting up a ponzi scheme in Thailand. Suit yourself but if I was your life coach, I would probably advise you against it. A Thai court has sentenced a fraudster to more than 13,000 years in prison. Pudit Kittithradilok, 34, took about 40,000 people to the cleaners, making off with $160 million. He is now looking at a prison sentence of 13,275 years. On the upside, because he co-operated with authorities, his sentence has been cut in half and now he is staring only 6,637 years. Whew! Close call, Pudit. You were looking at some serious time there buddy. But please don’t feel too badly for this stinker. He should be out in about 20 years.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

Five years on, and Osama bin Laden is still runnin’ around the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan, successfully avoiding capture by the world’s superpowers who are using every very sophisticated tool they can to zero in on him and his band of merry asswipes.

Had anyone bothered to ask me, I think I could have made their job a lot easier and a lot more successful.

All Bush and Co. would have needed to have done is somehow to have gotten a bank debit card into the hands of the planet’s number one fugitive and then gone online and followed his tracks through the hills and valleys of those dusty lands.

This thought occurred to one night this week as I was pondering the repercussions of an incident that happened earlier in the day. On a day off with the kids, I headed out of town for a movie when about halfway there, I began suffering a terrible Mr. Big chocolate bar craving. (My doctor says I have a severe chocolate deficiency – worst he’s ever seen – and has prescribed one Mr. Big a day. I am following doctor’s orders to a T.) At a variety store I stopped at, I realized I was penniless once again and so whipped out my debit card to pay for my medication.

The young woman behind the counter informed me there would be a 25 cent debit charge, an announcement which did not deter me in the same way a $25 debit fee would not have dissuaded me from gobbling up my medicine in that critical situation.

Back in the van, nerves calmed, duly simmering, I turned back onto the road to continue on with our trip. We had a great afternoon.

But at suppertime (sorry folks, old farmer, evening meal is supper) my wife looked skeptically down the table and asked me what I had bought a few hours earlier for $1.50. I confessed to the chocolate bar and it gradually dawned on me how my every movements are now being monitored by someone who likes to check our bank accounts hourly on the Internet, in case, I suppose, someone accidentally deposits a million or two into those little, mostly empty equivalent of pots of copper.

In the old days – the good old ones, I am tempted to say – a man’s sins didn’t catch up with him that quickly. For one thing, we carried wads of cash, and no one could ever know what we spent it on. For another, there were no debit cards delivering instant confessions for us out over the Internet lines.

And evidence of any cheques that were written only showed up at the house once a month, long after the offending purchase had been made.

Some of those statements had a way of getting lost and once gone, the information on them, I think, was pretty much history as well. But once you’ve turned off the high road of cash and are hooked on that little magic card, your chances of going through an average day undetected are pretty slim.

You can be followed, minute by minute, like an inmate under heightened supervision in a maximum security prison.

So, I would stop fooling around with drone airplanes directed from warships hundreds of miles away, night-vision cameras and radar detectors from space and go get old Osama there his own debit card.

Then when he wanders into town for some tobacco, a few postcards and batteries for his GameBoy, I’d just look that up using Internet banking and swoop in for a little chat with our favourite holy warrior.

Who knows? We might even catch him scarfing down a Mr. Big or two.

Whether it’s chocolate or some other substance, he certainly does seem to be suffering from some sort of deficiency.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

Okay, so there are better ways to start the day than this.

I just got home from having blood taken from me at the lab after a 12-hour fast, when there was a message on the phone to call my wife at her office. So I called. She answered and then said, “Just a minute.”

The phone sort of went dead and I thought she was putting me on hold. So I said in as charming a way as I could, “Awww, c’mon! I’ve gotta get some fucking food into me.”

She came back on the line, seemingly flustered.

“I was on speakerphone, wasn’t I?” I asked. Turns out I was. She hadn’t put me on hold; she was preparing for a conference call and she was trying to take me off speakerphone.

At least her bosses and all the other VIPs didn’t hear my sweet nothings.

I’m hoping for joint custody of the kids but that’ll be up to the judge, I guess.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

Now that the world has dealt successfully with the easier problems of racism, crime, addiction, poverty, war and pollution, it’s time for us to move onto the more serious troubles facing modern man and woman.

I am talking here of serious woes such as the shame of bad breath.

How many times have you found yourself wondering, after a particularly frightening encounter with someone whose breath, as the expression goes, would scare a buzzard off a manure spreader, why someone hasn’t done something about this? Forty years of mouthwash companies experimenting with chlorophyll and retsin and toothpaste companies trying green stripes and red gel and a lot of us still have days when even our pets won’t come near us.

Well, the good news is, someone has done something about it. In October, the Fresh Breath Clinic opened up in Toronto, one of two in North America now treating stubborn mouth odours.

“It’s like a load’s been lifted off me,” one happy clinic patient told a reporter this week. “It was just unbelievable.” My guess is a bigger load’s been lifted off his family and fellow workers.

Of course, we aren’t hearing from the unsuccessful clinic attendees, presumably because no reporter can get close enough for an interview, but who are we to disbelieve someone who has had such a transforming experience? He has been to the mountain and the answer is a special prescription mouth rinse that makes his kisser as sweet as a freshly picked daisy. The rinse apparently also works well for stripping down old tractor bodies for repainting and for opening up those nasty drain clogs. Do not use around open flames.

And now for the world’s other nastiest problem.

Out of London, England, comes the news that a new course has been designed to help people stop being excessively nice. Called The Nice Factor, the weekend course is being run by an actor who wants people to stop worrying about what others think.

“We are not against being nice itself, but we try to help people who are always nice – even to people who do not deserve it – and whose lips always say yes when their minds say no,” says course founder Raymond Chandler. “The disease of niceness cripples more lives than alcoholism.”

Now, aside from the fact that it’s been a while since I heard about anyone being run over by someone driving under the influence of niceness, I have no problems agreeing with Chandler’s view. As a chronically “nice” guy of long standing, I have been left standing for long periods in line while others not burdened with such a character defect, cut in front of me at the coffee shop. My response is to reason with myself: “Why cause a scene? What does it matter? Maybe he’s a nut with a loaded handgun in his jacket. Maybe he just didn’t see me. Don’t be petty.” The bottom line is, however, that he has his coffee and is halfway to Kitchener before I’ve even finished deciding between honey cruller and fancy plain.

So, as you can see, this is a crisis worth attending to. And it has an unexpected side benefit that sort of shows how life works in cycles that almost have an intelligence to them. The people who graduate from treatment for being too nice, it would seem, would have no problem from then on going up to people with barnyard breath and informing them of the fact.

“You smell like a fish factory on a hot day in August,” the no-longer-nice person would hopefully have the decency to say which, if the world were perfect, would result in another enrollee at the Fresh Breath Clinic. (Or, the Open Gunshot Wound Clinic.)

So the answer it seems, is for more us to stop being so nice and send the not-so-sweet-smelling among us for treatment.

Next dilemma, please.

By Jim Hagarty
2017
I got up this morning and dressed myself as I am, happily, still able to do. Then reached for the bedside table for my iPhone. It was missing. Rats. So I went upstairs and grabbed one of our cordless phones and dialed my iPhone. I immediately heard it ring. Somewhere, pretty loudly, but I couldn’t tell where. I raced back down to the bedroom. Loud ringing, but no phone. Out to the hallway, laundry, bathroom. Same thing. Lots of sound but no jackpot. I dialled the number again and wandered upstairs. The sound was loud up there, maybe even louder. In the kitchen, in the living room. I searched the couches. Nothing. I went out into the garage and dialled again. Riiinnnggg! Loud as hell. But a careful search produced no phone. More dialling. Back downstairs. In the bedroom once more. Down on my knees looking under the bed. Riiinnnggg!!! Very loud now. And as it rang, I felt a vibration in the back pocket of my jeans. I sometimes forget my name too but fortunately, it is sown onto the front insides of my underwear waistband and so I check there and sure enough, I am reminded of who I am: Harvey Woods.

By Jim Hagarty
2004

Gee Pee Yes

It has come to the attention of the folks at Better Driving Inc. that some male motorists in Canada are having problems relieving themselves into plastic pop bottles while guiding their vehicles along the expressways around the City of Toronto. This troubling situation came to light one recent summer day when police nabbed and charged a man whose car was bobbing and weaving at a slow rate of speed while its driver was delicately attempting to transfer liquid from himself to a bottle which had most recently contained soda pop.

This unfortunate incident reinforces the idea that what is urgently needed are automobile seats that are built in the fashion of the old commode chairs which people of earlier times used in their bedrooms to avoid cold, middle-of-the-night dashes to the outhouse. Any new auto seats designed for similar purposes could be stylish and fully automated, of course, but their development and installation as standard equipment in all new vehicles is long overdue. Modern motorists simply do not have the time to pull over to gas stations, restaurants and maple trees, as their counterparts from earlier generations did.

Quite simply, the elimination of waste products from the modern human being has become an incredibly inefficient and unproductive exercise that is diminishing the ability to achieve our well-established goals and objectives within the time frames that have been set for their accomplishment. This dilemma could be, perhaps, better explained by the simple declaration that we have reached a point where we have No Time To Waste.

However, in the absence of the needed development of the auto commode seat, we are seemingly stuck with the pop bottle and perhaps other similar containers. Given that reality, there are certain practices that might help the user of this system avoid traffic tie-ups and police shakedowns.

Here are some helpful hints in that direction.

1. Drivers should do some advance planning such as equipping themselves with a pop bottle with a significant-sized opening, as it may be safely surmised that one with a very narrow neck might produce some problems revolving around the issue of proper aimage. If options are available, it might be suggested a container with a sizable mouth such as a pickle jar, coffee travel mug or insulated picnic cooler be chosen.

2. When the appropriate receptacle has been found, some practice sessions might be advisable to ensure that the driver is able to adequately perform all the intricate movements required to avoid catastrophe both within the vehicle and outside of it.

3. The motorist should unzip all necessary garments prior to picking up the pop bottle, lest he experience a shortage of hands to operate steering wheel and related devices such as directional signals, horn, etc. while fumbling with buttons, zippers and cloth.

4. Where possible, the use of a funnel is recommended.

5. In the event that the motorist is accompanied in the front of the car by a willing passenger, the assistance of that person might be called on to hold the container or whatever else it might seem appropriate to be held.

6. A motorist engaged in this delicate endeavour should also be aware that the job cannot be considered to have been completed until some sort of cap is fastened to the receptacle that was used. (In the case of the Toronto man who was pulled over, his pop bottle was not sealed, leading one officer to comment that he ended up, as a result, paying twice for his crime, as his container tipped over in the excitement, spilling its non-soda-pop contents.)

7. Under no circumstances should a motorist engaged in the activity described here, simultaneously answer a call on his cellphone, regardless of how strong the urge might be to do so. In a similar vein, it is advisable to forgo returning friendly waves to acquaintances who might direct them towards the preoccupied driver while passing, as a hand thus extended might interrupt some critical aspect of the operation under way.

8. When the urgent task has been completed, the receptacle and its contents should be tightly sealed and, if possible, stored beneath a front seat or in the glove box. Under no circumstances should the driver attempt to empty the material out his window, as the effect of this matter hitting a strong crosswind, for example, cannot be predicted. It also cannot be guaranteed onto whose windshield the liquid in question might splat.

9. A precautionary approach, which might help the motorist to avoid all of the above, would involve a visit to a washroom prior to leaving the house or office. Or the ordering of something less majestic than the super-double-jumbo cup of coffee at the drive-through.

10. Above all, motorists in such circumstances should attempt to avoid the action taken by another hapless one among them who was caught by police driving down the highway with his driver door open, hanging out over the roadway and marking his trail as he went. In contrast to the actions of the man with the pop bottle, this solution to the call of nature must be considered especially primitive.

By Jim Hagarty
2014

I do a lot of joking, I know, but at heart I am deeply concerned about the direction society is heading. Too many rules and regulations, too little freedom. And I worry about the next generation and the world we are leaving them.

For example, somehow it has become wrong for the manager of a fast food restaurant in Kermit, West Virginia, to pee into the sink in the restaurant kitchen. What? In my day, peeing in the sink is just something you did, especially the guys. I can’t vouch for the women. And it was just a several-times-a-day habit for restaurant managers back then. I don’t know if I ever saw a restaurant manager come out of an actual washroom. They are busy people; no time for the fancy manners some people insist on.

These high-brow sorts who object to sink peeing would have others believe it is wrong and that they would never do it. But have they ever tried it? Well, have they?

So now the poor manager, for a long time to come, will be known as the dreaded sink urinator from Kermit. Eventually people will forget his unfortunate transgression but he certainly will forever be known as someone who lived in a town named after a frog puppet.