Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
2012
My mother used to say, if you burn your ass, sit on the blister. I have sat on many a blister over the years. Not fun. But as I write this, for the first time, I am wondering how does a person burn his ass? Fall bum-first into the fireplace? Accidentally sit on the stove? Fall asleep for four hours nude sunbathing face down? Anyway, that was an expression she got from her mother and it’s folk wisdom at its best. Suffering the consequences of our mistakes teaches us at least as much if not more than enjoying the benefits of our successes.

By Jim Hagarty
2011

A farmer wears many hats, both literally and figuratively. He is a meteorologist, able to predict weather with uncanny accuracy, using the behaviour of birds and animals and even the leaves on the trees to make his forecasts. He is an agronomist, able to identify soil structures and needs and knowledgeable about both natural and chemical ways to enhance the power of earth to grow food. He is proficient in animal husbandry, able to deliver baby goats at 3 a.m. or treat a bloated cow and save its life in the process. He is a mechanic, able to keep machinery new and old in running order. He’s an architect and carpenter, erecting sheds, barns and all sorts of other outbuildings and feeders.

And maybe most important of all, a farmer is an inventor – the world’s first do-it-yourselfer, a man who through necessity and to satisfy his own curiosity, comes up with ingenious solutions to tricky problems and dilemmas. In another life, my Dad could have given Thomas Edison a run for his money. The most fun he had farming was in designing new ways to do jobs with less back-breaking labour. Some of his solutions were no solutions at all and, in fact, has some serious consequences which I will write about someday, while other ideas worked out brilliantly.

I was always in awe of this ability of my father to assess a chore and devise a strategy to do it in a better way. I have inherited a little bit of this ability and love nothing more than to solve a problem with some thoughtful ingenuity. In both my Dad’s case and mine, necessity always has been the mother of invention as neither one of us could just go out and buy the latest, most expensive gadgets.

Many years ago, the five-acre gravel pit at the back of our home farm froze over well in winter and some chums and I would have hockey games on the ice. But even on great pond ice that sometimes was so smooth and glassy you could hardly stand up on your skates, a couple of hours of hockey would rough it up a lot and leave it with ruts.

To the rescue came Dad one day. He drove the smallest of our John Deere tractors right out on the ice and parked it near the rink we had carved out. He then chopped a hole in the ice and into the opening he dropped one end of a hose that came from a pump that was attached to the power take-off of the tractor. He started the tractor and engaged the PTO. The hose underneath the ice sucked up water from below and he grabbed the other end of the hose and flooded our rink with it.

The tractor stayed there for the longest time and when we needed to, we started it up and flooded the rink. I know that that little success would have made my Dad very happy. He had put his thought power to work and solved another problem, albeit a small one.

Over the years he came up with more ingenious schemes than that, but to a 10-year-old boy, having a Dad who could perform a miracle like this while his friends stood around in wonder, was a pretty special thing, and went a long way to cementing his hero status for me.

Volkswagen has the best coloured cars on the market. Whether its brown, blue or green, like this modern Beetle shown here, their colours are just different enough from every other car company to make them unique and appealing. I don’t know if I want a Beetle, but I do want this colour. JH

By Jim Hagarty
2014

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is helping me a lot these days. I have been reading his biography for the past couple of months and will continue to do so for a few more at least. And while my bank account has not magically expanded, I have learned one major thing about him. Reading the words on 816 pages detailing the life of Warren Buffett is the best sleep inducer I have ever found. It is not that his life is boring; far from it. But trying to follow the minute details of every deal that resulted in his achieving a net worth of $60 billion is a challenge that this human, for one, cannot meet without passing out.

The other night, for whatever reason, I lie in bed wide awake. Tossing and turning, stopping and staring at the ceiling. It looked like a long, restless, sleepless night awaited me. I was frustrated. Then I remembered Warren.

I dashed upstairs and grabbed his hernia-inducing tome. I crawled back into bed, book in tow, and began reading. Two to three paragraphs later, I couldn’t have kept my eyelids open with toothpicks. I turned out the light and slept like a billionaire. It worked again last night. I am hoping that eventually, just the sight of the book on my bedside table will bring on the slumber.

Now that would be rich.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

A friend of mine was showing me his new truck the other day and it’s a dandy. It has heated seats to warm his butt and at night, when a car approaches from behind, the car’s headlights automatically cause the truck’s rear-view mirror to darken down, saving the driver from distracting glare.

There are two drivers for my friend’s vehicle and each has a separate key. When he bleeps his key, the truck’s interior features automatically adjust to his preferences: Seat goes back, mirrors go into correct position, etc. When his wife uses her key, her settings are immediately set in place.

There is not much new about these things. They’ve been around for years. But they’re impressive nonetheless.

But my friend is most proud of his global positioning system. To demonstrate it, he touched a button labelled “home” on the little machine’s screen and instantly up flashed a map showing every road he should take from Clinton to Bayfield. He told me that if he takes a wrong turn, the GPS makes a sound to indicate he is going the wrong way.

Now, as knocked out as I am by all this, I think it’s worth taking a step back and comparing these amazing accomplishments to other times and things in nature.

Example One.

My father used to talk about a farmer he knew who would take his horse and buggy to town on Friday nights, drink too much beer in a local hotel and sleep all the way home. This was possible because the horse knew the way and would deliver him to his front door, nearly 10 miles from town. When a satellite and a little computer can take you home while you are having a snooze, I promise to build a shrine to it in my home.

Example Two:

Yes, GPS is astonishing in its brilliance. But what about the CHC (the common housecat)? There is no end of stories about the ability of cats to find their way home. I knew a man who lived near Kinkora who had grown weary of his cat. He put it in the car, drove it out to a road near Dublin and dropped it off. A week or so later, it showed up back home which was not bad for a cat who had never been off the property, let alone to Dublin.

So, the man piled it in the car once more and drove it in the other direction to Monkton. But apparently, it is no harder for a cat to find its way home from there as it is from Dublin.

Defeated, the man kept the cat till its dying day.

GPS I can sort of understand. Cats I cannot.

My trucking friend then showed me a panel in his way vehicle, a GMC truck, for OnStar, a service available to GM vehicle owners only. If you are in a serious accident and your airbag deploys, the people at OnStar, wherever they are located (somebody said they are in California) know about your situation instantly and begin talking to you on an intercom to see if you’re OK. They will even call the ambulance.

But how about this.

If you have locked your keys in your car, you can call these nice people at OnStar and they will unlock the doors for you remotely, from whatever centre they are located in, wherever that is. Again, through the wonders of modern technology.

This, I am truly blown away by. Somebody in California, Alaska or New York, perhaps, unlocking my friend’s truck in Clinton, Ontario, Canada, about as far into the boonies as you can get.

But I am left to wonder if other uses could be found for this technology.

Could guns, including pistols, machine guns and rocket launchers, be jammed remotely, let’s say, by the United Nations? Grenades and bombs defused by satellites? Landmines blown up in the same way? Could every weapon produced be outfitted with an indestructible sensor that would make all this possible? A mass murderer foiled after his first shot when monitors jam his weapon, perhaps.

It wouldn’t stop wars since wars will never end. The combatants will kill each other with sticks and stones if they can’t find anything else. But it would take a lot longer to kill a thousand people and knock down their homes with a stick than with a bomb.

By Jim Hagarty
2012
This is why a career in construction was never in the cards for me, even though, when going to university, I spent three summers building bridges. An hour ago, I was trying to lift an open step ladder over a bunch of lumber in the garage, unaware that a big heavy hammer was sitting on the top of the ladder. I discovered this fact when the hammer flew off the ladder and hit me right on top of my head almost knocking me to my knees. I am now sporting a big red bloody mark on my scalp and I have lost about five IQ points but that is OK: I have plenty to spare.