Beam Me Up, Thomas!

By Jim Hagarty
2007

Wherever Thomas Edison is right now, he must be shaking his brilliant head.

The former Stratford, Ontario, Canada resident – yes, he lived here for a while as a young man – invented the incandescent light bulb, among many other things you might have heard of, such as the phonograph (which later became the record player, then the tape recorder, then the CD player, then the iPod). And now, the news comes that my province Ontario is thinking of banning Thomas’s light bulb. It eats up too much energy and most of the hydro it uses is converted into heat, not light.

Alternative light producers have been invented and are in the process of being invented and even the twisty, fat, little compact fluorescent bulb, which has taken the old bulb’s place, will one day soon be obsolete as other technologies, such as light-emitting diodes, take their place.

Pardon me for using this old line again, but it seems appropriate here: How many folksingers does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to change the bulb and one to sing a song about how great the old bulb was.

I feel a bit like that folksinger, but just as my father never missed his woodstove once he had an oil furnace and central heating installed in our farmhouse, I am adapting pretty well to life without Edison’s invention.

More than years ago, when I first moved to Stratford, compact fluorescent bulbs were on sale at a downtown grocery store. They came in two sizes: long straight tubes and short straight tubes. They were done up in green packaging and promised great rewards. I bought a couple of them, but about the only place they were of any use was as the light in the range hood above the stove. All these years later, I am using one of them there still.

But throughout the rest of the house, I spent a lot of time buying and replacing traditional bulbs in fixtures and lamps. They always seemed to be blowing out, especially those finicky trilight ones. Then three years ago, I stopped in an aisle and noticed that the “CFL” was now being offered in a whole range of shapes and uses – they are even made for trilights and dimmer fixtures now – and having read where people were saving money by making the switch, I took the plunge for real. One by one, since then, I have replaced 95 per cent of the bulbs in our home.

This new light took some getting used to – it’s a bit colder and makes nice pine wood look more yellow than brown – but I found that after a few days, my family and I were well adjusted to our new atmosphere. Now I can never walk by a shelf of bulbs without checking them out to see what new “twist” might be there and to marvel at how the price of them keeps dropping.

I have not done a careful assessment of how much our hydro bills have fallen off since we began making the switch, but I know they are less. Here are some bulb stats from one home in Stratford. Before I started changing bulbs, there were 47 incandescents burning away in (and on the front and back) of the house and two long-tube, standard fluorescents. Those bulbs were burning 3,430 watts of electricity. I have since replaced 40 of them (which used 2,690 watts) and now use 737 watts instead. When I am done replacing everything, my wattage will have dropped from 3,430 watts to 935.

I know there are incandescent bulbs that it makes no sense to change in my house. They are seldom turned on and burn for only a few minutes or an hour or two when they are on. But being a perfectionist, I won’t be able to rest till all my sockets are twisted (sounds painful).

One statistic I don’t have, and should have kept, is how much all these little beasties have cost me. They certainly have been more expensive. In the long run, will I have saved any money when the bulbs’ long lives are balanced against my lower electricity bills? And one nagging question is whether or not, when we all start using a lot less electricity, our rates will go up to compensate for the lost revenue by the power companies.

All in all, it is nice not to have to change deceased bulbs so often and it’s been a while since I burned my fingers by touching a hot bulb (the new ones are cooler).

But there are downsides. For one thing, some of them don’t last as long as their packaging says they will. Secondly, some of the bulbs have caught on fire (not mine) though there apparently hasn’t been any recorded cases so far of this resulting in a larger house fire. And containing mercury, they have to be disposed of with a bit of care. I take ours to a local disposal depot at a hardware store down the street.

If Thomas Edison was still around, I guess he would have left his bulb behind him long ago and been inventing newer and better lighting devices. And he’d be listening to the song about how great the old light bulb was – on his iPod or iPhone.


(Update. The store shelves in my town are filled now with LED bulbs. I have yet to take that plunge but I know it’s coming. I have been waiting for the prices to fall and now that they have, I will soon be on board. They emit almost no heat, use less power and last a long, long time.)

Our Own White House

By Jim Hagarty
Stratord, Ontario, Canada, two hours’ drive from Toronto, couldn’t be much farther removed from the U.S. Deep South. Nevertheless, for more than a hundred years, we have had our own “White House.” The man who owned the large, fairly standard brick home in the late 1800s, once toured the southern U.S. states. He was so impressed with the plantation mansions he saw, that he decided to replicate, with his own home in Canada, what had so fascinated him on his U.S. trip. So when he came back home, he set to work having large columns added to his house along with balconies and other signature features of the southern mansions. Other Stratford homes also sport tall columns but none so closely resembled the real White House in Washington. This house was painted white, top to bottom, which completed the look. Unfortunately, the home has fallen on a bit of hard times, it is badly in need of a re-painting. A headline in local newspaper suggested the house, in fact, might be torn down.

Stupid Races

By Jim Hagarty

Well, isn’t that cute, I thought. One of the horses in the race we were betting on was called You Can’t Fix Stupid.

Six of us former journalism teachers were sitting around a monitor and looking out the big windows at the racetrack, following the excitement and checking our tickets after every race. We had each thrown $20 in a pot and when that was gone, we’d quit betting.

This night, we were doing pretty well. In fact, by Race 5 we were up almost $500. I’m new to this but nevertheless I was sent up to place our bets for Race 6. I took some money, approached the wicket and carefully placed $24 worth of $2 bets.

When the race was over, there was great rejoicing at our table. We had won $499.80. OMG we’ve made a thousand dollars tonight went the shouts and there were still six races to go.

One of the other teachers grabbed the winning ticket and went to the wicket to collect. He was there a long time and he seemed to be almost arguing with one of the women there. I suggested helpfully that maybe she didn’t have enough cash to pay us. Someone else said he looked like he was negotiating with the clerk.

Finally, he turned and came back to the table with a disgusted look on his face. He tossed the ticket on the table in front of me. “You bet on the wrong race,” he said to me.

It was quiet on the way home, all of us in the car. The only thing that saved me at all was the fact that our winning streak carried on for the rest of the night and we ended up ahead $800. Nevertheless, there was some suggestion made that I would be left in a cornfield somewhere and the words “hide the body” were also spoken but I am not sure what that was all about. I didn’t want to know.

All I do know for sure is You Can’t Fix Stupid didn’t win, place or show, and I felt badly for him as he and I seemed to be kindred spirits that night.

Speaker’s Corner

By Jim Hagarty

I’ve played guitar for 45 years but I have never owned a guitar amp. I play an acoustic guitar and when I perform, I sit on a stool and pull an instrument mic up to my guitar.

But a friend with a music store finally talked me into buying one. He gave me a good deal.

So one day I finally got up my nerve and went out into the garage and set it up. My guitar has a pickup inside it so I plugged it into my new, cool, rectangular box on wheels.

I experimented with it, turning all the buttons every which way and checking out the neat sounds it can make. After a while, I became curious about how loud it would go. So I cranked it up. All the way. I strummed my guitar strings a few times, didn’t care for the distortion at maximum volume, and shut everything off to take the dog for a walk.

I got three houses away from home and my neighbour came out of his house.

“My power just went off,” he said.

Another neighbour came out his front door, directly across the street.

“Have you got any power over there?” the first neighbour asked him.

“Nope,” was the reply.

Then a woman emerged from the house next door. She too had no power.

“Have you got any power?” the first neighbour asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I was just playing my guitar in the garage there and my amp was plugged in …”

Oh, oh. The report arrived later that almost the whole city had been down for a while.

Oh well. I am hell bent on becoming a rock star and my neighbours are powerless to stop me.

House for Rent

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

We built a wee house in a tree,
One summer, my daughter and me.
But she’s leaving home,
Treehouse is alone,
So I’ll climb up so it won’t be.

Worst Car Ever?

By Jim Hagarty

In the latter half of the 1950s, the Ford Motor Company produced a new model and named it after Henry Ford’s son Edsel. Car enthusiasts and experts remember it as a good car, but car buyers didn’t like it. Especially the “horse harness” on the front grille. The car was a flop and to this day, the name Edsel is associated with failure. In fact, the word “Edsel” is used in everyday language to disparage new products. So a company’s new laptop or smartphone might get a bad reputation and eventually be referred to as the Ford Edsel of the computing world. The convertible model shown here is from 1959, seen at a classic car show in my town last night.

edsel rear view

Trouble in Dreamland

By Jim Hagarty

The range of subjects on which to have a boring discussion with another person is probably endless, but about the worst item l can think of is the details of our dream lives.

How, I wonder, could it possibly be of any interest to me at all what crazy images blazed across the wide-screen TV in your head while you were unconscious last night? Unless you had recurring nightmares about your stabbing me 42 times with a 12-inch-long butcher knife while I sat in my chair watching a hockey game, any other spectacle played out in your brain during your REM cycles couldn’t possibly intrigue me.

And yet, people insist on describing to me, in vivid detail, every weird – and sometimes macabre – twist and turn and change of scenery and characters in the drama that was the dream they had last night. I am not denying that dreams can be very interesting, but only, I believe, to the person who experiences them.

As it happens, I dream like mad all night long, it seems, and if woken during the night, can’t wait to get back to sleep to see what’s up next in the lineup. It’s almost, ahem, a dream come true: channel-flipping all night long without the need to run a remote control and risk contracting carpal tunnel syndrome. Of course, what is truly frustrating is how dreams end just when they’re getting really good like having your favourite show interrupted for a major news bulletin and how you can never get that dream back again.

But if having people relate details of their dreams to you is tiresome, having someone interpret the meaning of your dreams is downright annoying. And there seems to be no shortage of people willing to take on, what would seem to me to be, such an arduous and unnecessary task. Now and then, I will make the terrible mistake of sharing one of my more memorable overnight movies with someone, only to have the meaning of each scene explained to me. I think it is the complete authority with which dream interpreters weave their magic that is so infuriating.

Years ago, I was told that if you dream you are free falling (like off a cliff) but you wake before you hit the ground, it means you are having a heart attack. Using this guide, l have probably had four or five hundred heart attacks so far in my life. (What I think might be really useful is if someone could tell me for certain why I keep getting shoved off this cliff.)

If, in your dreams, you discover yourself stark naked in public, it means you have been concealing some fact and need to reveal it. So there I occasionally am, in a mall or on main street, sauntering along stark raving nude.

If, in a dream, you hear someone knocking on your door three times, a family member has just died or is about to die, I can’t remember which. But when I hear it, I dig out my funeral suit and lay it out on the bed.

If you’re the bad guy in most of your dreams, it’s a sign of unresolved conflicts with others that need to be fixed. And, of course, there I am, Bad Bad Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole damn town.

If you want a punch in the head, insult someone’s religion, make fun of their kids, deride their politics or career of choice. But if you really want a fight to the death, try telling a dream believer that dreams are nothing more than a nightly fireworks of the brain which occur because the subconscious mind gets a chance to run the show for a few hours while the conscious mind takes a breather.

My guess is, talk trash about dreams to a dream interpreter, and your tumble off the cliff might be more than just imaginary. Some people take these things very seriously. Having figured out who they are, don’t even dream about describing your dreams to them.

That can be a nightmare.