Month: January 2018

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By Jim Hagarty
2016

If you are squeamish, or a self-appointed skin doctor (or a real doctor), don’t read this. For a couple of years I have had two big wart-like growths on the side of my head, just to the right of my forehead. They didn’t worry me much and my dermatologist always referred to them as “friendlies” and left them alone. It wasn’t fun walking around with two miniature muffins attached to my face but the rest of my Brad Pitt good looks (ahem) seemed to keep me out of Shrek the Ogre territory on most days.

This winter, however, there were developments. The dermatologist decided to biopsy my gruesome twosome and she did. So I went home and worked on my will for a week. Don’t worry. You are all in it. She finally phoned one day and said that everything was OK.

As it happened, I was scheduled not long after that for an event which required me to appear before a couple hundred people. And there would be a spotlight on me and my face for almost an hour.

A few days before the event, I was looking in my bathroom mirror and scrutinizing the mini hockey pucks on my head. And becoming concerned. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied a pair of toenail clippers. I will spare you the details.

But I am happy to announce that the practice of Jim Hagarty MD, Plastic Surgeon, opens Wednesday. Check my website for hours of operation. Rates reasonsble. Bring your own clippers.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

When I was 15, I thought I had to be working very hard at a job to get ahead.

When I was 25, I thought I had to be working very hard at a job.

When I was 35, I thought I had to be working very hard.

When I was 45, I thought I had to be working hard.

When I was 55, I thought I had to be working.

When I was 65, I thought I had to be.

By Jim Hagarty
2016
I walked up to the counter in the decorating store to buy a can of paint. “What colour?” the woman asked. “I don’t know. My mind is a blank.” She started mixing my paint. “Wait a minute,” I said. “What are you giving me?” She turned towards me, “You asked for My Mind Is A Blank.” Turns out, that is the name of the off-white paint colour I had been using and was exactly what I wanted. Glad I didn’t say, “I feel like crap.”

By Jim Hagarty
2007

Last week, the results of an important “research paper” showed that women do not talk more than men who yak it up more than was thought to be the case. To arrive at this startling conclusion, researchers bugged a bunch of university students with microphones and sent them out to see how their fellow students behaved on the conversational front. Apparently, the men had as much to say as the women. This, of course, serves to refute the old stereotype of women as incessant talkers.

A couple of other things can be concluded from the results of this study. First, this is proof positive that the world has run out of things to study. Secondly, somebody has scored front-row, first-class tickets on the government research gravy train.

U.S. researchers strapped small digital recorders to some 396 university students split about equally by gender and found that their female subjects spoke an average 16,215 words a day compared with 15,699 for the men. The difference between those two numbers, as reported in the journal Science, is considered statistically insignificant, yet significant enough to warrant reporting in the journal Science.

“The stereotype of female talkativeness is deeply ingrained in Western folklore and (is) often considered a scientific fact,” the paper states. An earlier study had argued women speak almost three times as many words per day as men – 20,000 versus 7,000 – but the authors of this latest paper call this nothing more than a “cultural myth” that grew through wide media circulation.

University of Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl, the paper’s lead author, says there is no difference in how much men and women talk. However, a McMaster University neuroscientist Sandra Witelson argues the U.S. study may have failed to record enough of the students’ conversations to produce an accurate idea of their actual word usage and she has reason to suspect women still might be the more talkative of the sexes.

Now, insubordinate hellion that I am, I want to know when the studies are going to get under way into whether we men actually never do stop to ask for directions, whether we scratch our nether regions more than women and whether we actually love remote controls more than the opposite sex does. Most importantly, do we pass wind as much as our female counterparts. (Tip: If those researchers were to go back over the recordings made by those little recorders they put on all those students and listen to them again, they might find the pass wind question will answer itself).

These, I submit, are equally valid questions to be answered and for a few hundred thousand dollars or so, I’d he more than willing to take a sabbatical to write lots of papers on all these subjects and more.

But if you need more proof that the research cupboard is practically bare, check out this bone from Mother Hubbard’s depleted stock: A new study suggests older adults have a harder time getting jokes as they age. “The research indicates that because older adults may have greater difficulty with cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning and short-term memory, they also have greater difficulty with tests of humour comprehension,” states a newspaper story. “This wasn’t a study about what people find funny. It was a study about whether they get what’s supposed to be funny,” U.S. professor Brian Carpenter says.

In other words, if you don’t think that doing a study to see if women talk more than men or to find out whether or not old people can still laugh are hilarious concepts, then you must he very old indeed and suffering from a severe funny-bone deficiency.

Transplants may soon be an option. I will not be a willing donor, so don’t bother asking. Humour is the only thing keeping me going most days.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

The interesting thing about news is that readers can never predict, with any certainty, what it is they’ll be confronted with on the front page of their paper from day to day. Yes, there are government budget stories, elections and scandals, civil wars and natural disasters. And then there are endless ramblings about the economy, the recession, the recovery, the interest rates, blah, blah, blah.

But who could have guessed one of the hot stories of the past few weeks would be about an American teenager being caned with a rattan reed across his bare buttocks as his punishment for vandalizing a bunch of cars in Singapore? Not since Lorena Bobbitt dealt out a bit of punishment of her own a while back, has such a bizarre story made the headlines.

And while the story couldn’t have been predicted, the reaction to it was anything but a surprise. Michael Fay’s bum rap has, of course, touched off a North American firestorm of discussion about the “issue” of corporal punishment and whether or not our society is too lenient with offenders.

What’s to discuss? Of course we’re too lenient. What we need, especially in this country, is a bunch of canings. Maybe even a few floggings. And to heck with this behind-closed-doors nonsense. Let’s have ’em right out in public and show ’em live on CNN.

If Michael Fay got four lashes for painting up a few cars, then the following North American offenders deserve the various punishments listed below.

• Ontario Premier Bob Rae – eight slaps on the you-know-what with a long piece of a used tire for not allowing companies to burn tires for fuel, preferring instead to see them pile up in ditches and woodlots;

• Ontario Attorney General Marion Boyd – ten flips of a rolled-up wad of legal paper for treating Ontario residents with contempt by churlishy muttering “no comment” to questions about what’s going on in the Paul Bernardo murder trial as if it was absolutely none of our business;

• American comic actor Roseanne Barr – ten snaps of her husband’s bathtowel on the place in which she’s been such a pain for the past few years. As she has been known to “moon” large crowds of people for fun, getting her to prepare for her punishment might not be the problem it would at first appear to be;

• Former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney – twelve smacks on the backside with Jean Chretien’s Red Book for wanting a $60,000 private washroom built at the National Archives for his convenience while he works on his “papers”;

• National Parole Board member Gil Bellavance – fourteen claps from an inmate’s belt, two for each of the seven people who were murdered because he released five notorious criminals who continued killing when they hit the streets. As well, two extra flips of the belt for taking no responsibility for his decisions and calling criticisms of him, “cheap shots”;

• The person who invented TV “infomercials”, those half-hour carnival barker’s dream come true designed to drive late-night viewers crazy – twenty smacks from a rope made out of shredded TV Guides.

Administered personally by yours truly.

By Jim Hagarty
2012

My family and I went public skating in a big city shopping mall rink on Saturday. I was pretty wobbly out there, not having strapped on my ancient blades in some time. And my skates actually are pretty old. Old enough that other skaters stop and remark, “OMG, what kind of skates are those?”

After a few shaky turns around the rink, I decided to sit on the players’ bench for a break. As I sat there and looked at the throng out on the frozen sheet of water, it occurred to me that I was the oldest skater there. At 61, in my normal, everyday life, I don’t feel that old, but skating that day with a rink full of younger folks, the idea that time is passing by took hold. I looked down at my skates and then at the crowd and realized that, at 36 years of age, my skates were older than 95 per cent of the skaters out there. Then, looking at some of toddlers poking along like newborn calves on their shaky pins, struggling to stand, it came to me that my underwear was probably older than some of them.

Finally, rested up, I went back out and felt it coming back to me a bit, my skating was gradually improving. Maybe the fact that my blades are covered in rust accounted for some of my problems.

Then, a tall young man sporting a really nice Team Canada hockey jersey skated my way, and when he passed me, I stared at disbelief at the big number on the back of his sweater: 61.

Aw, c’mon, I sighed to myself in disgust. Really? There were not enough reminders of the passing of my years for me to see that day without a guy skating by with my age emblazoned on his sweater?

No other hockey sweaters on the other skaters, no other numbers. Just 61. Father Time was outright mocking me now.

What a jerk!