By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker
I once knew a man named John
Who ran around with nothing on.
I thought it was rude
To see him all nude.
So I gave him some clothes he could don.
A Country Scene in Pennsylvania
Canadian blogger Al Bossence (thebayfieldbunch.com), who, with his wife Kelly and doggie Pheebs, are in their RV these days heading on their annual journey through the United States, took this shot of the hills of Pennsylvania.
Baring Up Under Pressure
By Jim Hagarty
1992
Recently, the issue of whether or not men should be allowed to parade their bare beer bellies around town, came up for discussion and the controversy has been ballooning out of control ever since.
Please, allow me to inject a little perspective into the debate.
First of all, it took men a couple of hundred years of concerted political pressure to win the right to get those bellies out there where everybody can have a good look at them. (As powerful as King Henry VIII was, he was not at liberty to let that big gut out of its confines. For that matter, neither was the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.)
If we are going to turn back the clock and force men back into covering up, we are going to have to be prepared to accept some of the other niceties of those ages, like spitunes, bleedings and beheadings. Seen in this light, the unrobed beer belly is a true sign of social enlightenment. (Seen in another light, it might be a sign that its owner has been drinking too much beer, but that’s another subject.)
Secondly, this idea that a great big, floppy, spongy belly is to be considered somewhat of a human eyesore, just doesn’t make sense. Exactly what part of the belly is to be found repulsive? The fact that it’s big? Bigness isn’t despised when it shows up in other men’s parts such as the shoulders or biceps. Do we object to it being floppy? If it was a pillow, we’d think it was great. As for spongy, what’s the problem? Serve up a cake that flexible and Betty Crocker would be breaking down your door to get at your recipe.
No, it’s obvious, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and, therefore, there can be no test to determine that a large, unclothed, male belly in a public place doesn’t belong there.
Thirdly, though it may seem to be a bit of a leap in logic, the bare beer belly is, in many ways, modern society’s last defence against the tyranny of youth and beauty that is always waiting around the corner to jump us. This week, it’s beer bellies. Next week, it will be knobby knees. Then freckles. Double chins. Bald heads. Soon, teams of Ugly Police will be enforced to cover up those parts of the male deemed to be repulsive.
So, in many ways, man’s struggle to bare his bloated belly is the struggle of free people everywhere. “Let my belly go!” should be our cry.
And lastly, and I want you to think about this carefully, if men are determined to shed some clothes on hot summer days, and the law allows it, is it not possible that the shirt could be the lesser of several evils. Imagine, for a moment, a situation where those men with the bellies decide one day that the shirt will stay but other garments just have to go. Is this a scene we want to contemplate?
Therefore, I see any criticism of the male right to expose yards of hairy, sweaty, bouncy, belly flesh on hot days as an attack on vital freedoms. And that is why I am proposing we march bare bellied through the streets this weekend. And I invite women everywhere to shed their tops and join us, as a sign of solidarity.
So, if you happen to see groups of women parading down the street this weekend with their shirts off, you’ll know my call for action has not gone unheard.
(Background: Around the time I wrote this column in 1992, a young Canadian woman walked topless down a street in her city on a hot summer day. She did this purposely, knowing the result. She was arrested and charged. She had her day in court. She won, thereby giving women the right to be topless in public without harassment from the law. For a month or two after the decision, women here and there went topless in public, in part because they could, and in some cases, as a lark. But this is a right that is rarely exercised in Canada, even on public beaches. As elsewhere, there are a few “topless” and even nude beaches, however.)
End of the Lyin’
By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker
My limerick skills run low.
I am out of ideas, you know.
I have had enough
Of writing this stuff.
These little poems might have to go.
Fly On 2015
This is a popular cut from the CD Wood, Wire, Glass and Soul by Canadian blues artist/songwriter Stevie T.
Fly On 2015 by Stevie T.
(If this track doesn’t play on this main page, click on the song title and go to the actual page itself.)
Packard Wasting Away
By Jim Hagarty
For years I have been driving by a local auto dismantler and I always look over at a 1949 Packard sitting there, rusting away, by the side of the road, the driver’s side window missing or wound down, leaving the interior open to the elements, winter and summer. I actually didn’t know it was a Packard until I dropped into the business today and asked the owner if I could take pictures of it. It was a classy car in its day. It has a vinyl covering on its roof. When I was a kid, the best cars had vinyl roofs. It also has “suicide doors”, the back doors opening into traffic instead of with it.
Not in My Back Yard
By Jim Hagarty
1986
Time was, the back yard was a fine place to get rid of garbage – at least in the country. It wouldn’t have occurred to us to load it all onto trucks, drive it a dozen or so miles from home, dump it in big piles along with everyone else’s “waste” and bulldoze it underground.
Our “landfill site” was an old gravel pit in the 20-acre field at the back of the farm. In there went all the things we couldn’t incinerate in the barrel behind the house or feed to the cats in the barnyard. Old beds, bottles, cans and barbed wire ended up in the bottom of the shallow pit and on one not-so-busy day during the dead heat of mid-summer – we doused it all with gasoline and burned it.
For day-to-day garbage, we kept big boxes in the back kitchen and in them went the stuff most suitable for burning. On a regular basis, Saturday mornings usually, all that paper and cardboard was carted out under the big maple tree by the fence behind the house, stuffed into a rusting, semi-burned-out barrel and set alight.
To a kid fascinated by the magical ability fire has to make things disappear, this exercise provided an hour or two of great entertainment. You could toss the most sturdy, indestructible objects at those flames and in minutes, they would be reduced to embers and ashes.
Meanwhile, into a pail under the kitchen sink, all our table scraps were scraped, eventually forming an unappetizing mixture appropriately named “swill.” The contents of the “swill pail”, while they were really rather revolting to any human with a reasonably active sense of smell, made up an apparently delicious supper for our many barn cats. They fished through this orangey-coloured soup in the same way children might wolf down chili without touching the kidney beans. It wasn’t the sort of meal Garfield might like, but it kept our kitties going.
On the farm, for everything there is a place. Each spring, or early summer, a small trailer hitched to a tractor was backed up under the upstairs’ window of the summer kitchen. That window was removed and out into the trailer, for the next few hours, flew things we couldn’t use any more and which weren’t worth giving away. Things like old winter coats, curtains, radios that didn’t work, lamps, school textbooks. When the trailer was filled, it would be drawn around to other buildings on the property that housed things we didn’t need and eventually the whole affair made its way back to the gravel pit.
Into the pit we threw everything from clothes to couches and from tree limbs to tractor tires. A gallon of gas and one match later, all that junk began to vanish.
In a year’s time, the average farm produces a lot of garbage. But you never saw much of it lying around our place. We got rid of it in the ways that seemed most sensible to us.
It was a simpler time. Environmentalists were as rare as Cadillacs on the road that ran by our farm and even if it had occurred to us that the belching black smoke from our little yearly fire might be doing some damage to a thing called the ozone layer which we hadn’t even heard of anyway, there was no one around very much concerned about it. We just wanted to clean up the place so the neighbours wouldn’t think we were deadbeats which are pretty terrible things to be mistaken for.
Today, waste disposal is an important issue. A real one. What kind of world do we want to leave for the generations to come? On that point, we’ve come a long way. Most of us think we’ve got to do a better job of getting rid of our garbage.
However, and it’s a big however, can people be blamed for not wanting a large landfill site in their backyard? In the past, to belittle the concerns of people who complain about the prospects of a huge dump in their neighbourhood and thereby undercut their arguments, planners have arrogantly dubbed the phenomenon of people opposing landfill sites (and other developments they don’t want) the NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard, effect. These planners, who often live out of the area to begin with, only create deeper anger and suspicion when they treat affected citizens like a bunch of local yokels who have nothing better to do than bellyache about inevitable change.
Granted, no site will please everybody. But there must be one site, somewhere, in any rural area, that would adversely affect only a few people. That’s the place to build a new dump.
We used an old pit at the back of the farm for our dump, as far away from our house as it was possible to get on our property. No engineering studies told us that was the best spot for our garbage.
Common sense did.
On the Dock of the Bay
A dog relaxes on the dock jutting into a bay in northern Canada.
The Hillbilly Blues
By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker
There once was an old hillbilly,
Who, when he talked, sounded silly.
He caused no offence,
But he barely made sense.
As oddballs go he was a dilly.
The ’72 Swinger
I saw this 1972 classy Dodge Dart Swinger in a lot in my hometown today. The Dart was brought back a few years ago but is going out of production again. It was much smaller than its ancestor and presented as a four-door family car, more than the mild muscle car pictured above, although this one contains a powerful engine.
