Month: August 2016

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

If you’re caught watching CNN,
And you want the madness to end.
No need to frown
Just shut the thing down
And go for a drive with a friend.

By Jim Hagarty

I have no decent explanations for the things that bug me on a regular basis, I freely admit. I want to locate the first person who ever said or wrote this super annoying expression: “Just sayin'”. I would like to take that person out behind the barn and administer a much-needed attitude adjustment. I do not know what it is that “just sayin'” is supposed to mean. Does it mean, which I suspect it does, that I am not responsible for the bullshit I just now expressed and you will have to give me a pass on it because, after all, I am “just sayin'”.

In other words, yes, what I have just expressed is probably unacceptable but I have a right to say it so boo hoo for you if you don’t like it.

“If Obama is really an American citizen, howcum we have never heard him singing a Merle Haggard song? Just sayin’…”

I believe that this expression was especially designed for people who want to get their hatred out there and not be held to account for it. So, if you see it at the end of a comment, read that comment over again and tell me I am wrong.

It is the hater’s shorthand and a little classier than, “Screw you!”

Just sayin’.

By Jim Hagarty
In the early ’70s, our neighbour on the farm who had moved to town, died. His widow did not want to keep the car she and he husband had used. So she sold their 1966 Chevelle Malibu to my Dad for $400 and he gave the car to me. It was a lighter shade of blue than the one shown above at a classic car display in my hometown this week, but identical in every other way. I loved that car. It had a very peppy engine and as most four-door sedans in those days, a bench front seat. The bench had so many advantages, a major one being that on a date, proceedings did not have to be relocated to the back seat where there was more room. And in the days before seatbelts became the law, a young man could drive down the road with his date sitting tight beside him, one arm on the steering wheel and the other around his girlfriend. The worst thing to happen to car-inspired love was the bucket seat. How sexy is it to sit in a bucket? One thing that amazes me is how this car, bigger than most full-size American cars on the road today, was considered almost a compact, much smaller than its older Chevy cousins such as the Impala. The Chevy Nova (at first also called the Chevy II), in fact, was even smaller than the Chevelle and I believe was actually referred to as a compact. To see one today makes that classification laughable. It is huge.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

I hate losing things.

Some people just shrug off the temporary or permanent loss of a possession, but I can’t stand to be deprived of something that belongs to me, even if it has little or no value.

So, when faced with the prospect of never again seeing the thing which I have lost, I go into an extravagant recovery mode that defies logic. Last week, on vacation with my children, I dredged the bottom of a lake we were swimming in, to find a pair of green goggles. The goggles cost $3.97 plus tax to buy, so you can see that such a significant investment would require extraordinary efforts to reclaim what the water had swallowed up.

I organized a search party of three – my brood and I – and we carefully combed the lake bottom with our feet in a grid pattern I had mapped out. After about 20 minutes, something caught on my big toe. I raised my foot in glory: Green goggles dangled there.

My joy was shortlived. An hour later, the goggles disappeared again and this time, the lake had its victory, despite another search.

You might have gathered, from this column and previous ones, that I have trouble letting go of things. I have become aware that I am not alone in this. There are, in fact, many people who are far more afflicted in this direction than I. They cannot part with anything and their possessions eventually form a kind of emotional stranglehold that cripples their lives.

Perhaps that is why some people who have lost their home through fire or some other catastrophe, testify later that, except for the loss of irreplaceable memorabilia such as photos and videos, losing their former home ended up being a freeing thing. Disaster achieved what they couldn’t bring themselves to do – discard that which they didn’t need – and they began to live again.

Maybe it’s an Ontario thing. A quarter century ago, I spent three months in Edmonton and along the way, formed an opinion about Albertans that l’m sure isn’t very accurate and is a naive generalization. But at that time, in any case, it seemed to me that many of them – at least the ones I met – were less security conscious than us easterners. Money was not to be accumulated and trapped so as to never see the light of day. It was to be used and enjoyed.

My one friend, for example, carried a wallet so full of cash he could hardly close it. And he had no problem parting with any of those bills, if the mood struck him, for a good meal or a piece of clothing that grabbed his fancy.

And from him I learned a lesson in how seriously we should take our possessions. One night, he drove his restored 1955 Chevy into a fast-food restaurant parking lot and pulled up beside a sleek, white Pontiac Firebird. He immediately fell in love with the sports car next to him and as he got out to examine it more closely, the owner of that car walked over and took an envious look up and down at the classic old Chevy. Eventually, after a brief discussion, the two men decided to trade cars, there and then. They exchanged ownerships, climbed into each other’s vehicles and drove off, without any money changing hands.

I have always marvelled at that story and how it flies in the face of our modern ownership ethic. I cannot imagine doing what my friend did; I’d have to go home and think about it for a week or two and make sure my ’55 Chevy wasn’t worth more than the Firebird. By the time I was ready to make a move, the other fellow would have moved on.

Some day, of course, ready or not, we all have to leave all our stuff behind. As a line from a popular country song once said, you never see a moving van following a hearse. Nevertheless, being human, we all need a certain amount of stuff.

Such as invaluable green goggles.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once caught a pike named Mike.
And carried him home on my bike.
I had plans to eat him,
And no plans to keep him,
But it turns out that we’re quite alike.

By Jim Hagarty

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have flossed my teeth in my life. But the calculator on my phone does not have enough digits to count the number of times my dentists have told me to floss in my life.

Now, there appears to be proof, according to a study, that flossing does a person who has teeth in his head very little good if any at all. Meanwhile, the $2 billion floss industry has spent decades making me feel guilty about not sticking a bunch of string in my mouth and flailing away at my gums till they bleed.

I have only this remarkably intelligent comment to make:

“Yay!”

This is one small step for man, one giant leap for lazy oafs.

So I am going to draw up a list of all the other things I am supposed to do but often refuse to do, and check all these things off as future studies debunk them too.

This is my partial list so far.

1. Eight glasses of water a day. I have tried that once or twice and my tiny bladder practically exploded. I had pee coming out of my wherever.

2. Skim milk. I once blindfolded myself and did a taste test. One glass held skim milk, the other, chilled rabbit piss. I am not a stupid man, but I could not tell the difference. (As an aside, do you have any idea how long it takes your rabbit to fill a glass with its urine? Me neither. I buy mine at the farmers’ market.)

3. Walk your ass off every day. No, seriously. Walk until your ass falls off.

4. Eat chicken. Then some more chicken. The next day, chicken. On the weekends, treat yourself to chicken. A tasty bedtime snack: chicken on a cracker. If this gets boring, eat fish, but only if you can find a way to prepare it so it tastes like chicken.

5. Enjoy life more. While flossing, eating chicken, drinking rabbit piss, walking your ass off and swallowing a full barrel of water.

Further updates to the list as more examples of soon-to-be debunked health practices occur to me.

By Jim Hagarty
2007

I don’t idolize just anybody but these guys really impress.

The world is running out of heroes, but maybe it’s still too early to count the human race out. In New York there lives a man whose recent accomplishment shows that there isn’t much we can’t achieve if we put our mind, and in this case, our mouth into it.

This week Joey Chestnut became the world’s hot-dog eating champion, knocking off six-time title holder Takeru Kobayashi and my hat is off to him. Chestnut, competing in the annual Fourth of July competition, broke his own world record by inhaling 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes – a staggering one every 10.9 seconds – before a screaming crowd in Coney Island.

“If I needed to eat another one right now, I could,” the 23-year-old Californian said after receiving the mustard yellow belt emblematic of hot-dog eating supremacy, stated a Canadian Press story. Kobayashi, the Japanese eating machine, stayed with Chestnut frank-for-frank until the very end of the competition. He finished with 63 HDBs – hot dogs and buns – eaten in his best performance ever.

Almost as good as the event was the newspaper story describing it: “The two gustatory gladiators quickly distanced themselves from the rest of the 17 competitors, processing more beef than a slaughterhouse within the first few minutes. The two had each downed 60 hot dogs with 60 seconds to go when Chestnut, the veins on his forehead extended, put away the final franks to end Kobayashi’s reign.”

You know, we all come to our rightful place in life after a while and Joey Chestnut, obviously, has found his mission as a speedy consumer of tube steaks. There are worse fates. And there are worse foods to be ingested in a hurry.

The record for eating live cockroaches, for example, is held by Ken Edwards of Derbyshire, England. In 2001 he ate 36 hissing Madagascar roaches in one minute. Chris Hendrix holds the world record for eating crawfish. He ate 331 of them in 12 minutes. Richard LeFevre holds the world record for eating SPAM by eating six pounds in 12 minutes. Sonya Thomas ate 38 lobsters in 12 minutes. She also holds the record for hard boiled eggs, and pork and beans (8.4 pounds in 2 minutes 47 seconds) and many others. She weighs only 105 pounds.

The world eating competition for cow brains is held by our hungry friend up top Takeru Kobayashi who swallowed 17.7 pounds in 15 minutes. The world record for butter eating is seven quarter-pound sticks of salted butter in five minutes by Donald Lerman. The world record for eating cabbage is held by Charles Hardy. He ate six pounds, nine ounces in nine minutes. The world record for eating corn on the cob is 33.5 ears in 12 minutes, held by Cookie Jarvis. The world record for eating mayonnaise is held by Oleg Zhornitskiy. He ate four 32-ounce bowls in eight minutes.

I can happily live out the rest of my life taking a pass on seeing how fast I can gobble up cockroaches and cows brains, but to further the development of homo sapiens as a species, there is a record involving one particular sandwich for which I would be willing to compete. And that is the grilled cheese, a few of which I’ve put away in my life, especially in my bachelor years. There are annual contests in the U.S. with prizes nearing $30,000. The current world record belongs to Sonya Thomas (the mini-me mentioned above), who devoured 25 grilled cheese sandwiches in 10 minutes in a contest in 2005.

Stand back. I’m sure I can do better than that.

Without even trying.