Month: January 2018

By Jim Hagarty
2011

A farmer in Perth County, Ontario, Canada, sold 335 acres of prime farmland divided into three farms in the late 1970s for just under $300,000, a pretty good figure at the time.

According to a recent story on land values in our local newspaper, that farmer today, if he could get top dollar, would walk away with a cheque with the figure $4,690,000 written on it. If that farmer were still around to read about this, he would probably be crying big salty tears in his beer. On the other hand, he paid only $4,500 in the early 1940s for one of those three farms (100 acres) which he sold for $75,000 eventually, so that must have seemed almost more amazing to him then than today’s figures would if he could learn about them. (Update: In 2018, those 335 acres could fetch as much as $7 million.)

Another farmer in the same area sold his farm a few years earlier for $19,000. He was going to buy a house in town with his money which he could easily do but the new owner said he wasn’t going to use the farmhouse so the farmer could just stay as long as he wanted to. So, the farmer did. I don’t know whether or not he paid rent but after a few years, he decided to move to town. Unfortunately for him, house prices had zoomed past him so quickly in those few years that his $19,000 wouldn’t buy him a house by then. If he was still around, with that money he couldn’t even buy a decent van to live in down by the river.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

There is a cat show in my hometown Sunday and it’s been suggested to me that I spruce up my old pal Grumbles and haul her growly self over to the Fairgrounds to let people oooh and aaah over her.

I gave this thought some consideration – five seconds’ worth, I think it was – before deciding the only spectators she’ll be showing herself to on Sunday will be the sparrows sitting around the fence in my backyard. I have several reasons for knowing I made the right decision. First of all, having total strangers stick their admiring faces within a few inches of my temperamental cat with the Wilkinson Sword teeth would be like telling a friend who borrowed a table saw: “Blade guard? Nah! Don’t need one. You’ll be all right.”

Secondly, there’ll probably be about $5 million worth of cats at the show that would be worth about $5,000 after my peevish little scrapper broke loose and went around rearranging the ribbons and bows around their furry necks.

And thirdly, for me to put her through all that misery would earn me a cat chaw on a thumb or finger that would make the shark victims in the movie Jaws look like they’d suffered a slight scraping on the skin of their legs. This wound could come any time within a day of taking her to the show, as she remembers injustices and is patient in meting out her revenge.

But (can’t you just feel this building to a crescendo?) my biggest reason for not entering my critter in this ego-feeding frenzy for felines is my certain knowledge that the little grey bundle of fury that can shred paper towels, woodwork and upholstery faster than a Vegomatic can slice through a tomato, would come in dead last in the competition, embarrassing herself and her (somewhat reluctant) owner. Oh, she might pick up a point or two for her cute face and a few more for her street smarts – she can tell time, especially breakfast time, dinner time, supper time, etc. – but at 10 years old, she’s starting to show the effects of her battles. Some unfriendly neighbour pet made off with with a part of one of her ears one night and a big black dog chewed on her midsection for a while another time. I’m convinced when I look at her sometimes that her face is on crooked and as I watched her fall out of a tree on Saturday, I thought that maybe she’s losing her grip.

My cat’s belly sags now like the underside of an old cow, the effects of age and too many patch-up jobs at the vet’s. Her day’s work, which once involved chasing down and murdering creatures smaller than herself, now is made up almost solely of finding a nice warm place for her increasingly chilly frame. She spends a lot of her time now down in the basement on our huge, white cat warmer which also doubles as our water heater. And she actually lets our other cat walk by her from time to time without rushing out and getting him in a headlock.

Another pleasant feature is how her stomach disturbances burst forth into the air as she reclines on my chest with her hindquarters an inch away from my face while I lie on my couch trying to watch TV. She also coughs up fur balls and breakfast with disturbing regularity and in the most obscure locations around the house.

Ah, she’s a dandy alright, this little companion of mine. But sometimes when I’m sitting in the backyard and she crawls up and sits down beside me, looking off in the same direction I’m looking, I know darn well we won’t be missing much on Sunday. No fancy-pants cat with a Princess Diana manner about her could take the place of one, well-timed headbutt from dear old Grumbles, no matter how big a butthead she can be.

By Jim Hagarty
2013
Every once in a while, when I open the fridge door, a housefly comes staggering out, barely able to stay aloft. I am sure his fly mind is saying WTF? This has happened a few times now, and I am starting to wonder if it’s the same fly that flies in when the door opens. If so, this fly is (a) not very smart or (b) the smartest fly in the world. While all his fly buddies are sweatin’ it out with the rest of us, he’s found his own little air-conditioned Shangri-la. On the other hand, sometimes he’s in there for up to eight hours straight between fridge door openings. I do not believe this is good for a fly and therefore I predict his ultimate demise. At his funeral, I promise to sing, “Why can’t I free your doubtful mind, and melt your cold, cold heart.”

By Jim Hagarty
2017
So you are considering setting up a ponzi scheme in Thailand. Suit yourself but if I was your life coach, I would probably advise you against it. A Thai court has sentenced a fraudster to more than 13,000 years in prison. Pudit Kittithradilok, 34, took about 40,000 people to the cleaners, making off with $160 million. He is now looking at a prison sentence of 13,275 years. On the upside, because he co-operated with authorities, his sentence has been cut in half and now he is staring only 6,637 years. Whew! Close call, Pudit. You were looking at some serious time there buddy. But please don’t feel too badly for this stinker. He should be out in about 20 years.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

Five years on, and Osama bin Laden is still runnin’ around the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan, successfully avoiding capture by the world’s superpowers who are using every very sophisticated tool they can to zero in on him and his band of merry asswipes.

Had anyone bothered to ask me, I think I could have made their job a lot easier and a lot more successful.

All Bush and Co. would have needed to have done is somehow to have gotten a bank debit card into the hands of the planet’s number one fugitive and then gone online and followed his tracks through the hills and valleys of those dusty lands.

This thought occurred to one night this week as I was pondering the repercussions of an incident that happened earlier in the day. On a day off with the kids, I headed out of town for a movie when about halfway there, I began suffering a terrible Mr. Big chocolate bar craving. (My doctor says I have a severe chocolate deficiency – worst he’s ever seen – and has prescribed one Mr. Big a day. I am following doctor’s orders to a T.) At a variety store I stopped at, I realized I was penniless once again and so whipped out my debit card to pay for my medication.

The young woman behind the counter informed me there would be a 25 cent debit charge, an announcement which did not deter me in the same way a $25 debit fee would not have dissuaded me from gobbling up my medicine in that critical situation.

Back in the van, nerves calmed, duly simmering, I turned back onto the road to continue on with our trip. We had a great afternoon.

But at suppertime (sorry folks, old farmer, evening meal is supper) my wife looked skeptically down the table and asked me what I had bought a few hours earlier for $1.50. I confessed to the chocolate bar and it gradually dawned on me how my every movements are now being monitored by someone who likes to check our bank accounts hourly on the Internet, in case, I suppose, someone accidentally deposits a million or two into those little, mostly empty equivalent of pots of copper.

In the old days – the good old ones, I am tempted to say – a man’s sins didn’t catch up with him that quickly. For one thing, we carried wads of cash, and no one could ever know what we spent it on. For another, there were no debit cards delivering instant confessions for us out over the Internet lines.

And evidence of any cheques that were written only showed up at the house once a month, long after the offending purchase had been made.

Some of those statements had a way of getting lost and once gone, the information on them, I think, was pretty much history as well. But once you’ve turned off the high road of cash and are hooked on that little magic card, your chances of going through an average day undetected are pretty slim.

You can be followed, minute by minute, like an inmate under heightened supervision in a maximum security prison.

So, I would stop fooling around with drone airplanes directed from warships hundreds of miles away, night-vision cameras and radar detectors from space and go get old Osama there his own debit card.

Then when he wanders into town for some tobacco, a few postcards and batteries for his GameBoy, I’d just look that up using Internet banking and swoop in for a little chat with our favourite holy warrior.

Who knows? We might even catch him scarfing down a Mr. Big or two.

Whether it’s chocolate or some other substance, he certainly does seem to be suffering from some sort of deficiency.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

Okay, so there are better ways to start the day than this.

I just got home from having blood taken from me at the lab after a 12-hour fast, when there was a message on the phone to call my wife at her office. So I called. She answered and then said, “Just a minute.”

The phone sort of went dead and I thought she was putting me on hold. So I said in as charming a way as I could, “Awww, c’mon! I’ve gotta get some fucking food into me.”

She came back on the line, seemingly flustered.

“I was on speakerphone, wasn’t I?” I asked. Turns out I was. She hadn’t put me on hold; she was preparing for a conference call and she was trying to take me off speakerphone.

At least her bosses and all the other VIPs didn’t hear my sweet nothings.

I’m hoping for joint custody of the kids but that’ll be up to the judge, I guess.

By Jim Hagarty
1994

Now that the world has dealt successfully with the easier problems of racism, crime, addiction, poverty, war and pollution, it’s time for us to move onto the more serious troubles facing modern man and woman.

I am talking here of serious woes such as the shame of bad breath.

How many times have you found yourself wondering, after a particularly frightening encounter with someone whose breath, as the expression goes, would scare a buzzard off a manure spreader, why someone hasn’t done something about this? Forty years of mouthwash companies experimenting with chlorophyll and retsin and toothpaste companies trying green stripes and red gel and a lot of us still have days when even our pets won’t come near us.

Well, the good news is, someone has done something about it. In October, the Fresh Breath Clinic opened up in Toronto, one of two in North America now treating stubborn mouth odours.

“It’s like a load’s been lifted off me,” one happy clinic patient told a reporter this week. “It was just unbelievable.” My guess is a bigger load’s been lifted off his family and fellow workers.

Of course, we aren’t hearing from the unsuccessful clinic attendees, presumably because no reporter can get close enough for an interview, but who are we to disbelieve someone who has had such a transforming experience? He has been to the mountain and the answer is a special prescription mouth rinse that makes his kisser as sweet as a freshly picked daisy. The rinse apparently also works well for stripping down old tractor bodies for repainting and for opening up those nasty drain clogs. Do not use around open flames.

And now for the world’s other nastiest problem.

Out of London, England, comes the news that a new course has been designed to help people stop being excessively nice. Called The Nice Factor, the weekend course is being run by an actor who wants people to stop worrying about what others think.

“We are not against being nice itself, but we try to help people who are always nice – even to people who do not deserve it – and whose lips always say yes when their minds say no,” says course founder Raymond Chandler. “The disease of niceness cripples more lives than alcoholism.”

Now, aside from the fact that it’s been a while since I heard about anyone being run over by someone driving under the influence of niceness, I have no problems agreeing with Chandler’s view. As a chronically “nice” guy of long standing, I have been left standing for long periods in line while others not burdened with such a character defect, cut in front of me at the coffee shop. My response is to reason with myself: “Why cause a scene? What does it matter? Maybe he’s a nut with a loaded handgun in his jacket. Maybe he just didn’t see me. Don’t be petty.” The bottom line is, however, that he has his coffee and is halfway to Kitchener before I’ve even finished deciding between honey cruller and fancy plain.

So, as you can see, this is a crisis worth attending to. And it has an unexpected side benefit that sort of shows how life works in cycles that almost have an intelligence to them. The people who graduate from treatment for being too nice, it would seem, would have no problem from then on going up to people with barnyard breath and informing them of the fact.

“You smell like a fish factory on a hot day in August,” the no-longer-nice person would hopefully have the decency to say which, if the world were perfect, would result in another enrollee at the Fresh Breath Clinic. (Or, the Open Gunshot Wound Clinic.)

So the answer it seems, is for more us to stop being so nice and send the not-so-sweet-smelling among us for treatment.

Next dilemma, please.