Category: Uncategorized

By Jim Hagarty
1991

If I was a thief, and if I don’t soon win the lottery I might have to become one, I would have my eye on any number of things to steal out there in Perth County.

I’ve seen a red Corvette convertible I wouldn’t mind making off with in the middle of the night, a big Winnebago motorhome that would look just great with my smiling face behind the steering wheel and a motorboat that I’m sure was built with me in mind.

Being a music lover, I’d steal a nice, expensive Martin acoustic guitar if I went out for a night of thieving or an audio-visual centre complete with CD player, a VCR and the best speakers money could buy. I might steal somebody’s record collection.

There are homes in the county that are furnished with beautiful antiques from basement to attic and if I was in the habit of taking what isn’t mine, I’d have a few of those around my place. I might even make off with a prized painting or two or a brass door knocker or a set of wicker porch furniture.

I can even see the value in digging up a couple of lush trees from someone’s front yard to plant in my yard. I might take a plush leather jacket, or a pair of cowboy boots. Or even a flashy new bicycle.

But I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t steal.

I wouldn’t steal a portable toilet.

Call me a snob, but my heart has never been set on having anyone else’s Johnny-on-the-spot. You could line up 50 of the best ones made on your front lawn and I wouldn’t take one of them. If I could make a killing selling modern two-holers on the black market, I wouldn’t thank you for the opportunity.

But we’re all different, I realize now.

Because I read in the paper on Tuesday about the theft of a $700 portable toilet from a construction site near Russeldale. The thieves will have a hard time hiding their booty because I expect, by now, that police dogs have picked up their scent and are hot on the trail.

But the question remains. Why would anyone steal a toilet?

I can think of only three possible answers.

Perhaps they have already stolen everything else and are getting down on their list of desirable items for theft.

Maybe Perth County is running out of things to steal.

Or – and this theory is the most complicated – perhaps they needed a portable toilet.

Now, I realize that historically, people have stolen when they were in need – food when they were starving, money when they were destitute, etc. But if the thieves in question needed a toilet that badly, couldn’t they have found some way out of their dilemma that would have saved them from having to turn to crime? Couldn’t they have stolen off behind a tree, for example? Or into a corn field?

My prediction is, if this toilet theft leads to a rash of such thefts a toilet paper stealing spree can’t be far behind. Follow the paper trail and it will lead you right to the pooper scoopers and the smelly spoils of their crappy crime.

By Jim Hagarty
2015

I have been looking for a new sport ever since my doctor put an end to my hang gliding (I landed inside a silo near Kinkora and got some scrapes) and now I think I have found it in New York.

Several dozen competitors from around the world took turns Sunday hurling a sacrificial banjo into a polluted urban canal to see who could throw it the farthest. Tyler Frank of St. Louis bested all other male competitors with an 85-foot throw. On the women’s side, Nada Zimmerman of Innsbruck, Austria, tossed the banjo 67 feet into Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.

Two things: I want to hire Tyler to tutor me and I am madly in love with Nada.

Event founder, banjo player and radio host Eli Smith, says, “I love the banjo, and yet I have a perverse desire to see it thrown into a body of water.” I don’t see anything perverse about that at all.

So, I’ll be down at the Avon River in Stratford practising tonight. I just hope I don’t hit a duck or a dragon boater.

Finally, my sport. Shows if you are patient, the right one will come along.

By Jim Hagarty
2007

Nothing’s simple any more. You hear it said. So do I. You might, in fact, have heard it from me. I’m usually saying it. People of the jury, I present as my evidence, well, just about every aspect of modern life.

You don’t want to know about my underwear buying habits, I’m sure, but I just recently spent almost half an hour in a men’s clothing section trying to decide among the many options available today for the simple job performed by underwear, whatever job that might be. Colours galore, patterns aplenty, boxers, briefs. Value paks of six pairs, or three pairs. Special occasion briefs.

In the good old days, there was one kind of men’s and boy’s underwear and one kind only. However, you had a wide variety of colours to choose from – as long as it was white.

It doesn’t matter what you go to buy, or to eat, or to watch in a theatre. Saturday, at one of these big movieplexes, a friend and I stood gawking for 15 minutes before the popcorn stand, weighing all the various options and packages priced for value. Bargain hunters from way back, we took our time and came up with what we think, but still aren’t sure, was the best buy.

Has anyone’s life improved as a result of having all this variety pumped into it? I don’t know. I do know that simplicity is as quaint a notion as table manners, modesty and diplomacy.

Witness my main piece of evidence. When I was a kid on the farm in the 1830s, our black and white TV got three channels – London, Wingham and Kitchener. We picked up the broadcast signals from these stations by way of a space-station-looking aerial on the roof of the house which we controlled by an electric “rotor” in our living room. Amazing science.

Today, in the city, of course, my TV-watching options are much more varied although my family and I have not opted for all the channels money can buy. For 22 years, I have had a pretty good arrangement with my cable company. They’ve run a wire into my house, I’ve plugged it into my TV, they send me a bill for this luxury every month, and I pay it. Every year they send me a letter saying, sorry, but we have to charge you more for your service. I pay it. I don’t see any other cable companies banging on my door, so I have no choice.

Now, in my feeble mind, the simplicity of the relationship between me and my cable company goes like this: If I don’t pay, they take the wire away. Not hard to understand. I don’t get to have that bag of potato chips if I won’t give the cashier the money for them.

But this week, I received in the mail an “Important Notice of Changes” to my service. “As part of our ongoing effort to improve customer service, we have simplified the terms applicable to our various services.” I opened the document and it fell out before me like a scroll Julius Caesar might have read from. On that parchment are typed 5,493 words (I did a computer word count) defining the new relationship between my cable company and me.

Somewhere, a lawyer is basking in the south sea sun at a beautiful resort paid for with the money he or she charged my cable company to write to me with all these simplified terms. There are 52 sections in the document and most of them seem to more or less define what awful things will happen to me if I don’t live up to the agreement.

OK, here’s a little nugget: “We may assign or transfer the Service Agreement or any of our rights or obligations hereunder without your consent. The provisions of Sections 8, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38 and any other provisions of these terms which by their meaning are intended to survive termination. These Terms have been drawn up in the English language at the express request of the parties.”

I am baffled as I believe I am a party and I don’t remember expressly requesting this, or anything else, with the possible exception of being left alone.

Here is the most I can put together from all I’ve read so far. If I don’t pay them, they’ll take the wire away.

If I was writing the Simplified Terms, I’d reduce the 5,493 words to about 12: If you don’t pay your bill, you will lose your cable signal. Words a TV-addicted couch potato like me can understand.

Expressly.

From Kitchen Crafty Fun

By Jim Hagarty
1987

Every once in a while, a little boy from down the street brings me fuel for my wheelbarrow.

The other night, Bradley and I were sitting on the steps of my front porch slurping popsicles when he turned to me with a serious look and said in a man-to-man voice: “How’re ya fixed for propane? D’ya need some?”

“Well, I am getting pretty low, now that you mention it,” I answered. “You wouldn’t happen to have any with you, by any chance?”

“Yes. I’ve got some in my pocket,” he replied.

“Is it okay to carry propane in your pocket like that?” I asked.

“Ya. It’s okay.”

With that, he went over to my wheelbarrow – an implement for which he has an undying fascination – and plugged his thumb and forefinger into the end of one of the handles. While he made a sound like gas escaping from a hose, the propane travelled from his pocket, up one side of his body, down through his arm, out his fingers and into the wheelbarrow.

It’s a good thing, too, that somebody keeps the wheelbarrow gassed up and ready to go because I can never seem to remember to do it. And it gets a lot of use around my place for jobs its designers might not have envisioned when they created it. It’s plastic and lightweight and can be easily maneuvered by a child. And it’s excellent for carrying live cargo as well as inanimate objects.

Take my cat, Grumbles, for example. Without the wheelbarrow and the kids to operate it, she might have to actually walk all the way across the front lawn. That’s a lot of steps when you’re only eight inches high. Lately, she gets to ride, free of charge though she doesn’t seem to realize she’s supposed to stay in the wheelbarrow for the entire trip.

Other kids are more suitable freight as they aren’t as liable to scratch and hiss at you when you put them in and can generally be relied on to stay in for the entire journey although they have a tendency to yell, “Not so fast” a lot. I looked up once to see the riders blindfolded with towels and now and then, one of them would get dumped on the ground.

I am continually amazed at how little it takes to amuse children. Bradley’s little sister Jennifer is madly in love with three old sponges I keep in the garage. I’ve been going to throw them away but she drags them out whenever she’s over and carries them around the yard. They’re a great thing to press against your ear when you’re sucking your thumb.

“Dairz doze punjes,” she says, just before she pounces on them. Once in a while, she stops, puts them on the ground and counts them.

“How many sponges you got there, Jennifer?” I ask her. The fingers start touching each sponge, “Waaaan, twoooo, forrrr … and finally she arrives at a figure. “Nine!” she says. A few minutes later, when I ask for a recount, she repeats the procedure and comes up with, “Eight!”

Unfortunately for Jennifer, her mother doesn’t share her daughter’s deep interest in sponges. And so, they remain at my place and not at hers where she would like them to be.

Jennifer is also intrigued by my cats, Grumbles and Buddy. (She calls them Dumbles and Bunny.) But Margie, a toddler from across the street, goes wild whenever her parents bring her over to visit the “meow” at my place. She gets excited watching Grumbles’ tail wag back and forth and once in a while she grabs it and gives it a hardy pull, supplying the cat with a reason to demonstrate how she got her name.

Watching my little neighbors find ways to make themselves happy takes me back to the days when a wooden fencepost and a driveway covered in stones could keep me out from under my parents’ feet for hours. It was impossible to get tired of picking up stones and trying to hit the fencepost, which was about 20 feet away. No finer sound could be heard than the “crack” of rock meeting wood.

“Go on outside and let the wind blow the stink off you,” my mother used to say. And I would.

And while the stink was blowing away, I’d hurl a few dozen stones in the general direction of the post.

That was long before the age of propane-powered wheelbarrows.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I hate to be pessimistic, but it is getting to be an awful world out there. Bombings, torture, arson, assassinations. Environmental crimes. Hate crimes. Our fellow humans are losing their minds and it is downright scary.

What is all this mayhem leading to? This is what we can look forward to.

A woman in Maryland stole three french fries and, incredibly, ate them. She ate them right in front of the man she had stolen them from. You are reading that right. But take heart. The woman was not only hungry and lacked any moral compass, she was stupid enough to steal them in a restaurant from a plate which belonged to a police officer.

Wow!

Thank God, however, that the law moves decisively and quickly in our modern society. The officer arrested her right away and carted her off to jail where she belongs. She has been charged with second-degree theft. On the arrest sheet, the fast-acting cop listed the items stolen as “French Fried Potato…quantity 3.”

Some might say this is too trivial an event for jail and a subsequent court appearance. Are you kidding me? Across the world, french fry theft is on the increase and out of control. Do you not read the news? And if you think this is over the top, ask yourself this: Will french fry thieves stop at potatoes? Will they? No they won’t. Left unchecked, they’ll go on to nab onion rings, salad fixin’s, gravy containers.

I hope this doesn’t sound like fear mongering, but sooner or later, they will drink your pop! Good work Maryland police officer. In your honour, I am coining this new slogan: “French Fries Matter.”