Category: Uncategorized

By Jim Hagarty
2012

One of my earliest memories is from my family’s encounter with Hurricane Hazel in 1954 when I was three years old. It was a horrific storm that took 1,000 lives in Haiti and the U.S., as well as 81 lives in Ontario, most of them in Toronto and area.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that. All I remember is my Mom driving in our laneway in our green ’53 Ford and coming to a stop in front of our house and my Dad rushing out of the basement to take her and her kids to shelter in the stone cellar of our two-storey farm home. Along with watching him running frantically out to get us, I remember seeing the storm door on the front door of our house plastered open against the brick wall. As well, the huge wooden barn door on the upper storey of the barn, which I had never seen open and probably never saw open again, was also slammed open against the front wall of the barn.

That is all I remember but I had my eyes opened when a college journalism student of mine in the ’90s did a feature story on the hurricane and its effects on Toronto. I had no idea how really bad this storm was and reading about it now on Wikipedia confirms its ferocity. Houses in Toronto were lifted off their foundation and carried away, one ending up a mile from its original location. And some of the dead were found hanging in the branches of trees.

We talk about climate change and no doubt it is real but this was 58 years ago. People then must have been wondering what the heck was happening, especially in Ontario where these sorts of things just didn’t occur. And with all its fury, the storm was dying out by the time it reached here.

You might have heard the mayor of Mississauga, Hazel McCallion, referred to as Hurricane Hazel. This is where she got the name. Those who tangle with her do so at their peril.

By Jim Hagarty
1991

Ever since service stations began stuffing my mailbox full of gas coupons, I haven’t been able to keep gas in my car.

I’ve got coupons for $1 off and some for even more. I’ve gotten them for Christmas wrapping paper and plastic drinking glasses. Also wine glasses. And stamps. I’ve even cashed in “scratch and win” coupons, where, after I’ve filled up, the service station attendant has scraped away the grey covering from a little box on a card and told me how much I’ve saved.

Saving and cashing in these coupons have become my little way of battling high fuel prices.

But they’ve also resulted in my being stranded several times lately by the side of the road, not a drop of gas – expensive or cheap – in my tank.

I explain. Most coupons are only good on fill-ups of 25 litres or more and some can only be redeemed after buying at least 30 litres of gas. For most cars, this is no problem. But my little red car only holds about 30.5 litres which does not give me a wide margin of error when I’m trying to calculate when I can fill up and still redeem my coupons. So, every time I pull into a service station now, I sit nervously, coupon clutched in my hand, staring out my window as the gas pump meter clicks: 21 litres, 22, 23, 23.5 … Will I make 25 or 30 or whatever I need before the attendant stops the pump?

Complicating matters are certain gas stations where the pumps were built on a hill. If I don’t watch myself, and park the wrong way at one of these service centres – and I know where most of them are now – the front of my car will face down with the rear end up, allowing my tank to hold only 22 litres or even less before the pump says the car’s full and quits, leaving me sitting with an uncashed gas coupon.

Therefore, to take advantage of these great gas savings and to collect my rightful share of towels, glasses, wrapping paper and stamps, I have to drive around all week with my car on empty and fill up only at service stations where the bays are perfectly level.

After a while, a person gets pretty good at judging important things like this. Riding along with me, a passenger might ask me if I don’t think we’ll soon run out of gas but I know that, even though my fuel indicator is on the third line below EMPTY, I still have enough for a few more kilometres.

“Heck, I’ve driven to London and back on less than that,” I’ve been heard to laugh, bravely.

In fact, I recently left Toronto with the indicator just above E. By Kitchener, it was below E. At Shakespeare, it was WAY BELOW E. But, I made it home.

The next morning, however, in my own driveway, the car wouldn’t start. It was out of gas.

And I’ve miscalculated several times lately, twice while driving on Lorne Avenue at the south end of the city.

And anyone who can run out of gas in Stratford, where gas stations abound – there are three within two blocks of my home – should win a prize.

A really great prize.

A book of gas coupons would be nice.

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In not too many years from now, the next generations will be asking, “Grandpa, what is a gas station?”

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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.