Author: Jim Hagarty

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 out the human race. 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

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.

I can happily live out the rest of my life taking a pass on seeing how fast I can gobble up some of the disgusting things people will eat, 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 during my bachelor years.

There are annual contests in the U.S. with prizes nearing $30,000. The current world record belongs to Sonya Thomas who devoured 25 grilled cheese sandwiches in 10 minutes in a contest in 2005.

Stand back. Sonya, my dear. I’m sure I can do better than that.

Without even trying.

©2007 Jim Hagarty

When you spend as much time studying wild rabbits in your backyard as I have these past two years, you can almost not help but get to know them pretty well.

I am especially on some sort of rabbit-man wavelength with My Bunny, a smallish female who thinks I’m okay. She will sometimes come right up to me when I call her and she has fetched me when her food supply is low.

Consequently, I have learned how to communicate with this bunny in particular. That is how I knew what I had to do when I saw her come bounding out of our tool shed yesterday afternoon. In circumstances such as this, you need to be stern and project seriousness. So, I spoke to My Bunny in somewhat of a scolding voice while still being friendly.

Bunny froze when she realized I had seen her emerge from the shed.

“Hey Bunny,” I said. “What are you doing in the shed? You’re not supposed to go in there. I’ve lost track of what might be lying around. You might eat something you shouldn’t. So don’t ever go back into the shed. Okay?”

By the end of my message, Bunny had turned her head and was looking right at me. She was really absorbing my commands and I felt good that I was getting through to her. I don’t like to talk down to her but it’s not easy to do anything else with a creature that stands less than a foot tall.

I was glad I had gotten through.

And once she fully understood what I was saying, Bunny turned around and hopped back into the shed.

Apparently, my serious words did not register. Next time I will try to remember to wipe the smile off my face when I deliver my verbal discipline.

It is possible that bunnies don’t do well with mixed messages.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

As we all know, there are many paths that can lead us to experience true joy, the feeling that can only be absorbed and rarely explained. Many thousands of books, in fact entire religions, have been developed to show the ways to attain what can only be thought of as the ultimate human emotion. Usually, the formulas offered have something to do with helping others.

And while I am on board with all that, I would like to offer an often-overlooked direct route to joy.

In our town, we have regular “treasure hunts”, whereby citizens can set items we no longer want on our boulevards with the understanding that anyone who might want those items is free to stop and take them home. We have a wonderful brown pop fridge I picked up 20 years ago on somebody’s curb and which has been keeping our beverages cold every day ever since. I paid zero for it. It is one of our prized possessions.

And while picking up someone else’s castaways can perk up a person’s day, the other side of those transactions can sometimes be even more meaningful. Many an unwanted thing has disappeared from our possession thanks to a car slowing down and a trunk opening up.

But a bit of patience is sometimes required. We had a beautiful wooden headboard for a single bed that needed to go. It wouldn’t fit in our car so I couldn’t donate it to a second-hand store. Our only hope was to drag it to the end of the driveway with a big sign “FREE” on it and wait for a Good Samaritan to relieve us of our burden.

Every day for two weeks, I dragged the headboard to the street and propped it up against a tree. And every day, the many passersby ignored our former treasure. Every night I dragged it back into the garage, discouraged and frustrated. I started to entertain the idea of cutting it up and making something other than a headboard out of it.

Last Thursday night, I forgot to bring the darned thing – yes, it had become a darned thing – in from the street. At 2 a.m., up for one of my early morning peanut butter runs, I thought of going out and getting it but decided to just let it stay where it was as an effort such as that might or might not involve putting on pants.

The next morning, I went out to see how it was doing. The darned thing was gone.

Not believing my eyes, I checked to see if someone else had brought it back up to the house. They hadn’t. I looked next door to see if hooligans had smashed it in the parking lot there while I was demolishing my third tablespoon of peanut butter. Finally, I realized that it was truly gone.

I felt pretty darned good for the rest of that day.

You might even say I was joyful.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

We all make our choices, many of them a day sometimes. Some better than others.

Take the Texan who saw an armadillo on a road Thursday. Immediately, he chose to do what I know I would have done. He pulled out his gun and shot the armor-plated animal.

Once a bullet leaves a gun, you can’t be completely sure where it might end up. The bullet the gunslinger fired bounced off the animal and hit the man in the head.

This is the second person shot by armadillo-ricochet this year. A few months ago in Georgia, a man shot at an armadillo and the bullet bounced off and hit his mother-in-law.

It is therefore obvious that the government needs to crack down on armadillos, maybe ban them. Americans wanting to shoot themselves and their mothers-in-law should not have to aim at armadillos to get the job done.

But one thing is clear, to some people, at least. Any time we see a live wild animal we need to jump out of our truck and kill it.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

I was beyond irritated with whoever left the back door open as night fell (it was me). Our old cat Mario can operate the screen door beyond the steel door and when he gets outside after dark, he turns from docile domestic kitty to fierce feral tomcat faster than Clark Kent becomes Superman. And once outside at that time of night, getting him back into the house requires the guile and cunning of a search party and a swat team. It can be 2 a.m. or later before he reappears.

But I had to try anyway.

“Mario,” I yelled into the darkness. I followed this up with six or seven more Mario calls, each one more desperate than the one before, all of them dripping with anxiety and frustration. But, of course, I had to be careful to not let the cat know I was angry.

But this night, after a few calls, I was glad to sense an animal approaching the screen door in the growing darkness.

The creature showed itself at the door.

And there stood My Bunny, the friendly backyard rabbit that sometimes comes when I call her but is obviously oblivious to the fact that her name is not Mario.

I was happy to see her, even if she wasn’t the cat, and I talked to her as I always do, asking her what she was up to, and telling her I love her, as I do every time I speak to her. I have found that no matter how much you show a wild rabbit how much you care for her, she still likes to hear the reassurance of some terms of endearment.

So, I babbled on like this for a few more minutes until I heard a distinctive “meow” behind me. I turned to see Mario at the bottom of the steps, leading to the rec room, looking to be fed.

When I turned back to the screen door, Bunny was gone.

The other thing I’ve learned about bunnies is they never like to share the spotlight with any other critter.

No matter how much you express your love for them.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

Another tale from Jim’s Twilight Zone.

I walk for 35 minutes each morning as per doctor’s orders. As I walk, I stoop to pick up garbage which I put in a shopping bag. No, I am not a saint though I expect to be made one soon, except one of the requirements is that you be dead first and I am not in a rush.

I pick up garbage for the exercise of bending down to the ground which is good for my back and legs. (And to cement my saint application.)

One morning recently, I looked down to see a familiar blue piece of paper on the sidewalk and happily deposited a Canadian $5 bill in my pocket. That night I went to an outdoor bluegrass jam. Now, I have never had one of those neat little electronic tuners that clamp to the end of your guitar but have long wanted one. Every player, it seems, has one these days.

A friend paid $25 for hers. This night, she pointed me in the direction of a guy who was selling the same one she uses. “How much?” I asked the guy. “Five dollars,” he replied. “I bought too many and I just want to get rid of them.” I whipped out that morning’s $5 from my pocket and said, “Sold!”

On the miracle scale, not quite loaves and fishes or water to wine, but kinda quirky. I think it’s called serendipity.

©2012 Jim Hagarty

I like to watch videos on the Internet. I spend an hour or two late at night doing that. The range of subjects I follow varies, almost randomly, over a kind of vast array of things. A lot of politics. Hockey. Discoveries of statues on Mars, supposed evidence of time travel, what Ancient Rome really looked like, and history. Lots of history. Videos of great musicians and of animal rescues. And Got Talent shows.

Recently, I’ve been bitten by the ghost-hunter craze, because scaring myself half to death in the middle of the night while I sit all alone seems like a reasonable thing to do. I saw one of the creepiest ones I’ve ever seen the other night where the spirit explorer was going through an old haunted house. He came up to a door to a room and someone was obviously, frantically, trying to open that door from inside the room, turning the knob and pulling on it. The brave ghost hunter ran to the door and flung it open. There was no one inside the room.

So, I went outside for a breath of fresh air and to collect my frazzled thoughts and darned if there weren’t ghosts running around all over our backyard. I dashed back to the safety of my couch.

It was exactly midnight.

Suddenly, there was a knock on our front door. It was a persistent knock but not a loud one. Almost as if whoever was knocking didn’t really want the occupants of the house to hear it.

But then the doorbell rang. Followed by several more knocks, a bit louder now and more insistent. Then more doorbell.

I don’t mind sharing that I was freaking right out by this time. In a panic, I woke up another family member and the two of us went to the door. To find a police officer there.

As it turned out, he was seeking a suspicious character and he saw someone in our backyard. Could he have a look back there.

I told him it was I who had been behind the house just then.

I forgot to tell him I had been busy back there fighting off a bunch of scary ghosts.

And how they all looked like suspicious characters to me.

©2023 Jim Hagarty

I had an interview with my dietitian on Monday. The consultation was very useful but I became confused with the various mixed messages she kept sending me.

I should have taken a notebook and pen with me and written a few things down because since I’ve arrived back home, I have been unclear about a few details regarding my way ahead food-wise.
I could be wrong but I believe she advised me to drink at least eight glasses of pop a day and consume two family-size bags of potato chips weekly (not daily).

I am also to eat one pound of bacon every two days, nothing but white bread, and if possible, a medium-sized (not large) slice of chocolate cake with every meal.

It is also important that I eat at least one cherry pie every week and to treat myself, a cherry cheesecake once a month. (If you get too serious about your diet, you won’t keep it up.)

A bag of chocolate chip cookies should round out my weekly menu and between meals, I should aim to eat a chocolate bar, but not worry if I miss once in a while.

It is also apparently vital that I have a bagful of caramel popcorn (all to myself) while I am watching TV three or maybe four times a week (she was not very clear on this point).

Pancakes and sausages for breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays but I am to use real maple syrup only, none of the fake stuff. This is important.

Oh, and I believe she said I was to eat as much pizza as possible every week, maybe three or four times, but no more than seven toppings on any one pizza. Also, I should work in three or four visits to hamburger joints every seven days for the protein.

I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.

Oh yes, I did.

I am supposed to have one carrot a week – no more.

At our next meeting, I am going to ask her to clarify some of these items to make sure I have them right. We will be talking about exercise at that session but when the subject came up on Monday, she frowned. I have a feeling she is going to advise me against it.

I am willing to do whatever she tells me to.

©2014 Jim Hagarty

I ordered my meal in the restaurant and asked for a Coke. I expected a glass of pop but instead, the waitress delivered my order in an old-fashioned glass Coke bottle, a little skinnier than in the old days, maybe, but close enough. OMG, the clouds had parted and Heaven shone down upon me.

I have rattled on and on for decades about how Coke (or any pop) out of a can or plastic bottle tastes nothing like the Coke of my youth which came only in glass bottles. Now that was when a Coke was a Coke!

I couldn’t wait to lift this miracle to my lips and treat my taste buds to something they had been deprived of for so long. I raised the bottle, and let the first swig trickle down my throat like shallow creek water over rocks after a winter’s thaw. Glug and then a couple of more glugs.

Well, half in tears and full of emotion, I am here to report that this beautifully bottled Coke seemed to me to taste no different than the stuff that comes in cans and plastic containers. It was like finding out Paul McCartney really did die some time in the sixties and was replaced by a look-a-like. Or that the moon landing was staged somewhere in Arizona.

How could this possibly be? I am despondent. It is a cruel world. I was raised on the bottle. Now nothing makes sense anymore.

©2017 Jim Hagarty

I lost my keys and needed the key finder I was given at Christmas, but (and you know this is coming) I can’t find the key finder. I need a key finder finder.

So, for a month my keys were gone. That hurts. I had to beg keys from other family members who increasingly had a difficult time disguising their contempt.

“Did you search the couches?” I was asked.

“Of course I did,” I replied and under my breath, “What kind of knucklehead do you think I am?”

But just to be sure, I checked again. Nothing. Didn’t bother with the leather recliner. I never sit in it.

Another man, perhaps one who is not as tight as bark to a tree, as my mother used to say, would have borrowed the needed keys from family members and paid the price to have them reproduced.

That is not my way.

So I searched in every imaginable place on our property without any luck at all.

Finally, on Saturday, a smiling family member, sitting in the leather recliner, called my attention to something she was holding in her hands. She had my car keys. They had been buried down in the ridiculous folds of the recliner. The one I hadn’t checked.

I was happy at the discovery, of course, but also a little taken aback at the triumphant look on the face of the human key finder. She had told me several times to check the furniture. I did not completely follow instructions.

So I had a lengthy period of gloating to put up with, and I had it coming so let ‘er rip. Then that same family member got up from the recliner, walked away and said, “Now if I could only find my phone.” Immediately, I saw the phone, sitting right in the middle of the recliner seat. It had been under her, under her, … well, just under her.

So, lots of ha ha’s all around and all of a sudden I was the gloater and not the gloatee. I was fully enjoying my new status.

Then another family member entered the kitchen from outside and he was filled in on the startling developments of the past few minutes. He laughed derisively at the two family members who, it seemed to him, were degenerating into dottering old fools. I could see this sudden turn was not going to work to my advantage.

Then, I remembered a request this same family member had made of me that very, hot afternoon.

“Do you know where the oscillating fan is?” I was asked, as it was wanted for the shed. “I have searched everywhere. Do we even have one anymore?”

I wandered out to the garage but I knew it wasn’t out there. I was sure we still had one. My mind’s eye started to reveal a location. I went into the bedroom of said family member and there was the fan, sitting atop a bookshelf, where it has been for over a year.

So, I have lost track of who has gloater privileges in our house and who has none. I don’t know if other homes operate this way, but in ours, it is very important to stay one step ahead of the pack. You never want to look over your shoulder and see them gaining on you.

©2018 Jim Hagarty