Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

I am a believer in serendipity, even if I am not exactly sure what that is.

Maybe it’s better to say, I look to the Universe now and then for signs and because I am open to them, I guess, I tend to see them more often than you might think a person should or would.

I used to be a heavy smoker. But there finally came a day, after almost 20 years, when I managed to quit. That was a long time ago when I walked away from the addiction.

But addictions are patient things, always kind of waiting around to get you again if they can.

Today, I had an uncontrollable urge to buy a pack of cigarettes. I fought it all day, but I pretty much knew it was going to be a losing battle. So I drove to the local smoke shop. But before I went there, I stalled a little. Instead, I went into a hardware store to buy a few things. In the back of my mind, I thought maybe the urge would somehow go away if I stalled for time.

I pushed the shopping cart out of the store and across the parking lot to my car. Placing my purchases in the car, I turned to wheel the cart back to the store. When I was almost there, a man about my age came walking my way, carrying a black plastic canister in one hand. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I examined it a bit closer, he saw me doing that and he made eye contact with me briefly.

Tubes were coming from the canister to an apparatus the man wore around his neck. He was carrying an oxygen tank, though he didn’t have the nose piece in place at that moment.

I don’t know what happened to this man to cause him to need oxygen. Maybe he never smoked a cigarette in his life.

But it was odd that he would appear just as I was set to head over to the smoke shop. Now, along with the notion of a cigarette, I had the image of an oxygen tank in my brain.

I got in my car and drove home.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

I was in a big, modern computer shop the other day and l didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Well, actually, I did know enough to cry as I could not afford to buy all or any of the goodies displayed all around me.

Especially what I could not afford to buy was a sleek new iMac from Apple. It is a beauty. If it was a car, it would be a Corvette. Small, compact, all white. It has a flat monitor, as do most personal computers these days, but unlike most, it has no tower – the entire guts of the thing are somehow squished into the monitor itself. Even more perfect: it has a remote control. It would take up little room on my desktop and is the only thing standing between me and complete happiness. (That and the fact that my town does not have a caramel popcorn factory and Sandra Bullock doesn’t live at the end of my street.)

However, the store wants $1,300 plus tax for it – about $1,500. Seems a lot for a personal computer when you can buy brand new Dells and Acers for $500. Still…

To me, this little episode, besides illustrating my ongoing addiction to toys, also shows how expectations have changed when it comes to modern electronics and the prices we are willing – or unwilling – to pay for them. Because sitting in my basement is the first computer I ever bought – also an Apple – for which I somehow had no trouble writing a cheque for $4,000. That was 1994 and although Macs were more expensive even then than Windows-based PCs, all computers were much more expensive than today. It was just assumed that to get one, you’d have to be willing to part with a few thousand.

So, $4,000 then and $1,500 now.

But, the difference in price gets even greater if you count in the disparity in computers. My 1994 Mac has eight megabytes of RAM. The one I checked out this week has 512 mgs. It is, by my calculations, 64 times as powerful. Its speed (as far as I can figure out these things) is 667 megahertz. My first rig runs at 66 megahertz. Ten times as fast. But what hurts is the fact that the new iMac has a hard drive which contains a whoppin’ 160 gigabytes whereas my first Mac has 250 megabytes, half of what my son’s MP3 player, the size of a small cigarette lighter, has. A gigabyte is 1,000 megabytes. If my math is right, the new hard drive is 640 times larger than the old.

So, just to round out a few figures, it seems to me the new Mac is about 50 times the computer my old one is at just over 25 per cent of the cost. Therefore (Einstein I am not) that would put the real price of the new computer, in relation to the old, at about $100. Now, $100 I can afford. In fact, I’d be willing to double that, on a dare. But I’ve got a feeling the good people at this big computer store, with their identity tags around their necks, would probably not see my reasoning and slip me a new Corvette, er iMac, for $200.

So, I could go the other way, and tell you that in today’s terms, my old computer is worth about $200,000. And I am willing to part with it, for a very good price. Say, $1,500?

Ah, the heady days of 1994. During a few subsequent shopping trips back then, I bought a laser printer (black and white, eight-by-ten-inch copies only) for $2,000. I just looked up a (probably superior) Samsung laser printer on the Internet for about $100. I bought a scanner for $600. Today, you can buy a better one for pocket change.

I guess what has me crying is the fact that I have computer equipment at home for which I paid about $8,000 and for which, assuming I was able to sell it, I could probably now get enough to buy me a couple of Happy Meals.

However, at least I do not have to agonize over having paid too much for a cellphone. My first, about 15 years ago, cost $100.

But a friend, an “early adopter” who bought one of the original “car phones” years before, paid $4,000. Today, they give them away like popsicles.

And they can do everything but scratch your back.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I know a cheapskate named Rose,
Who won’t pay you back what she owes.
She takes all she can
From woman and man.
Then pretends to forget but she knows.

By Jim Hagarty
2007

Wherever Thomas Edison is right now, he must be shaking his brilliant head.

The former Stratford, Ontario, Canada resident – yes, he lived here for a while as a young man – invented the incandescent light bulb, among many other things you might have heard of, such as the phonograph (which later became the record player, then the tape recorder, then the CD player, then the iPod). And now, the news comes that my province Ontario is thinking of banning Thomas’s light bulb. It eats up too much energy and most of the hydro it uses is converted into heat, not light.

Alternative light producers have been invented and are in the process of being invented and even the twisty, fat, little compact fluorescent bulb, which has taken the old bulb’s place, will one day soon be obsolete as other technologies, such as light-emitting diodes, take their place.

Pardon me for using this old line again, but it seems appropriate here: How many folksingers does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to change the bulb and one to sing a song about how great the old bulb was.

I feel a bit like that folksinger, but just as my father never missed his woodstove once he had an oil furnace and central heating installed in our farmhouse, I am adapting pretty well to life without Edison’s invention.

More than years ago, when I first moved to Stratford, compact fluorescent bulbs were on sale at a downtown grocery store. They came in two sizes: long straight tubes and short straight tubes. They were done up in green packaging and promised great rewards. I bought a couple of them, but about the only place they were of any use was as the light in the range hood above the stove. All these years later, I am using one of them there still.

But throughout the rest of the house, I spent a lot of time buying and replacing traditional bulbs in fixtures and lamps. They always seemed to be blowing out, especially those finicky trilight ones. Then three years ago, I stopped in an aisle and noticed that the “CFL” was now being offered in a whole range of shapes and uses – they are even made for trilights and dimmer fixtures now – and having read where people were saving money by making the switch, I took the plunge for real. One by one, since then, I have replaced 95 per cent of the bulbs in our home.

This new light took some getting used to – it’s a bit colder and makes nice pine wood look more yellow than brown – but I found that after a few days, my family and I were well adjusted to our new atmosphere. Now I can never walk by a shelf of bulbs without checking them out to see what new “twist” might be there and to marvel at how the price of them keeps dropping.

I have not done a careful assessment of how much our hydro bills have fallen off since we began making the switch, but I know they are less. Here are some bulb stats from one home in Stratford. Before I started changing bulbs, there were 47 incandescents burning away in (and on the front and back) of the house and two long-tube, standard fluorescents. Those bulbs were burning 3,430 watts of electricity. I have since replaced 40 of them (which used 2,690 watts) and now use 737 watts instead. When I am done replacing everything, my wattage will have dropped from 3,430 watts to 935.

I know there are incandescent bulbs that it makes no sense to change in my house. They are seldom turned on and burn for only a few minutes or an hour or two when they are on. But being a perfectionist, I won’t be able to rest till all my sockets are twisted (sounds painful).

One statistic I don’t have, and should have kept, is how much all these little beasties have cost me. They certainly have been more expensive. In the long run, will I have saved any money when the bulbs’ long lives are balanced against my lower electricity bills? And one nagging question is whether or not, when we all start using a lot less electricity, our rates will go up to compensate for the lost revenue by the power companies.

All in all, it is nice not to have to change deceased bulbs so often and it’s been a while since I burned my fingers by touching a hot bulb (the new ones are cooler).

But there are downsides. For one thing, some of them don’t last as long as their packaging says they will. Secondly, some of the bulbs have caught on fire (not mine) though there apparently hasn’t been any recorded cases so far of this resulting in a larger house fire. And containing mercury, they have to be disposed of with a bit of care. I take ours to a local disposal depot at a hardware store down the street.

If Thomas Edison was still around, I guess he would have left his bulb behind him long ago and been inventing newer and better lighting devices. And he’d be listening to the song about how great the old light bulb was – on his iPod or iPhone.

(Update. The store shelves in my town are filled now with LED bulbs. I have yet to take that plunge but I know it’s coming. I have been waiting for the prices to fall and now that they have, I will soon be on board. They emit almost no heat, use less power and last a long, long time.)

By Jim Hagarty

Well, isn’t that cute, I thought. One of the horses in the race we were betting on was called You Can’t Fix Stupid.

Six of us former journalism teachers were sitting around a monitor and looking out the big windows at the racetrack, following the excitement and checking our tickets after every race. We had each thrown $20 in a pot and when that was gone, we’d quit betting.

This night, we were doing pretty well. In fact, by Race 5 we were up almost $500. I’m new to this but nevertheless I was sent up to place our bets for Race 6. I took some money, approached the wicket and carefully placed $24 worth of $2 bets.

When the race was over, there was great rejoicing at our table. We had won $499.80. OMG we’ve made a thousand dollars tonight went the shouts and there were still six races to go.

One of the other teachers grabbed the winning ticket and went to the wicket to collect. He was there a long time and he seemed to be almost arguing with one of the women there. I suggested helpfully that maybe she didn’t have enough cash to pay us. Someone else said he looked like he was negotiating with the clerk.

Finally, he turned and came back to the table with a disgusted look on his face. He tossed the ticket on the table in front of me. “You bet on the wrong race,” he said to me.

It was quiet on the way home, all of us in the car. The only thing that saved me at all was the fact that our winning streak carried on for the rest of the night and we ended up ahead $800. Nevertheless, there was some suggestion made that I would be left in a cornfield somewhere and the words “hide the body” were also spoken but I am not sure what that was all about. I didn’t want to know.

All I do know for sure is You Can’t Fix Stupid didn’t win, place or show, and I felt badly for him as he and I seemed to be kindred spirits that night.