Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

I am not a conspiracy nut, but I do honestly believe that there has been a plot hatched and carried out by certain people around me to convince me that bats have better hearing than I have.

On several occasions, in fact, my nearest and dearest have levelled the ridiculous claim that I am deaf as a post.

This is an insult to posts and arrogance unlimited. Who are they to say that a post cannot hear? Or that it has no feelings, in fact.

But being the sensitive kind, I have begun to believe the charges being levelled against me. And it is becoming a self-fulfilling claim. I have begun not hearing as well as I used to because of my so-called deaf-as-a-postness.

However, tonight I got the ammunition I have been searching for which will even the score. I was in a shop when I saw hanging there a pair of “volume reduced” headphones. In an instant, my epiphany was realized and strong. My problem is not that I am hearing reduced at all. The dilemma comes from the obvious fact that I am living in a volume reduced world. Volume reduction is even being sold on store shelves now, for pete’s sake, without any care for people of normal hearing capabilities such as I.

It has been suggested that I spend thousands of dollars to render myself “hearing enhanced.” I will not do it.

What I will do instead, however, is to start a campaign to end the scourge of volume reduction. The next thing you know, shelves will be stocked with “sight reduced” eyeglasses.

At least that’s what I hear.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

I once knew a chef named Jill
Whose meals always made people ill.
She felt awful, of course,
And was full of remorse,
Cause nobody paid their bill.

By Jim Hagarty

So generally, we have pretty smart people in Canada.

With the exception, perhaps, of these two.

Police were called to the home of two proud Canadians who were engaged in a very heated argument over the shape of the Earth. It is not a small matter; my wife and I often argue about it.

The wife, in this situation, vehemently maintained that the Earth is flat. Not so, said her learned husband, who declared that the Earth, in fact, is round.

This highly educated debate went on for a while until the husband, showing perhaps a tinch too much passion over the issue, picked up a propane cylinder and threw it into the burning fireplace.

Hence my assessment that the argument became, perhaps, overly heated.

Despite their best efforts at conflict resolution, police were unable to get either party involved in the major difference of opinion to adopt a change of heart.

Looked at from a positive, practical point of view, it is possible a couple has run out of things to fight about when they begin to argue over the shape of the planet.

That is why my wife and I discuss it frequently. I won’t tell you which position I take on the matter but let’s just say I try not to walk too close to the edge.

I finally finished up the 25 tips for conducting family history research and they are listed in order under Genealogy. The tips are general in nature but I hope you find something meaningful there to help you on your journey into the past. JH

By Jim Hagarty

My wife and I are different in many ways. She loves doing puzzles, I’d rather sit naked in a pot of honey and then go find a bears’ den to moon.

I don’t see the point of sitting for hours flipping over little pieces of cardboard to try to reassemble what was a perfectly good picture till some demented soul with a bunch of goofy cookie cutters blew the whole thing apart. The same brain that feels satisfaction piecing together a cruelly dismembered depiction of some sort or other also enjoys endless knitting sessions or hours of playing solitaire on a computer. If I ever play solitaire on our computer I sincerely hope the police will come and arrest me and put me to work breaking rocks in a remote rock pile.

My point is, how can anyone find joy in sitting down at a table covered by 2,000 randomly shaped puzzle pieces with an eye to reconstructing something that should have been left alone all along? So when I hear the telltale flip of the puzzle pieces on the table, I go out to my garage and tinker.

The thing I love to do most, and it is a very engaging task, is to sort through the chaos out there and try to bring some order. For example, I was recently given several cardboard boxes and mutliple plastic bags all full of screwnails. Mixed in among the drywall screws, decks screws, fence screws, metal screws, and concrete screws, are assorted nuts and washers. Also, there are dozens of common nails, spikes, ardocs, concrete nails and finishing nails. Also sharing containers with all these screwnails and old-fashioned nails, are various sizes of plastic drywall plugs, plastic electrical wire connectors and hooks of every description.

I love to dump the containers of goodies out on my workbench and I can spend hours isolating items according to type and size and dropping them into empty peanut jars I have collected. When I accumulate new jars, I like to dump all the full ones on the table again and sort them into finer and more specific categories.

I have enough of this inventory to build a space shuttle or at least a really fancy sandbox for kids. But I will never use 95 per cent of all the material I love to sort and I know that going in. Very little is actually accomplished, therefore, by all this activity, but my mind is strangely calm and satisfied at the conclusion of each session.

But you wouldn’t see me put together a puzzle if the executioner said he wouldn’t give the riflemen the signal if I could complete, in three hours, a 200-piece puzzle showing a horse standing in a field. I would look him straight in the eye and yell, defiantly, “FIRE!!!!”

Yes, my wife and I are so different. It’s a wonder we’re still together after all this time.

By Jim Hagarty

This stinks!

A government worker in Washington was reprimanded in a four-page letter because of his bad habit of passing gas all day long in the office. His fellow workers were not amused and they complained to management.

Unlike the guy a while back who turned around and farted in the direction of an arresting officer – that guy was charged for that delightful little action – the office worker didn’t intentionally stink up the joint. He has a medical condition. But that didn’t make the odor any less offensive and so he was in big doodoo, so to speak.

But here’s what gets me. A tight-assed (too bad the office worker wasn’t the same) busybody manager actually went around counting and documenting his employee’s farts. In the four-page letter the manager wrote, a chart accompanied the description of the instances of gas passing, a Fart Chart, if you will. The poor guy blew it out his shorts 60 times over a few months, including nine times on one sad day in September.

So, he was reprimanded for creating a hostile work environment.

OK, a problem this is, I get that. But see this from another angle. There is a human being in this world who, in part, earns his paycheque by going around tabulating farts. When this manager was a kid, he told the teacher on everybody, didn’t he? And now he counts farts for a living.

We all have our mission. God put us here for a reason. Our job is to discover that vocation and follow it.

This manager discovered he had a talent for sniffing out farts and he has apparently made it his goal to wipe out (?) foul-smelling rear ends wherever they may be encountered.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the manager is a secret farter himself. When the manager’s boss found out about the reprimand he had given out, it was retracted, proof I think that the manager needs to learn how to apply the Principle of Benign Neglect and let his staff sort out their problems on their own.

Ya, the farty guy needs to somehow get himself under control but I’d rather spend a day with him than an hour with the guy who counts his farts. Now that guy is the real asshole!

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

There was a poor doggy named Fred.
“I’m always hungry,” he said.
“They do feed me kibble
But only a little.
I’m starvin’ and soon I’ll be dead.”

By Jim Hagarty

I could never live in Florida,
Though I hear it’s very nice.
I need to spend winters buried in snow
And falling down hard on the ice.

And I couldn’t live in Bermuda.
Though the beaches there look so fine.
I would miss the sound of snowblowers,
And the wind whipping through the pines.

Don’t even mention Tahiti,
Hawaii or old Mexico.
I’m sure those places are heaven on Earth
Except that they fail to have snow.

So here I sit in the sweltering heat
In the country that’s captured my soul.
Another few months I’ll be stranded inside
With my dog and remote control.