Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

A fine young fellow named Ben
Came home one day with a hen.
He thought he would try
To teach it to fly.
He was not the smartest of men.

By Jim Hagarty

I know a woman
Who is so good at lying
She prefers it to telling the truth.

If you try to learn
The facts from this person
You will see she is very uncouth.

She learned long ago
From some misguided soul
That the easiest path is to lie.

And now if some truth
Were to slip through her lips.
She’s liable to lie down and die.

I really don’t know
If I hate her or love her,
For all of her dishonest ways.

But in my long life
I never met anyone
Who lied so well to my face.

By Jim Hagarty

It`s a scary world and getting scarier by the day.

A California woman has been getting death threats by email.

Yikes!

What is worse, she has been sending these threats TO HERSELF. What was the poor woman to do? Call the police, of course. You would do the same. The police traced the emails back to the woman herself and she was arrested.

Apparently, she is relieved that the culprit has been apprehended. She asked police if she could arrest herself and they said no. Now she is holding out for a trial by herself, no judge or jury involved. She`ll probably sentence herself to three months in a resort in the Bahamas.

You would do the same.

I love email. It keeps me in touch with so many good friends.

These past few weeks I have received messages from Leo Morris, Richard Maxwell, Valerie Jordan, Barrister Jerry Mark, Shawn Deniken, Jack Bradford, Mickey James, Diana Cayhon, Deven Manning, Devin Stoutenborough, Emmalene Priestley, Danh Lablanc, Sonia Chomsky, Melissa Gannon, Sgt. Musthafa Kemal, Gillian and Adrian Bayford, Whitney Earnhart, Madeline Morgan, Deana Struber, William Norman, Becky Boggioni, Marilyn Dewberry and Susan Gilbert.

These people are so good to me. They have written me with all sorts of offers of help (according to their subject lines), from financial, to dietary to romantic. Some of them have offered me money but not needing any, I have politely declined. Some offered advice in the bedroom but as we are not decorating at the moment, I again passed on the offers.

And I even got a couple of wedding invitations. How nice. A few months ago, I opened one of these wedding invitation messages and my computer was immediately infected with the nastiest of viruses. I didn’t write back to the person who invited me as I knew they would be horrified to learn of what had happened.

But, despite all my new Internet friends, I didn’t open even one of these new messages referred to above, with the exception of the virusy wedding invitation. Obviously, I do not deserve the attention of these great correspondents listed here, some of whom wrote me more than once. I have had the same email address for 20 years. That is something to be proud of, I guess, and happy for as so many people around the world have discovered what my address is and have reached out to me.

I am a truly blessed – if highly ungrateful – man. And still, they all want to help me. How is it that so many people have learned what a mess my life is and have reached inside their souls to offer a few fixes? Amazing.

I love you Internet.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

I used work on bridge construction for a man who had a wooden leg. As a young man he had lost one leg below the knee to cancer. He didn’t let it slow him down at all and led a full and happy life.

Once in a while, however, his wooden leg would break and he’d have to replace it but he always kept a spare at home. One day he broke it on the job and sent me to his place to get the backup. This was exciting for me as it was the first of only a few times I ever drove an early Volkswagen Beetle.

Now you tell me. Is that the most unusual task an employee has ever had to do? To go and fetch his boss another leg?

When I said he didn’t let it slow him down, I meant it. He even played pickup hockey with a bunch of guys.

One night during a rough-and-tumble game, he got hit really hard by a bruiser from the other team. The collision caused his leg to detach and it slid down the ice – skate and hockey sock still attached.

An audible gasp came from the small crowd in the arena, most of whom didn’t know that he had a wooden leg, when they saw the limb go skidding down the ice.

Some of them must have thought to themselves, “Boy, hockey really is getting too rough!”

©2016 Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

My Dad used to tell this grim story about a one-room schoolteacher who died in our rural area many years ago.

He was a very tall man and the “undertakers” back then had a heck of a time fitting him in his coffin. They bent his legs as much as they could and finally managed to get him situated, with the bottom half of the casket closed and the top half, open.

At the wake, everyone was gathered around discussing events when something very strange happened.

In those days, embalming was a rarely performed exercise, apparently, and so the corpse had not been disturbed before being placed in the coffin. During the wake, rigor mortis set in and the large man’s legs straightened out. When they did, having no place else to go, the upper half of his body had to push out somewhere.

And so Peter sat straight up.

This had the effect of eliciting a few screams and many stifled chuckles. I don’t know what course of action the undertakers followed after that but I have a feeling that was not a high point in their careers.

Having been a teacher, I guess it was only natural for Peter to want to command everyone’s attention. And he sure did during his final class.

He sure did.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

There was a young doofus named Bill
Who sat on his window sill.
“Get down!” yelled his Dad.
“I won’t,” said the lad.
“If I want to sit here I will.”