Author: Jim Hagarty

Last week, two guys in Toronto saw a TV program which dealt with the hallucinogenic effects of a toad’s body secretions and so, being men of good judgment engaged in an eternal search for the ultimate high, they went and got a toad and licked it. What they ended up with instead of the pleasant buzz they were seeking were convulsions, unconsciousness and a couple of hospital beds.

This situation is unfortunate but we in the media bear a lot more responsibility in this matter than might be suspected at first glance because generally, we have not paid enough attention to the problem of amphibian licking by humans. In fact, in our haste to address other health and social issues, we’ve woefully neglected this whole problem of animal-tasting. While many well-meaning concerned folks have been running around trying to get us all to stop wrapping our tongues around those parts of animals contained within their hides, no one has been effectively addressing the dangers involved in tasting the outsides of those same critters.

Here then, in question-and-answer form, is the most up-to-date information available on the problem.

Question: Is the skin of the toad’s cousin, the frog, poisonous as well?

Answer: No it isn’t. In fact, frog licking can be a lot of fun although it is not always that easy to keep them from hopping long enough to get your tongue on them. Also, before licking them, it’s advisable to wash the swamp goo off them, unless, of course, you prefer that taste.

Question: Is it okay to lick cows?

Answer: Yes it is. In fact, cows are a great choice for licking because with very little encouragement, they’ll gladly lick you back. One word of caution, however: lick a bull only if you’re completely out of things to lick as he may take offence to this.

Question: Are dogs lickable?

Answer: Yes and no. Most small dogs such as poodles can handle an occasional lick and will even administer a few of their own but some of the larger members of the species, such as doberman pinschers and American pit bull terriers seem more temperamental when it comes to being licked.

Question: What creatures should definitely not be licked?

Answer: Most snakes prefer to be left alone. And some wild animals such as wolverines and bobcats are best avoided. Beyond those, it is advisable to use your best common sense before choosing to lick another being.

Question: Is there anything morally offensive about the practice of licking lower life forms?

Answer: Definitely not. Though some segments of society might try to stigmatize critter-licking as an objectionable act, it should not be seen as such. Australians have been running around licking toads for quite some time and don’t seem much the worse for wear, although they know how to do it without getting sick so there’s the difference.

Let’s face it: Animals have been licking us up and down for centuries. It’s time they got a bit of their own back. Besides, what have we been missing all these years?

You don’t really think your cat licks you ’cause she likes you, do you?

The truth is, she does it for the buzz.

©1990 Jim Hagarty

I sat down at the computer this morning to discover that about 60,000 of my emails were missing. I had them all neatly divided into about 20 folders according to category, from business, to banking, to family history and friends.

The proper response to something like this, of course, is to go stark raving nuts and so that is what I did. I tore apart my filing cabinet looking for the name of a person at my Internet company and her email finally in hand, I sent off a sharply worded message which contained only about three Canadian “sorry to bother you’s” as opposed to my usual number. I think she got the message because I also used the words “nasty surprise.” That will tune her in, I surmised.

Then I found her phone number and called but had to leave a message. My barely contained rage properly seeped into my message which started off with an apology, of course, and I might have also repeated “nasty surprise”. The woman did not immediately call me back, as she probably rushed into her boss’s office to resign as soon as she heard my enraged voice on her message machine.

So I called another woman whom I spoke to before she forwarded me to a third woman for whom I left what was by now a familiar anger-tinged and panicky message.

Finally, the first woman called me back, after apparently having reconsidered her decision to quit her job, and she listened patiently as I raved on about my important emails and then she put me through to technical support. A very nice man then tried to walk me through the whole mess and he could honestly not figure out why my email folders were gone.

But, he told me not to worry, they would be somewhere on my computer.

And right about then, and his mentioning “my computer”, a little light went on. Sometimes, it is very dark in my brain but now and then, there is a dim illumination. Low wattage, kind of like a night light. And this light told me I was not at MY COMPUTER but instead had sat down at my wife’s machine where, of course, my email folders would never be.

I thanked the young fella, ran downstairs to my computer and presto chango, there were my emails. Almost twice as many as Hillary deleted. I am thrilled to have found them because if President Trump found out that thousands of my emails had been deleted, I would someday be sitting in a jail cell next to the former U.S. senator and secretary of state.

So, three poor women and an unfortunate man, suffered the barely contained Wrath of Jim. Which, on reflection, does not surprise me. Two days ago, my cat died.

I won’t speak for other men, but that’s often how this one reacts to that sort of thing.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

The letter came in the mail in an unassuming presentation. Almost as though the plain, white envelope contained little more than advertising. But it didn’t. Inside were riches unimaginable.

It was a notice from a law firm acting on behalf of the shareholders of a large company trading on the stock market which had run afoul of regulations. There had been a class-action suit filed and a settlement was finally arrived at.

That settlement was $69 million. I will write it out as it seems more impressive done that way. Sixty-nine million dollars.

The law firm was searching for people who owned shares of this company between 2004 and 2009. As it happens, my wife and I did own shares in that company during that period which is why we got the letter. In fact, we owned a lot of shares, 1,091 of them. That is a very large number to me. I do not own 1,091 of anything, not even screwnails though I do have three peanut butter jars full of them.

I am not a stock market expert, not even close, but I cannot imagine anyone else owning even a fraction of the shares in this company that we did. We owned, after all, 1,091 of them. I am also not a mathematician but I have a good feeling with our majority stake in this company back then, we can probably expect a cool thirty or forty million coming our way. We will know for sure in 60 days.

I was at the coffee shop when I opened the envelope and I called my wife from the Cadillac dealership which is located between the restaurant and our home. I told her the good news and wondered what colour of new Caddy she would prefer. She didn’t have an opinion on that but instead, advised me to come right home so we could talk about this new development in our lives. I might be mistaken but I think I remember her using the same tone of voice when she was trying to talk our kids into climbing down carefully from the highest branches of the maple tree in our yard.

So I told the dealer “the red one” and then rushed straight home to celebrate our sudden good fortune with my spouse. She is not usually a spoilsport, but on this occasion, she put forward the idea that we might not see even $20 million of the settlement funds, let alone 40. I was disappointed by her pessimism but pretended to be reasonable. She took the position that there might have been a few investors who owned more than 1,091 shares in the company between 2004 and 2009, as doubtful a possibility as could be.

In fact, she guessed that some people might have actually owned many times more than 1,091 shares, a position I found totally unimaginable. I still maintain that 1,091 is a big number, whether we’re talking screwnails, stars or stocks. And I realized the more she talked the poorer we were becoming so I dropped the subject.

Then I set to work filling out the required forms to ensure we qualified for our cut of the settlement, or our eff ewe money, as I like to call it when my wife is not around.

It took me a month to fill out those stupid forms. And during that period, I discovered something funny. I swore out loud more than 1,091 times during that month and the strange thing is, it hardly seemed like I was swearing at all. All I know is there were long stretches during that process when the dog and cats went missing.

Today was the last day to send in our application. I spent the whole day finishing it up, swearing and rushing it to the post office before the deadline.

I have never known my wife to be wrong on many occasions but boy is she in for a surprise two months from now.

Either that or I will be calling the class-action lawyers and yelling, “Eff ewe!” into the phone.

I will report on the lawyers’ decision in eight weeks’ time but don’t expect me to wave at you from my red Caddy. I will have moved up a class or two by then.

©2017 Jim Hagarty

(Update 2023: I am writing this update from my phone while sitting in our 2006 Chrysler Sebring, coloured silver like our knives and forks. I honestly do not remember what the outcome of all this was but I do recall crying more than 1,091 tears when the decisions were announced so that might be a clue. I have a feeling our documentation was not complete enough or something like that and we couldn’t remedy the defects. The day our claim was rejected, my wife spent the afternoon talking me down from the top of our maple tree.)

I recently read an article which stated that coffee is bad for your health.

If you drink too much of it, it will make you grumpy and keep you awake at night.

Given the hard time other addictive substances are having in our health-conscious world nowadays, I feel fairly safe in predicting that coffee is about to go down the drain as a popular national drink.

It had been perking right along, so to speak, missing out on the terrible roasting that alcohol and tobacco have been getting all these years.

And now, in an instant, its reputation has bean run right into the ground.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that before long:

• the government will discover coffee and tax it till it costs about $5 a cup;

• the big behind-the-barn thrill for kids won’t be their first taste of booze or drag on a cigarette but instead, their first sip of coffee;

• coffee will be sold at special government shops with a big sign announcing COFFEE STORE over the front door;

• a lawyer will try to beat his client’s murder rap by arguing the poor schmuck was buzzed out on coffee when he pulled the trigger and never would have done it otherwise;

• proof of age will have to be shown in coffee shops and no one will be allowed a second cup;

• coffee ads on TV won’t be able to show people actually drinking coffee;

• the warning “Coffee Makes You Grouchy” will be printed on the label of every jar;

• police roadside devices known as coffalyzers will be used to measure the caffeine level of every speeder to see if they stayed too long at the restaurant;

• coffee drinking in the workplace will be banned and special consultants will help workers find new ways to spend the hours they normally spent sipping;

• where coffee had once been thought of in society as a great social glue and openly portrayed in the media as a harmless, friendship-promoting beverage, movie, TV and theatre directors will avoid it like the plague and actors will only ever be shown drinking lemonade or ginger ale;

• coffee addicts will be reviled in the world, much as drinkers and smokers are now.

And oh, what a grind life will be then.

©1990 Jim Hagarty

In my long-ago days on the farm, an incident occurred about this time of year that still makes me chuckle.

My Dad and his neighbour were harvesting corn and because all of us extra helpers were back in school, a couple of retired farmers were hired to haul loads of the crop back and forth from the harvester in the field to the silo at the barn.

All went well most of the time. As one wagon full of corn was coming in from the field, another was heading back out to be filled up.

The two retired farmers, Tom and Norman, were driving two old John Deere tractors hauling the loads. This work was taking place on a 100-acre farm with plenty of space everywhere. Hardly a tree in sight or a fence for that matter as everything was in crops.

A 100-acre farm, even by today’s standards, is a big space. I have no way of knowing this, but I suspect that if you filled every square inch of it with tractors, even old John Deeres, you might be able to squeeze in 10,000 of them. Or even 100,000.

My point is, there was lots of room one fateful day when Tom was driving his wagon out to the field and Norman was bringing his in. There was no particular path or road they needed to follow to make the journey. They were basically free to drive wherever they liked.

And yet, they both sort of chose the same stretch of field to guide their green vehicles along. As they headed straight towards each other, Tom decided to veer left to miss Norman who decided to veer right to avoid Tom when two left turns would have been better choices.

If you haven’t guessed by now, the outcome was predictable – probably the first and only head-on collision between two tractors on a wide-open hundred acre farm.

Fortunately, not a lot of damage is done when two tractors travelling probably eight miles per hour meet head-on and no one was hurt in the mishap.

The two men worked many more years drawing corn wagons for my Dad and his neighbour, but it was clearly noticeable how far they kept away from each other whenever they met in the fields after that.

Once “hitten”, twice shy.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

Apparently there are a lot of levels in Hell and the worse you were here on Earth, the farther down you go, closer to the fire.

I hope, and in my prayers tonight I will recommend, that the person who invented the “gable-top” milk carton spends eternity hopping around on the hot coals he or she deserves because this little carton is truly evil.

I wrestled with another one today as I sat at my table in a sub shop and if it hadn’t been for the prominent sign over the door which read, “No Screaming Allowed”, I would have let loose. A person needs the hands and fingers of a brain surgeon to open these stupid outfits and unfortunately, my paws are almost as big and delicate as a bear’s.

I know there is a way to open these awful things as I have been shown all the tricks many times by someone several decades younger than me. But he always demonstrates it so quickly I can never quite get it, like a magician reluctant to show you his whole method.

So there I sat today, ripping and tearing at this horrible little box like the aforementioned bear might have had he been in the sub shop at the time. (Had he wandered in and saw the look on my face, I think he would have run away, maybe even screaming, in violation of the sub shop code.)

By the time my milk was accessible, it was sitting in a pathetically mangled cardboard container and being chocolate milk, it was then I realized it needed to be shaken up. So I tried to close the wreck and gave it a shake. Milk spewed everywhere.

When I finally did get it open again and put it to my lips, the milk dribbled down my face and onto my jeans.

You know, I hope I go to Hell too so I can hop around next to the idiot who invented this abomination and spend my eternity screaming in his ear. I really do.

I have heard there is no prohibition against screaming in Hell. In fact, apparently, it is encouraged.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

When I look out my kitchen window in the evening, or even in the middle of the night when I sometimes get out of bed for a snack, I can see a light in the upstairs window of a neighbour’s house behind us and a few doors down.

I don’t know why, but that light gives me comfort.

The light shines through a green curtain, so it isn’t vivid; it’s nice and soft. I think it might be coming from a kitchen, maybe a light over a stove (this is an upstairs apartment in a house, the first floor is a business office.)

I don’t know who lives there. I’ve never seen anyone in the window and don’t expect I ever will. Still, just knowing that light is there makes me feel good. All is right with the world.

In the winter, when I am watering the backyard skating rink at 3 a.m., I glance up at the light and feel warm, despite the cold.

Once in a while, sometimes on weekends, I look out my window to see the light is not on and strangely enough, I feel slightly ill at ease. I assume whoever lives there has gone away for the weekend.

I don’t know where this comes from, this need for this kind of comfort. Maybe it’s a leftover thing from my early days on the farm when houses seemed so far apart and a yard light or light from a window was nice to see.

Or maybe it’s a caveman thing – the light from a fire would keep the predators away at night. People have often compared me to a caveman.

I just hope my neighbour doesn’t move out some day and is replaced by an energy-saving tenant who prefers to live in the dark.

My obsession with artificial light is something I have fully embraced inside our home, as well. A quick look around might cause a visitor to wonder if Lamps ‘R’ Us had gone out of business and I bought out the store. There are lamps on top of lamps and some of them are in unoccupied rooms of the house and serve no actual purpose except to cheer me up if I happen to wander into one of those rooms.

The invention of low wattage LED bulbs has fed my addiction as I don’t feel too guilty about burning the midnight oil. However, I live with some energy-efficient killjoys who seem to delight in extinguishing my omnipresent illumination need.

I have a long list of excuses I hope will reduce the resistance of my family members but none of them ever work very well. My favourite pro-lamp argument is that I leave these lamps on so our old cat can find his way around. My family counters that cats can see in the dark but now and then I run across an article refuting that old notion and I immediately try to get these others to change their view.

“How many lamp haters does it take to kill a light bulb?” is a persistent question. That age-old mystery doesn’t seem to have an answer, at least not in my home.

Perhaps I will use some of the money the lamp extinguishers are saving us to go for some counselling.

But there are a few important basics in life that shouldn’t be ignored. We need good food, fresh water, breathable air …

And, I would argue, lots and lots of lamps.

Besides, counsellors’ offices I’ve been in, and I’ve seen the inside of a few, always have low lighting on, even during the day. I assume the lights are there to calm down the clients.

I rest my case, your honour.

©2011 Jim Hagarty

I will be the first to say it and it might come as a shock to those who think otherwise, but life is not fair. I’ve always believed that and now I have more proof that it is so.

When he was three years old, Donald Trump was earning a salary of $200,000 a year. I am not sure what it was he was doing to bring in a haul like that but when I was three, I was struggling to learn to tie my shoes. My vocabulary consisted of about 50 words and as far as I can recall, I had no money. None. I struggled every day to make ends meet. It was not easy for me. I still bear the mental scars of those tough times.

And when Donald was eight years old, he became a millionaire. This really fries my bacon because it took me till I was 14 to earn my first million. When I was eight, I was still being swindled by my school’s designated bully out of the best hockey coins I had gotten from jello boxes and potato chip bags and which I made the mistake of showing the bully, hoping to impress him and reduce the daily beatings. I think he gave me Al Arbour for Gordie Howe, Stan Mikita and Frank Mahovlich. Or he just stole the coins and ran off. The beatings have left me with a faulty memory.

My parents were always very good to me and they left me with a nice sum when they moved on to the next dimension, an amount that has helped me through the years. But looking back, and comparing them to Donald Trump’s parents, they were not as generous as I had always thought. By the time Trump’s father Fred left this realm, he had given his son $413 million. Mom and Dad, successful farmers though they had been, left me with less than $413 million and I am not sure why they did that. I don’t think any of my six brothers and sisters got $413 million either, though I’d have to check the paperwork on that. Which begs the question, where did the rest of the family fortune go?

And while life is not fair, it sometimes has a way of balancing the scale. Poor though I may be, I have not been sued 3,500 times, 95 per cent of the people in the world don’t hate me, I have no ex-wives wandering around writing books about me and I have never met a porn star let alone paid one to keep quiet. I wouldn’t know what to do with a porn star if one knocked on my door and insisted on coming in. Like my cats, I’d probably run downstairs and hide behind the water heater. As far as I know, no porn stars have ever knocked on my door but you never know. I might have slept in that day.

Eventually, plowing through lots of potato chips and jello and when I got older, finally learning how to swindle the younger kids, I got the plastic coins with the pictures of Gordie Howe, Stan Mikita and Frank Mahovlich on them.

So I’m good.

©2018 Jim Hagarty

I have been running this winter and trying to get my mile under four minutes (total lie), so I needed a timer.

I dropped into my local surplus store and bought one. It doesn’t work. I opened it up to check the battery and a little piece of metal fell out.

Now this thing didn’t cost me much, so I threw the receipt in the recycling and was going to toss the timer in the electronic waste bin next time I happen upon one. But it kind of bugged me that the timer never worked even one time and never would.

A week went by and every day I thought about this. Would I dump out the recycling bins and search through the debris for the receipt? Or just let it go? I decided to let it go. Still …

This morning I hauled three large recycling bins (the ones on wheels with the lids) out to the curb and after the truck went by after collecting the contents of them, I went out to bring them back in. The recycling guy had emptied all three and stacked them upside down, one on top of the other. I took them apart, set them back on their wheels, and prepared to pull them behind the house again.

As always happens, a few stray recyclables were left behind on the ground. A couple of water bottle caps, a small advertising brochure and – a receipt. I turned over the little slip of paper and was shocked to see that it was the receipt for my crapped-out little timer. How in heck could this possibly be?

Things like this don’t happen to me often, but when they do, they drive me nuts. Those three bins were jam packed with recyclables of every description including fine paper by the fistful and so many receipts it was embarrassing. In our family, we apparently like to buy things.

But in this instance, even the consumer gods were disturbed that I had been ripped off for the price of a timer and weren’t going to let me get away with not taking it back.

So tomorrow morning, timer and (somewhat grimy) receipt in hand, I will be back in the store, righting the great wrong that has the Universe so upset it left me a giant clue showing how it felt about it.

By the way, the timer cost $1.99 plus tax.

I don’t know why it was a piece of junk.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

You get the chequebook out, write up the thing and put it in the envelope. No stamps. Days go by before you remember, while in line at the checkout, to buy some. Of course, not every checkout sells stamps so you wander around to find somewhere that does. Everywere but the post office, that is.

Stamp successfully affixed to envelope (what’s an envelope, asks child under 20), stage three approaches – the actual depositing of the envelope with its promissory note enclosed into a red postal box.

As I write, this is a challenge that has not yet been met. The envelope has sat on the passenger seat day after day as the van has driven happily by every red postal box in sight. If there were green and yellow ones, the van would whiz by them too.

Arriving home, curse words escape the mouth at the sight of that silly piece of mail. Into the house it goes again, then back out to the van the next day. Rinse and repeat several times.

This is the very situation that resulted in the invention of the word “aaarrrgh” and a very good word it is too. When aaarrrgh fails to emerge from the vocal chords, other fine words take its place.

The end of this archaic way of transferring funds can’t come soon enough for this absent-minded cheque writer.

(Update 2023: This was written 11 years ago. Lots of ways to transfer funds have come about since then, now digitally, from e-commerce to auto bank cards. One frontier I finally crossed this summer: holding my smartphone up to a reader to pay a bill in a store. Some people still prefer cheques and we keep some around but they are rarely used now. Unlike my kids, I have not yet graduated to depositing cheques I receive by photographing them with my phone and depositing them in the bank through the magic of, well, I don’t know. Just some sort of magic. Aaarrrgh!)

©2012 Jim Hagarty