Month: June 2016

By Jim Hagarty

What is it about gun nuts that makes them so darned easy to make fun of?

An Oregon man openly carrying his brand new handgun was robbed of the firearm recently by another armed man. The 21-year-old victim, who had bought a semi-automatic .22-calibre handgun earlier in the day, was openly carrying the weapon down a street when another man approached him and asked for a cigarette. The man who asked for a cigarette pulled his own firearm from his waistband and said, “I like your gun, give it to me,” according to police. The man then fled after the victim handed over his new purchase.

I can’t even think of anything funny to add.

Perfect irony writes its own endings.

By Jim Hagarty

“What should I do with the old brine tank?” I asked the plumber, as we looked at my unrepairable water softener.

“Just get rid of it!” he answered.

Typical plumber, I thought to myself. All he saw was a four-foot-high plastic tank that used to hold salt for the softener. A creative and imaginative person such as I am, on the other hand, saw before me a thing of beauty (the tank, not the plumber, though he was handsome in his own way, I should mention him to a single woman I know) that was being set free to take on a new life in any number of directions. My mind was abuzz for the possible uses for it, but I settled on a bucket for yard waste collection days. I already had a yellow “Yard Waste” sticker to attach to it and it had a nice lid. The only drawback is that yard waste containers have to have handles on both sides and the tank had none, so I would have to work on that.

Today, my first chance to use my new yard waste can arrived as I was taking a load of garbage to the dump. So, I filled the former brine tank with garbage, popped the lid on it and very wisely duct taped it closed so it wouldn’t fly off on the ride to the dump, as it stuck out of the trunk.

When I arrived at the dump, it was to discover to my horror that the lid was gone. It had flown off somewhere on the one-mile trip from home to landfill. Rats and double rats and I am not referring to the ones at the dump.

I quickly threw my refuse into the dumpster and raced back along the route to find my lid. I arrived home lidless and discouraged. So I took the other garbage cans out of the car along with the brine tank, and headed back for another search. This time, I found it, lying lonely on the four-lane street under a railway overpass.

This is a busy street on a Saturday morning and long steel fences on either side of the underpass are designed to keep people from walking along that area. But a man in search of a brine tank lid regards steel fences as mere speed bumps on the road of life (terrible metaphor, yuk, but best I can do as I need some potato chips soon and have to get this done.) So, there I was, on the wrong side of an underpass fence on a mission to retrieve a plastic brine tank lid when it occurred to me that my life was in danger. Angry drivers whizzed by me and shot me looks that were not pretty. People are mean and lack proper brine tank understanding, in my opinion.

But I came for my lid and I would have it. I dashed out and picked it up, in much the same way a turkey vulture grabs some raccoon guts just before the car gets him though I am much better looking than a turkey vulture if only half as smart. When I got a chance to inspect it, I became aware that someone had found my lid before I did and ran over it. Maybe more than one driver, in fact. I’m pretty sure some of them did it deliberately.

I took it home and put the sad affair on top of the brine tank. The only good thing was the fact that it no longer fit tightly as it did before and, because half the side was missing, it actually went on and off pretty easily. I started thinking about how I could fix it. Maybe get some plywood, tape, screws (but none of that frickin’ duct tape) …

I related all this news to my wife when I got home.

“What should I do with the old brine tank?” I asked her.

“Just get rid of it!” she answered.

There must be an echo in here. (Or she’s been hanging around with that plumber.)

My tank conversion days have come to an end.

Sadly.

(With apologies to plumbers and turkey vultures)

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.