Month: January 2018

By Jim Hagarty
2015

I have an old caulking gun in the garage and I had thought of getting rid of it as I rarely use it. But now I see an opportunity to put it to work and make some money at the same time.

A Toronto-area woman used her caulking gun to inject silicone into the buttocks of nine women who paid her thousands of dollars each for the privilege. As it happens, I also have several half-tubes of silicone lying around so two birds, one stone, etc. And I am willing to charge less for the procedure than this woman did.

The women who lined up for the injection all wanted bigger butts and it seems they got their wish. The fact that one woman still can’t sit down months after getting injected is a minor point. Another became very sick and had to have an operation to have the stuff removed but nothing is perfect, is it? Maybe she had a pre-existing condition, such as a normal body, which rejected the caulking gun stuff, etc.

The pretend plastic surgeon also offered to inject her special concoction into lips and muscles but I think it’s important to specialize and so I plan to stay focused on women’s butts, something I have been focused on for many, many years.

Sadly, my caulking gun hero might find herself spending 10 years in jail sitting on her own rear end, unenhanced, I presume. But this won’t happen to me. Her fatal mistake was conducting her procedures in shady hotel rooms. Very unprofessional. I will open up my business in my garage.

So, if you’re interested, just call my toll-free number 1-800-BIG-BUTT. Book an appointment soon as I expect to be a little behind in my work pretty quickly.

Or a lot behind.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

This is a big month for special days. Next Friday, for example, is St. Patrick’s Day. Perversely, as someone who’s pretty much addicted to all things Irish and fascinated by the story of St. Patrick, I have no great affection for this day, at least not as I find myself rounding third base and beginning to head for home. Forty years ago, now that was a different matter. But as it stands in 2006, the day is all gimmicked up with little green leprechauns and green beer and everyone using a silly Irish accent. The national colour of Ireland isn’t even green, for Pat’s sake, or Pete’s sake, or whomever. (It’s blue).

Wednesday was International Women’s Day, a more recently created special day than the one dedicated to the fifth-century saint of Erin. No green beer drunk on this day and, in fact, I don’t think any sort of mind-altering substances are encouraged to mark the occasion. Though International Women’s Day was adopted by the UN only in 1977, the idea for it began at the beginning of the 20th century when women’s struggles focused on universal suffrage, reads a press release sent to my newspaper editor’s desk this week.

“The efforts and courage of women seeking social, economic, and political equality demanded, and finally achieved, symbolic recognition.” I applaud the day and recognize the absolutely dreadful mistreatment of women that still persists in so many parts of the world today, including our own country, but being of the gender that causes so much of that pain, I find it hard to celebrate. This day is for women, not for men.

That leaves National Potato Chip Day which was Tuesday, and not to diminish the importance of the two other days, if there ever was a food that was deserving of a national day of its own, it is the potato chip. Much-maligned in health-promoter circles these days, the potato chip, nevertheless does a lot for the soul if not for the heart of a human. That delectable crunch of that first chip out of a newly opened bag, the salt that covers every lovely square inch of each thin, wavy wafer, the cold pop required to wash down all those delicious bits.

My love affair with potato chips goes back a long, long way. If memory serves, my best friend and I once bought small bags of them for five cents, then eventually 10 cents. We used to walk the mile and a half to the gas station in the village, him in one ditch, me in the other, searching for returnable pop bottles to exchange for our treats. In those days, it seems, everyone tossed everything out of their car windows, so there were lots of goodies to be found, if you made it to the ditches before other eager fortune hunters arrived.

Seven cents for a small bottle of pop, five cents for a bag of chips and my friend and I were livin’ large. Then along came NHL hockey coins inside bags of potato chips and our joy was complete. To this day, when I open a bag of chips, I half expect to see a miniature round photo of Gordie Howe’s face smiling out at me.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and exclaim, not knowing this to be true for sure, that the reason my family left lreland during the catastrophic potato failures in the late 1840s was the need we had to get to some country that still had potatoes – and potato chips. Because addiction to our chips is as much a Hagarty characteristic as freckles.

Ironically, if you ask for potato chips in a shop in Ireland, they hand you a mess of great big french fries on a sheet of newsprint. What we call potato chips, on the other hand, they call potato “crisps.” Potato crisps. Potato crisps. Nah, it just doesn’t have it. Which is why I could never live in Ireland. Besides, you could never find a bag of crisps there with Gordie Howe inside.

St. Patrick, maybe. On the other hand, didn’t he once play goal for the Montreal Canadiens?

(That last paragraph contains an oblique reference, lost on most people now. Former NHL superstar goalie Patrick Roy was often referred to as St. Patrick.)

By Jim Hagarty
2018
June 13 is Blame It On Somebody Else Day. Now they’re talking. Finally, a really useful day. Expect Donald Trump to sign a big declaration and admit that this is his favourite day of the year.

By Jim Hagarty
1986

I used to think there were no such things as antiques. The world was made up of only two kinds of household items – old furniture, bottles, machinery and paintings and – new ones.

I could never understand what it was people found intriguing enough about an old washstand or dresser to make them want to invest hours of backbreaking labour and lots of money in the refinishing of them. Why not just go out and buy yourself something new and shiny and unmarked?

Antique lovers, I thought, had too much money and not enough things to spend it on. Or they were wasting their time wandering around in a past that wasn’t really as good as they remembered it.

A few years ago, I bought a chrome-and-arborite table with an imitation barnboard top and vinyl swivel chairs to match. The whole affair was the most beautiful furniture I’d ever seen. How the manufacturers managed to sell it at so low a price was beyond me. And why everyone else wasn’t buying up the identical ensemble had me stumped.

About the same time, I gave away, free of charge, a white-paint-coated washstand to a furniture refinisher who expressed an interest in it. It was given to me, I reasoned and I wasn’t going to use it. Go ahead. Take it.

A short time later, I barely recognized the same piece of furniture in the refinisher’s showroom but by then, it looked remarkably good and bore a price tag of $225. I was vaguely aware that I had let some sort of treasure slip through my fingers.

Today, my chrome table’s gone and in its place sits an old elm harvest table, complete with scratches on the top and uneven finish on the legs. Around the table sit five old pressed-back kitchen chairs that wobble a lot and need repairing. The seat on one of them is split in two and the spindles on another don’t match but I wouldn’t trade the whole lot for a factory-full of chrome.

There must come a time in most people’s lives when the nostalgia bug bites them and I think it has some correlation with expanding waistlines, receding hairlines and rounding the halfway mark to the three-score-and-ten line. You don’t see very many teenagers in antique shops and flea markets. They’re in the record stores and burger places.

I’ve always been sentimental but never was much attracted to old things until recently. Now I spend a lot of time browsing in flea markets and antique shops, in search of bargains. I look more often than I buy but if something really grabs me, and the price is not outrageous, I take it home.

It’s funny how tastes change. When I was a kid, our house on the farm had many old pieces of furniture ranging from washstands and dressers, beds and night tables to kitchen table and chairs. In their original state, they would all have been stained and varnished and had wooden or porcelain turns on their doors and drawers. By the time I was old enough to take notice of them, they had all been coated with several layers of white paint and their original turns had been replaced by glass knobs. I can’t remember ever thinking that any of that furniture was very appealing or valuable.

Now, in shops and markets, I look at the price tags on furniture that’s almost identical and just shake my head.

A few weeks ago, a local antique dealer showed me through the room where all of his refinishing is done. As soon as I entered the shop, I spied a black and red, General Electric, table clock-radio hooked to the wall. I asked the man if he’d turn it on and he did. The radio took half a minute or so to warm up before any sound came out of it. When it did, the music was accompanied by a humming sound – the identical buzz that emanated from the same radio that sat on my bedside table at home for years. Disc jockeys from WBZ in Boston and WLS in Chicago plus a New York station for which I can’t remember the call letters (was it WCFL or WKYC?) used to spin their records late into every night over that little radio while I lay there waiting for sleep. I have no idea where the radio went and had forgotten about it completely until I saw its twin in the antique dealer’s shop.

In a turbulent world where, it seems, little stays the same from one day to the next, it’s comforting to know that that 50-year-old radio in the dealer’s shop is still spittin’ and cracklin’ its music and news out over the air.

It wasn’t for sale. Stuff like that never is.

By Jim Hagarty
2015
My daughter says I keep repeating bad jokes in the hope that somebody somewhere will find them funny. To prove her right, I am repeating that our dog Toby can’t hold his licker. Clever, right? I thought so. Please laugh so I don’t have to repeat that several more times. To encourage you to choose the only possible response, I am offering a bonus assessment. I am going to build Toby a doghouse and call it the licker cabinet. It’s falling down laughing you are, right? I thought so. If that hasn’t done it yet, there’s always this: My wife and daughter are disgusted when Toby licks my face, head and the insides of my ears. They command him to stop when they catch him at this activity. They are therefore known, as well they should be, as our licker inspectors. Go ahead, throw back your head and let ‘er rip. You and I and Toby all know you want to.

By Jim Hagarty
2016
I quit drinking coffee for almost 15 years. I went back to it two years ago when the Vatican turned down my application for sainthood. I didn’t have proof of enough miracles (and I wasn’t dead). They didn’t think my photos of me turning water into long and wide skating rinks in my backyard qualified me. What I didn’t realize when I quit coffee was I had also quit taking coffee breaks. That was a mistake. Workplaces should not only always allow coffee breaks, but should also encourage them. There is a direct link between them and sanity.

By Jim Hagarty
2005

Clutter and I have been involved in hand-to-hand combat for the past few months and for a while, I thought I was winning. But trip after trip of carrying things out of the house to throw away, recycle or donate, didn’t seem to be making the mountain of material objects any less arduous to climb. I was truly puzzled by this phenomenon; surely if you take things away from a pile, the pile must begin to shrink. Alas, no shrinkage occurred. In fact, the exact opposite seemed to be true: the clutter was gaining on me at an alarming rate.

Then, a morning of meditation finally brought the truth to me. At the same time as I was obsessively lugging old stuff out the back door, the other three members of the household were busy hauling new stuff in the front. With the odds stacked against me like this, I fear I’ll be found dead some day beneath a heap of winter clothes, a bunch of boxes, foam and plastic bags from new purchases and a plethora of manufactured goods of dubious use. The needability of many of these items is borderline or below.

Still, I carry on, pun intended, my arms full of belongings that were once held in great esteem but which have now been tripped over (literally) far too many times.

Every night I search the Internet for quality clutter-busting tips and have discovered a whole world out there of people who have suffered as I have from the weight of too many possessions. And of the thousands of words of advice I’ve read, comes this basic, number one rule:

Do you use this thing? If not, why do you possess it?

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Thanks Internet guru.

The push was on to simplify.

Another useful suggestion was to not try too hard to get a fair buck for everything. Just get rid of it, the sooner the better.

It is amazing what wonders one little stake on your lawn bearing a hand-scrawled sign labelled “FREE” can achieve toward the goal of declutterization. There is almost nothing, it seems, that won’t become instantly irresistible at the amazing, once-only, bargain-basement price of zilch. Nuts, bolts, wire, curtains, windows, picture frames, you name it.

By mistake, I put in the give away box a pair of old eyeglasses that I intended to donate to my optometrist to take on her next mission to Guatemala. She won’t be taking them, however; amazingly to me, someone fished them out of the box and took them home. Here’s what puzzles me. The glasses were bifocals. To be of any use to you, your vision needs would have to match not only the regular prescription but the bi-focal one too.

I don’t care. They’re gone. Just 2,346 items left to go. But with my family hauling material things in the front door at such a rapid rate, I fear I will forever be the frustrated man who is shovelling his driveway during a snowstorm and wondering why he isn’t getting ahead.