Lifetime Sentences

It will take some very imaginative, innovative people to come up with ways of leading us all out of the environmental jungle in which we humans have gotten ourselves lost.

But fortunately for the planet and its occupants, many very creative people have set their inventive sights on the problem and are coming up with solutions. Brilliant solutions. Oh, how I wish I could have thought of some of them.

Here are only a few of the amazing answers our best minds have come up with recently to our pressing pollution problems.

The Milk Bottle

In a Vancouver, Canada, neighbourhood, a dairy company is selling thousands of litres of milk daily in (get this), glass bottles. The bottles, when empty, go back to the dairy where they’re washed and refilled and sold again. Drinking milk in that neighbourhood means never having to say you’re sorry for sending dozens of cardboard cartons and/or plastic bags to the landfill site every year.

The Clothes Line

Researchers recently wondered whether or not wet clothing could actually dry without being placed in an electricity-consuming or gas-burning clothes dryer. To test their theory, they stretched a rope tightly between two posts outside their laboratory and hung a shirt over it. Within hours, it was dry. They tried a pair of pants, then a towel and some socks and found the drying process works almost 100 per cent of the time with any kind of textile. An exception, they found, occurs when it is raining outside. They are working on ways around this problem including hanging up wet clothing inside a building. Test results should be revealed soon but early findings seem to hold some promise.

Alternative Transportation Modes

Although research into possible alternatives to the pollution-creating, gasoline-powered automobile is only just beginning, some revolutionary methods of getting from Point A to Point B are being tested. One method involves a person systematically and repetitively placing one foot ahead of the other foot and moving in the direction he or she desires to go. Repeated enough times, this motion, scientists theorize, will eventually propel a person to his or her destination. Other methods being tested include placing people on light, two-wheeled machines with pedals and teaching them to push the pedals, which drive a chain, which, in turn, turns the wheels. Another suggestion is to place a large box on wheels and hook it up to an animal such as a horse, although this idea is having some difficulty catching on. Scientists have some doubts the horses will cooperate.

The Windmill

In the push to find ways of creating energy without generating nuclear waste we can’t dispose of or burning non-renewable fossil fuels or damming up rivers and hurting the wildlife that lives in and around them, some scientists have made the radical suggestion that the wind, which always seems to be blowing around anyway, could be harnessed to generate electricity or to pump water out of wells. According to their theory, a fan of blades, erected high in the air and pointed into the wind would turn, and that motion could turn an electric generator or a water pump. It seems crazy but also on the drawing board are ships that would be pushed along through the sea by wind catching in huge sheets erected above their decks.

The Sweater

Although many Canadians keep their houses as warm as Florida so they can walk around half naked all winter long, some scientists wonder if a human being can survive in less balmy atmospheres. Experiments are being conducted with sweaters, sweatshirts, etc., to find out if keeping the heat we all generate as close to our bodies as possible instead of artificially heating all the space around us so we can watch TV in our underwear will work. Similar experiments are being carried out with extra blankets on beds to see if house temperatures could be lowered overnight.

Startling concepts, perhaps, but where science is concerned, it seems nothing is impossible.

©1990 Jim Hagarty

It is a great comfort to me, as a man of advanced years, wisdom and spiritual development, that I do not let little things bother me. Lesser men do, and I feel sorry for them. I have always been guided by the sageness of my elders who taught me to overlook the grains of sand in my shoes and walk on undisturbed. It is the key to happiness.

That is one reason it pleased me so much to pull up to the pizza shop in my car today and read the sign in the window that promised me that for $4.99, I could get a nice big slice of pepperoni pizza and a pop. I was in need of both those things so I entered the restaurant with excitement.

That is the other lesson I have learned. Far from being potential irritants, it is the little things in life that afford the greatest pleasures.

I approached the counter and asked the young man at the cash register for a pepperoni slice and a pop.

“Sorry,” he said, not looking very sorry. “All I have is Mediterranean or Canadian. Being Canadian and never having been to Mediterranea, I chose a slice of Canadian, knowing it would cost more than the advertised pepperoni. I have learned to go with the flow.

The man soon returned with my slice and rang me up. The total was $4.73.

“My pop?” I asked.

“You didn’t order a pop,” said my server.

I did order one, of course, but like I am sure Buddha would have done, I let it slide.

“I would like one,” I said.

“I’ve already rang in your order,” I was told. Once orders are rung in, I understand, they cannot be unrung in.

“That’s okay,” I smiled, much as any of my great mystic heroes might have done.

“That’s $1.57,” he said.

I paid for my pizza and pop, more expensive than they should have been according to the sign in the window, notwithstanding. My outlay was now $6.30, not that I was paying that much attention.

I took my meal to a table and did some calculating as I ate, not that it mattered to me. Had I gotten what I came in for, I would have spent $5.64. I was now eating and drinking a snack that had cost me 66 cents more than it should have.

But who was counting?

Not me.

I have learned to stay above the fray.

The pop was warmer than the pizza.

Just the way I like it.

©2020 Jim Hagarty

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 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.

Sadly, our 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.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

From 1994 to 1999, I taught journalism at a community college in Canada. To those of you who complain about the sorry state of newspapers these days, I apologize. I did that. It’s my fault.

However, that is not why I have come to address you today. In my classes full of youngsters, mostly born in the late ’70s and early ’80s, there were a lot of smart people. It didn’t take me long to become aware that most of them were smarter than I am. So, from then on, my job was to hide that fact from them as best I could. I was often successful, sometimes not. When some of them figured out what a clueless idiot they were dealing with, things became a lot more difficult.

But that is also not the topic of today’s speech. My teleprompter is broken so you’ll have to forgive me for that as well as for wrecking journalism for the foreseeable future. What I want to tell you about is the wide cultural gulf that separated some of my students from me.

For example, one day, I mentioned the name Roy Orbison. A girl’s hand shot up. “Who is that, sir?” I asked the class how many people had never heard that name. Half the class acknowledged their ignorance. For a guy who was tucked into my bed every night with a picture of Roy Orbison and a pair of dark sunglasses, this was earth-shattering. On another day, I threw out the name Paul McCartney. Another girl’s hand shot up. “Is that that guy from Wings?” The band Wings was the one Sir Paul started after the Beatles broke up. I didn’t ask her if she did not know about the Beatles. I was afraid that an answer in the negative might send me over the edge.

For a guy who went to bed every night in his Beatles pajamas wearing his Orbison glasses with the picture of Roy pinned to the other pillow, this was a heart-stopping moment.

Fortunately, we all recovered from these near meltdowns and for six years, I will admit my classes were a very educational experience – for me. I learned a lot. I went to a couple of student parties and dances and even accompanied them out to dinner now and then.

I felt like a caveman suddenly introduced into a weird modern world, but I progressed fairly quickly. I learned from them how to operate computers and printers and cameras and we had some very interesting discussions about marriage and sex and life and death.

All in all, I finished my six years in college with a great education and didn’t have to pay any tuition to get it. I kind of feel bad about all those students I thrust out onto the unsuspecting world, but some of them have connected with me since then, so maybe I’m forgiven.

Well, I have to have my afternoon nap now, if I can find my photo of Roy. And my PJs with the pictures of the guy from Wings on them.

©2013 Jim Hagarty

I was in a church on Saturday and following a solemn ceremony, I badly needed to find a washroom. Fortunately, one appeared and in I gladly went.

I was carrying two things in my hand as I entered and looked for a place to put them down while I attended to business. But my instincts kicked in and told me that among the large number of guests at the solemn ceremony in the stately church were probably a dozen or more heartless thieves, one of whom would enter the washroom while I was busy and make off with my two items if I dared to set them down for a few minutes. Churches are known to attract absconders of every description so a man can never be too careful.

As a result of my caution, instead of setting my articles down, I decided to keep them in my hand during the proceedings. This proved to be a very unfortunate decision as one of the items slipped from my hand into the very porcelain receptacle before which I was then standing.

Now, the other type of people you might find in a church these days are those who swear loudly, at lungs-top levels, when a calamity such as the one described above occurs. And that person, having an array of at least fifty choice curse words to use in any situation, would only be able to think of two, and those two, again unfortunately, fit into the category of taking the Lord’s name in vain, which, as I recall, is a violation of one of the Ten Commandments.

So, there I was, in a church, where good behaviour is regularly encouraged, swearing my head off, using the name of the historical figure for whom the very church I was in was built and dedicated to. Not a proud moment, I will concede, but perhaps a human one.

Well, I comforted myself, at least there was no one else in the washroom at the time of the meltdown, but as I left, I could see that, indeed, there was another man present. Fortunately, he couldn’t see me, and I made a hasty exit.

My only hope is that he is not a foul-mouthed thief and that he said a quiet prayer for me as he attended to his business.

©2019 Jim Hagarty

As a dedicated and learned scientist, I wake up one morning and decide today is the day I start work on finding a cure for cancer, dementia, palsy, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, depression and any one of a host of other conditions that afflict members of the human race. Or I might put my good brain to work to solve our many environmental problems and come up with the perfect clean energy solution to keep the planet from burning out like a giant candle. I might work to devise ways to save the many endangered species of wildlife on the planet. Or to come up with ingenious plans for exporting Earthly life to other planets.

But I don’t do any of those things because I have a more pressing matter to spend my energy on.

For many years, I been almost obsessively interested in the mysteries of fish. And so, I, along with a team of like-minded geniuses, set to work fitting cuttlefish with oversized 3D glasses to help us understand how they calculate distance when attacking a moving target.

If we are able to answer this question, it will mark the fulfilment of a lifelong puzzle for me. I remember as a farm boy of eight years old, asking my father, “Daddy, how do cuttlefish calculate distance when they are attacking their prey?” I remember how Dad tried to answer me and how he finally gave up, saying, “Go ask your mother. She might know something about cuttlefish. She’s always reading.”

So, with this latest experiment and others to come, we will soon pull back the curtain on the Great Cuttlefish Mystery. But our curiosity won’t end there. In fact, it has just begun. We have so many unanswered puzzles to solve when it comes to other fish such as the Fangtooth, the Whitemargin Stargazer, the Asian Sheepshead Wrasse, the Jawfish, the Tassled Scorpionfish, the Frogfish, the Boxfish and the Psychedelic Frogfish.

I won’t lie. I can hardly wait to find out what’s up with the Psychedelic Frogfish.

That guy needs a pair of 3D glasses for sure.

©2020 Jim Hagarty

Colleen McCullough, author of the Thorn Birds among other great writings, died at 77 this week. Her obit in an Australian newspaper is being widely mocked on Twitter. The second paragraph read, “Plain of feature, and certainly overweight, she was, nevertheless a woman of wit and warmth.”

Twitter writers have been hilarious in their responses. I will start with my own and then follow with a few examples.

“Though bright as a burned out nightlight and smelling of energy drinks and pepperoni past its best-before date, Hagarty managed to put several sentences together in his lifetime that were worth reading if you had absolutely run out of all other material.”

Check these others out:

Fancying herself a rockabilly princess, Nicole more aptly resembled a toadstool with too much eyeliner. Crooked teeth, soft jaw & limp notwithstanding, she somehow managed to find a willing, though certainly unambitious mate.

Although a shouty malodorous vulgarian he nevertheless enjoyed most episodes of house hunters international. (Craig Ferguson, comedian and former late night talk show host.)

Big of stomach, and almost constantly flatulent, he somehow managed to reach the keyboard to write some things, too.

Thin of hair, and strangely proportioned, she nevertheless managed to land a respectable job and charming husband.

Although dark-skinned with facial hair & ugly teeth he was not a terrorist but an actual scientist who even discovered a thing or two.

A struggling black single parent, she occasionally took breaks from making gumbo & spitting watermelon pips to pen fables.

Disappointingly heterosexual, her spinster status and preference for short hair & sensible shoes confused the best of them.

Though unmarried & certainly showing her age around the eyes, she was, nevertheless, sort of helpful. (Accompanied by a photo of Mother Teresa)

And here is a pretend obit of slimy press baron Rupert Murdoch: Ugly of face, devoid of morals and with a neck more wrinkled than a stegosaurus’s scrotum …

This is the best way to take on idiocy. The pen is mightier than the you know what. Oh, come to think of it, you probably don’t know. You are probably too plain and fat. (But nice enough, in a sort of ordinary way.)

©2015 JimHagarty

There are days – you’ve had them too – when everything clicks with the precision and ease of a Swiss watch. There are other days when the old Tmex not only stopped, the face popped off and the guts flew out at your feet.

It was the latter kind of day described above that awaited me as I hustled out the door to go to my Saturday afternoon guitar jam today, my one big social event of the week where I actually interact with human beings who don’t describe me as “my dad” or “yes, that’s my husband.”

“Why are you leaving so early?” asked my wife at 12:30.

“It starts at one o’clock and I am never on time. I want to start the new year off right.” I usually burst into the studio with a flourish about an hour after the music has started. I think this annoys some of my otherwise even-tempered and sweet-sounding pals.

“Take the good car,” yelled my wife, as I was leaving the kitchen. If you have one car that is described as the good car, that can only mean that the other one is the bad car.

“Nope,” I yelled back. The Pontiac needs a good run. It hasn’t moved in a week.

Out to the bad car I went, loaded up my guitar, and looked down to see a mostly flat front tire. That was not going to put me off. I drove to the local gas station in the pouring rain and breathed some life into that poor ancient piece of rubber. I empathize with things that are poor and ancient.

Finally, off I went, sucking on a can of pop and practising a song out loud I planned to dazzle my buddies and our audience with.

A few miles out of town, I looked at the heat gauge to see two sets of warning lights flashing and a dial indicating the coolant was warmer than a rich man’s hot tub. This had happened before. The car’s manual says to shut the car off right away as it could burst into flames. I didn’t do that, instead driving a few more miles to a gas station in a small village. I killed the engine and sat there waiting for the firetrap to cool off. At least I was not sitting in a inferno.

I was discouraged. Bad cars can make a man discouraged from time to time.

As I sat there contemplating the unfairness of life, the right lens popped out of my eyeglasses and fell on the floor. I had no way of repairing them. The next few hours I did my best Cyclops impersonation, driving the highway and banging away at the jam while only partially sighted. Driving partially sighted is against the terms of the agreement between me and the Ministry of Transportation.

I finally opened the hood and dumped half the big can of coolant I bought at the gas station for $18.35 into the plastic container designed for that purpose. That container and the rest of the car are 23 years old this year. I still don’t think of it as a bad car, however. My son is 23 till March and my daughter will be 23 in December and I don’t hate them.

I will come right out and say it. I like the bad car.

Most of the time.

In the midst of all this, I failed to mention that when I left home, whatever day that was, nature was calling. I didn’t pick up. One overheating car and a set of broken eyeglasses later, nature was yelling at me. Abusively.

I would soon get a chance to shut nature up.

A few miles down the road, the heat gauge was screaming again and I had to pull off onto a deserted gravel road. Another long wait to let things cool down. Another big gulp of antifreeze. And a few minutes to stuff a big sock in nature’s belligerent mouth.

By the time I reached the town where the jam is held, the heat gauge was in full protest mode again, and pretty lights were flashing on my dash. I parked and burst into the studio, still partially sighted, at 2:30 p.m., a full 90 minutes late, and facing a room full of, I imagined, cranky music makers.

I wish I had taken the good car.

©2020 Jim Hagarty

So, there was an ad on the Internet. It offered a $250,000 life insurance policy “from $18 a month” with no health inspection necessary. The ad was accompanied by a picture of an old woman so it was obvious it was legitimate and targeted to seniors.

I’ve been looking at the ad for months and finally decided to check it out.

I filled out a simple form, included my phone number, stated my age and, because I am not a greedy man, put down that I would like a policy which would pay only $200,000 after the Grim Reaper pays me a visit. I thought it would help my family pay off all the debt I racked up on the seemingly endless jars of peanut butter I have torn into over the years.

I can afford $18 a month, I thought. Maybe even a little more.

Ten seconds after I pressed send, my phone rang. A very nice young man interviewed me. He asked me more questions than I was expecting about my lifestyle and my health and then told me to stay on the line while he came up with my free quote.

Finally, he came back to tell me what I could probably expect to pay.

“It’s expensive,” he said, “because of your age and a few other things. You’re looking at spending at least $1,356.”

I quickly calculated and thought that figure, though high, still amounted to just over $100 a month, which might be doable.

“That is high but I might be interested at just over $100 a month,” I told the sales rep.

“No, you misunderstand,” he replied. “That’s $1,356 a month.”

Well, that call ended quicker than many of the ones I made as a teenager looking for a date.

“You could get $100,000 for under $700 a month,” said the salesman, but it was too late. My dream was shattered. My peanut butter debt would have to live on for decades for my poor family.

So, for a mere $16,272 a year, I could have a $200,000 payout upon my death from extreme handsomeness. After 10 years, I would have spent $162,720 for my policy, leaving $37,280 for my heirs. That probably wouldn’t buy each of them a decent hockey stick by that time. After 12 years, they’d have only $4,736 to spend on my going-away party.

But I can now see where I made my critical errors. I shouldn’t have told the interviewer about my frequent skydiving, my penchant for hangliding, my deep-sea diving to explore sunken ships and my sideline as a homemade dynamite maker.

But I think what really did me in was the coughing fit I had during the phone call which seemed to make the sales rep very nervous. He kept asking me if I was okay.

Once again, my quest for riches has fallen through. So, it’s back to making 20 cents an hour doing surveys.

On the Internet.

©2022 Jim Hagarty

I played guitar and sang with a friend and fellow musician last night at an impromptu jam session and as always, really enjoyed the experience. When we met a couple of years ago, we soon discovered that we like the same kinds of songs and also that we seem to have a natural ability to harmonize. I don’t know how we sound as we’ve never really recorded ourselves singing together, but I think we’re OK and many of those who have heard us think the same.

I have always loved all kinds of music but I have to say I am drawn to singers who harmonize. A couple of guys who sort of set the standard are the Everley Brothers (now also known as the Elderley Brothers). They are amazing. The bit of reading I’ve done about them reveals that their method of harmonizing was unique to a small area of the southern United States from where they originated. I think it was in Kentucky but all this info is available on the net. One article I read explained in technical terms what Phil and Don do to create this sound but I couldn’t understand it. One of the reasons they are so good is they have been singing together since they were very young. And their parents were entertainers too.

But what is fascinating to me is that no one else in the world of popular music has been able to replicate the Everley style though many have tried. The Beatles idolized them and tried to mimic their sound and while they came up with something very appealing, it was not the Everley sound. Other great harmonizers in the pop world have been Peter and Gordon, Peter, Paul and Mary, Simon and Garfunkel and others.

But I saw two fabulous singers – James Taylor and Art Garfunkel – singing the Everleys’ Crying in the Rain and while they did a good job, they are no Phil and Don on that song.

When you are singing harmony and you click with the other person, it is an amazing feeling. In my life, this has not happened often to me. When one of my sisters and I were young we could sing harmony pretty well but I haven’t really felt so connected like that until these past couple of years.

If I was a professional hockey player, a star right winger, I think this would be equivalent to finding the ideal left winger to play with, like Gordie Howe being teamed up with Alex Delvecchio. That wordless communication, knowing instinctively where the other person is going and where you should go too, is a joy. It is, for me, the real fun of playing and singing.

©2012 Jim Hagarty