Interview with a Snowbird and Recipes from Gloria Hart by J.Q. Rose #BWLpublishing #mystery #recipes

 

Terror on Sunshine Boulevard by J.Q.Rose
Mystery, Suspense, Thriller
Click here to find more books by J. Q. Rose from BWL Publishing

Hello and welcome to the BWL Authors Insider Blog!

Gloria Hart, the main character in my mystery novel, Terror on Sunshine Boulevard, is my guest today.

INTERVIEW WITH SNOWBIRD, GLORIA HART

I caught Gloria just before she was leaving for exercise class at the community center in Citrus Ridge 55+ Resort and Golf Club located near Florida's Gulf of Mexico. We sat in her golf cart to chat a bit.

JQ--Thank you for visiting today with our readers, Gloria. You refer to yourself as a snowbird. What exactly is a snowbird?

Gloria--Oh, yes, my husband and I are snowbirds, running away from the snow up north during the cold winter season. However, I prefer to be called a sunbird because we really leave to chase the sun. 

I am so happy to be here with your readers on this beautiful sunny day in Florida. 

JQ--You went through a pretty rough winter here in Citrus Ridge several years ago. Tell us about that winter that wasn't so much fun for you.

Gloria--You can say that again. We had a horrible, frightening winter, and it wasn't because of the weather or sickness invading our community. No golf, no games, no beach time, and no early-bird dinners at the Golden Corral. Instead, the residents in our retirement community lived in terror. We had no idea who or what was killing the folks on Sunshine Boulevard, one of the streets in our community.

JQ--I understand your husband Jim was quite involved in solving the mystery.

Gloria--Because Jim is the Captain of the First Responder Team, he was pulled into the investigations and saw first hand the emergency calls. He still has nightmares when he remembers those death scenes.

JQ--I'm sorry to hear that. What about your friends? Were any of them murdered? 

Gloria--Sadly, we lost neighbors. We did lose some friends, but not because they died. Our friends betrayed us by keeping secrets from us. One of them even ended up falling naked into a geranium bed!

JQ--Oh my! I bet there's a story there! Didn't people go back north to get away from this terror?

Gloria--Some snowbirds left, but many of the people in Citrus Ridge live full-time in Florida. They couldn't leave their homes. 

JQ--Why did you stay?

Gloria--We discussed leaving, but we couldn’t leave our friends and neighbors during this catastrophe. Jim wanted to stay to help with the First Responders Team. Many of the old folks were experiencing heart attacks, panic attacks and health issues brought on by the frightening events in the neighborhood. We couldn’t return to Michigan because our hearts would remain in Florida. So we stayed and managed to survive that winter of deadly events and do what we could to help out in the situation.

Beach scene

JQ--So do you return to Citrus Ridge every winter?

Gloria--Yes, we do. I doubt any winter could be as bad as that one. Although the Covid pandemic has been pretty bad. We are following the precautions and returning to normal as quickly as possible.

JQ--I saw your lovely garden behind your place. 

Gloria--This year, the garden is doing great. Jim is happy with the harvest. He loves growing vegetables and sharing them with friends and neighbors. Needless to say, I have had to come up with some creative recipes to use up all the wonderful, fresh produce from his garden. 

JQ--Oh, fresh veggies from the garden in the backyard during the winter months sounds like a dream. Can you give us some recipes on how you prepare the vegetables for your dinner table?

Gloria--I'd love to share some recipes with you and your readers. I'm sure some of them have made New Year’s resolutions to eat healthier this year, so maybe these recipes will inspire and keep readers on track to a healthier year.

JQ--Thank you, Gloria!

Garden vegetables
Image courtesy of Sereneste at Pixabay

RECIPES FROM GLORIA HART

Stuffed Green Peppers

We like the peppers stuffed with or without the meat using corn or peas or more veggies from the garden.

Place 6 peppers (either a full-sized pepper with the tops off and seeds cleaned out or a cleaned pepper cut in half) in a micro-waveable 8" x 8 " dish. (Yes,this is so much easier than boiling them for 5 minutes in boiling water, I think.) Salt the inside of the peppers. Cook the peppers in the microwave for 3-4 minutes depending on how thick the wall is. They need to be hot.

Prepare a cup of rice--instant, brown, whatever your family prefers.

Brown one pound of ground beef with onions in a large skillet. Drain. Return to the skillet.

Add rice and 3/4 can of diced tomatoes to the meat and onions including juice. You may add salt and garlic to taste. Heat through.

Stuff peppers with meat mixture. Top with remaining tomatoes and juice. Return to microwave and cook covered 10-12 minutes or bake in 350 degree oven, covered, for 45 minutes. Remove foil from oven baked peppers, and cook 10-15 minutes longer.

Remove from heat and sprinkle tops with cheese. No need to return the peppers to the heat as the cheese will melt.

I let the dish of peppers set for five minutes before serving. Enjoy!

Seven Layer Salad, one of our family favorites. You may want to add or delete any of the layers. I like to add boiled eggs and radishes, so that may make it a nine layer salad. Use what you have from your garden to make this a tasty addition to your turkey or ham dinner or to your cookout with burgers and dogs.

Seven Layer Salad

Shred lettuce to fill a 9 x 13 pan.

1/2 c. chopped green pepper

1/2 c. celery

1 sweet onion, sliced thin or green onions from your garden

1 package frozen peas, not thawed or fresh from the garden

1 c. mayonnaise mixed with 2 T. sugar(I use the light mayo)

Place veggies in pan in order listed above.

Sprinkle 4 ounces cheddar cheese on top of dressing. (Sub fat-free cheese)

Cook 6 strips of bacon. (optional) 
Break them up when cool and place on top of cheese.

Cover. Place in refrigerator for 24 hours.

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It's Not Spring by Helen Henderson

 

Windmaster Golem
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In my family, spring cleaning traditionally began when the weather warmed enough to open the windows. The heavy drapes were taken down and hung out to air. Carpets adorned porch rails for beating out the winter's accumulation of tracked-in dirt. Trunks came down from the attic full of summer clothes and went back up full of heavy, woolen sweaters. And in the coal country of my ancestors, wiping down windows, walls, and glass lampshades removed the omnipresent coal dust and gray film.

Holiday decorations are back in the attic and the house is again neat and tidy. Outside it is 20 odd degrees, chill factor in single digits, and snow covers the ground. It is not spring, so why am I cleaning?  

 

The beginning of a new year offers the opportunity to discard, shred, or otherwise dispose of outdated paperwork. Files more than ten years old come out of the file cabinet or storage boxes and piles of papers litter the floor. Each stack contains receipts, drafts of published articles, cards, utility bills, or no-longer needed documents. 

Image Courtesy of Pixabay

Some piles are recycled. Others are more fun to dispose of. There is a cathartic sound to a shredder chomping sheets of paper into little bits. The small fire pit in the backyard will gobble up sensitive sheets while providing a comforting warmth.

Don't forget to include reviewing and purging your electronic files in your cleanout. They may not take up physical space, but can slow your computer or tablet. Even more serious can be the delays the clutter causes in your research. 

While not as satisfying as a fire, deleting digital files or organizing digital photos for quicker access is a useful activity. The new year can also be a good time to delete (or toss for prints) photographs that are blurry or upon reflection you decide you don't want in the public domain.

Although it it not spring, it is time to start cleaning, sorting, and organizing. You might even have a surprise benefit at the end. You're ready to file the paperwork needed for the taxman.

~Until next month, stay safe and read. Helen

To purchase the Windmaster Novels: BWL

Find out more about me and my novels at Journey to Worlds of Imagination. Follow me online at Facebook, Goodreads or Twitter .

Helen Henderson lives in western Tennessee with her husband. While she doesn’t have any pets in residence at the moment, she often visits a husky who have adopted her as one the pack. 

To Write or Not to Write by Nancy M Bell

 

To explore more of Nancy's books click on the cover above. 

I'm working on another installment of the A Longview Romance series. Storm's Refuge was the first book, which was followed by Come Hell or High Water and A Longview Wedding. Michelle is the heroine in the first three books and her life is turned upside down when her supposed fiance comes home from the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas married to someone else. 

Rob Chetwynd, the fiance in question, has played a role in the first three books, but this time I'm sharing how the impromptu Vegas wedding comes about. Kayla's Cowboy is the title and is told from Kayla's POV. How she meets Rob and how their relationship progresses is certainly a work in progress.  

I'm struggling with how to bring these two disparate characters together. Kayla is an accomplished dressage rider who is at the NFR to give a demonstration of her sport. Her sponsors have arranged the whole thing and have sent another horse and rider pair along as well. Kayla and Anna split the duties with one of them doing the riding and the other providing the commentary on a rotating basis. This is all okay until Anna's horse, Arizona, gets cast in the stall and unable to perform, which puts added  pressure on Kayla and Wellington. 

Anna's a bit of a party animal and she brings Rob and his pal into Kayla's orbit. She thinks the cocky, but admittedly sexy, cowboy is an adrenaline junkie for getting on rough stock not to mention enraged bulls.  But, things take some twists and turns and she is thrown into his company more and more. Somehow, the cockiness wears off and a more vulnerable side of Rob comes to the forefront.

He confesses that, while he and Michelle have been friends forever, and everyone in Longview expects them to get married, Rob isn't in love with Michelle that way. His mother is pushing him to get on with it, and Michelle is certainly unaware of his reservations, added to the pressure is the fact his late father's dying wish was that Rob and Michelle get married and combine the Wilson and Chetwynd  ranches. Rob isn't ready to settle down with Michelle and he sure as hell isn't ready to quit the rodeo road.

That's it so far, now I've just got to figure out how Kayla agrees to marry him. She noticing the chinks in his armour and as a woman who was raised by her aunt after her parents died, she realizes how Rob's cocky facade is just a front to hide the face he's fighting his own demons. 

So, to write or not to write, the dreaded writers block. I keep turning my characters this way and that and trying to figure out how they fit together. <sigh> 

I know this dilemma should help me deal with the Covid isolation blues, but somehow it just doesn't seem to be working. I'm into Covid Winter x 2 and not liking it at all. Hopefully, either Kayla or Rob will cosy up with my muse and help me out here.

Until next month, happy writing. Stay warm, stay safe and stave off the dreaded writer's block.

Nancy 

Being a Blog Host or Guest by Janet Lane Walters #BWLAuthor #BlogHost #BlogGuest

 

I have an active blog eclecticwriter and often have guests. I’ve been guesting on other people’s blogs. Since the first of the year, I’ve been noticing some things about the blogs I’ve visited. They all did something I often do not do. So I’m making a note to let the person pposting to know when their material will go live. Hopefully I’ll remember. Now for some questions from people who have blogs and those who visit other people’s blogs.

 

How do you promote your own blog when you have guests? Do you let them know? Do you post the appearance on Facebook, Twitter or other places that allow promotion? I try to do them all.

Do you go to your won blog when there’s a visitor and read the comments and make your own if needed? This is something I hope to do better with.

 

Now for those who are guesting, a few questions. Do you visit the blog and let the author know you’re glad to be there? Do you promote your appearance on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other places that allow this type of promotion? Do you check periodically for those who have visited and made comments? Do you dialogue with those who have commented?

 

When I visit, I do promote the blog I’m visiting on the day I appear. I also chack for about a week to see if there are any comments and also to comment if needed.

 

Other people’s blogs can give you venues and find readers and writers you may not know.

 

 

My Places

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 http://wwweclecticwriter.blogspot.com

https://www.pinterest.com/shadyl717/

 

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Crazy Canucks, by J.C. Kavanagh

 

The Twisted Climb

Book 1 of the award-winning Twisted Climb series

Winter time in central Ontario, Canada, brings about snow, ice, freezing rain, blizzards and white-outs. If you like extreme weather, you'll fit right in. If you don't like the cold or any of the above weather conditions, well, you won't like Canadian winters. Me, I love it. Having the crisp, icy-cold wind ripple against your cheeks and feeling the delicate frostiness of snowflakes descending on your face... ah, that is a rejuvenating winter experience.

Me and my awesome and often crazy partner love to cavort in the elements. Summer is for sailing. Spring and Autumn are for taking care of the woods on our rural property. But winter - oh winter - it's for:

• Chopping and stacking bush cords of hardwood
• Shovelling snow (and driving snowblower)
• Hiking the property (with glass of wine in mittened-hand)
• Snowshoeing the property
• Bonfires 
• Enjoying home-cut fries/poutine around the bonfire
• More snow shovelling (and driving snowblower)
• Star gazing at back of property (with glass of wine in mittened-hand)

Ian and J (carved by Ian with chainsaw)

Firepit area

One section of trails

Clearing driveway in 'Canadian' disguise

Woodstove ready

After the hike... photobomb

And our newest outdoor entertainment: Axe/Knife throwing

My partner has this thing about knives (is it a guy thing?) and ever since axe-throwing became popular, he's wanted to build a target and set it up beside our shop. So, during the Christmas break, he decided it was time to design and build the target. Once that was accomplished, then of course we had to buy a set of throwing axes/knives. No sense building a target without deadly instruments.

Have you ever thrown an axe? Or a specially-designed throwing knife? Not for the faint-hearted. But definitely a challenge. Also a hilarious challenge. Most throws will have the axe/knife 'clunk' against the target and fall straight down. Or, it will completely miss the target (it's 40" x 50"). Great fun!  

J-I Axes homemade target. Yup, it says 'EyesBull'

Canadian chill at -25 Celsius (-13 F)

While some people might think outdoor winter activities are for crazy Canucks, I like to think they're for anyone crazy enough to enjoy the elements. That's me.

However, if you're the kind of person who prefers to curl up inside your home with a hot cup of cocoa, then I have two perfectly good, non-deadly instruments for you to hold on to. The first is: The Twisted Climb, voted Best Young Adult book, and the second is The Twisted Climb-Darkness Descends, voted Best Young Adult book in 2018. Book 3 in this exciting series is on the way!

Until next time, stay safe everyone.

J.C. Kavanagh, author of
The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends (Book 2)
voted BEST Young Adult Book 2018, Critters Readers Poll and Best YA Book FINALIST at The Word Guild, Canada
AND
The Twisted Climb,
voted BEST Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers Poll
Novels for teens, young adults and adults young at heart
Email: author.j.c.kavanagh@gmail.com
www.facebook.com/J.C.Kavanagh
www.amazon.com/author/jckavanagh
Twitter @JCKavanagh1 (Author J.C. Kavanagh)
Instagram @authorjckavanagh

What is Special About the First of January?

 

            The first of January, also known as the New Year, is the largest celebrated holiday in the world. In almost every country, whether Japan, Australia or Brazil, the day is marked with festivities, firecrackers and feasts.

            Astronomically speaking, January 1^st is an odd time for the New Year. It signifies neither the spring nor the fall equinox, nor does it coincide with either of the two solstices. It lies in the middle of the earth’s journey between the Zodiac constellations of Capricorn and Aquarius and doesn’t match with the end or beginning of any of the seasons.

            In original cultures, spring marked the beginning of a New Year, logically enough, since the season marked rebirth—of plants and crops, after the barrenness of winter. It’s the season when, according to natural cycles, animals and birds mate. In China, the Spring Festival coincides with the New Year. According to the ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Indian, Iranian and Mayan calendars, the year commences with the spring Vernal Equinox, usually in March or April, when the sun starts its northern journey.

            So how did January 1 become the beginning of the New Year? The first instance occurred in Rome, in 153 BC, under the rule of Julius Caesar. It marked the Roman civil year, when Roman consuls, the highest officials of the Roman republic, started their one-year tenures. After the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval Europe banned January 1^st as the New Year, considering it a pagan holiday, and replaced it with the 25^th of March, which roughly corresponds to the date of Jesus’s death and resurrection.

            The use of January 1 as the New Year can be traced to the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XII in 1582 as a way to correct the Julian calendar. The imprecision in the Julian calendar, which added a full day every hundred-and-twenty-eight years, created difficulties for the Church in calculating Easter, celebrated on the Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon on or after the twenty-first of March. European scholars had been well aware of the calendar drift since the early medieval period. After much debate, in 1622, the Catholic Church adopted January 1 as the beginning of the New Year.

Many people in the world follow two and, sometimes, more calendars, pertaining to their cultures and their religious holidays. Best wishes for the New Year, whenever you celebrate it!

Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanauthor.com) is the author of  "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

The Past is a Different Place...by Sheila Claydon

 Find my books here

Readers are taken back to the 1800s in Remembering Rose, the first book in my Mapleby Memories trilogy. In the third book, due out in May and still untitled, readers are taken to the 13th century. Until today I didn't expect to travel further back but now I have learned a whole lot about life 50,000 years ago.

Why? Well because my 20 year old granddaughter, who is studying Biology at university, asked me to check a paper, shortly due to be submitted, for flow, and also to advise on losing approximately 400 words without significantly altering the research. 

As it is a scientific paper I had to read it through several times to fully understand it, especially the scientific terms, but once I done that I became really interested. I learned, for example, that animals and humans have domesticated each other. Initially wolves and humans lived in the same area but without interacting, but by the time humans began to develop into agricultural societies, about 10,000 years ago, they were working together. It is thought that a human preference for smaller, more docile and therefore easier to manage dogs, are what led to the breeds we see today.

One of the interesting changes is that wolves could solve tasks by observing the behaviour of others and they could also follow the human gaze to 'see' a problem, whereas domesticated (wolves) dogs cannot differentiate between the intentional and accidental actions of their handlers. Domestication has taught them to ignore cues not specifically addressed to them. Instead, living in close contact with humans has taught them to rely on help rather than trying to solve problems independently.

Cats, of course, are very different and it is thought that initially they probably took advantage of the the mice and food scraps they found around the first settlements. Later they learned to live with humans, becoming more docile and developing behaviour and reward conditioning, but even today, thousands of years later, they are still largely independent, and able to find their own food and breeding partners.

Domestication of horses occurred much later, around 6,000 years ago and, surprisingly, given how important horses have been for transport, farming etc. over many centuries, their behaviour has changed far less than that of dogs and cats. While they benefit from the food, shelter, physical care and protection humans provide, left to their own devices they would still very quickly reassume a feral lifestyle.

There was much, much more. All of it interesting. However I found the animal/human relationship the most intriguing. Probably because I have been around dogs, cats and horses all my life but never, until now, considered how they have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. And how we have helped them do just that. And how they, in turn, have helped us domesticate ourselves. 

A Cup of Kindness

 

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Happy New Year, dear readers. 

Auld Lang Syne means “in old times,” to the Scots people. Robert Burns was trying to keep his beloved Celtic language alive when he popularized it. He described Auld Lang Syne as ‘an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man’s singing.’  

The town of Bedford Falls sang it at the end of It's a Wonderful Life, when a happy George Bailey finally realizes that his life has been a worthwhile struggle. We sing it at the dawn of a new year, to mark the passage of time. To grieve a little while we promise to do a little better, love a little stronger, be a little kinder. What words could be more poignant as we enter the third year of a global pandemic?

The words say, “We’ll take a cup o’ Kindness yet." That refers to the old tradition of toasting: raising a glass, a “cup o’ kindness,” but I am always moved by the notion of kindness in a cup overflowing, bestowed on each other at the start of each year. 

Kindness. A whole cup of it, I wish to you this new year of 2022, my friends, and beyond.

Canadian Mystery Novels, eh?

 

                   Please click this link for author, book and purchase information

At last year's Ontario Library Association's online conference, I sat on a panel about novels set in Canada. The moderator divided the topic into three parts--Canadian characters, settings, and stories--and asked each panelist to discuss one of the sub-topics in relation to one of our novels. To my relief, I was assigned setting, which I considered the easiest of the three. The other two stumped me. When I create characters, I think of them as people, not Canadians, and my stories lean toward the psychological, rather than events particular to Canada.   

I chose Ten Days in Summer, the most Calgarian of my novels, to illustrate how I include specific setting details and how they shaped the story. The novel takes place over the ten days of Calgary's annual Stampede Festival, when the whole city goes wild-west. People wear cowboy hats and boots to go shopping. Beer tents and free pancake breakfasts pop up everywhere. I explained how I looked for opportunities to set scenes at Stampede happenings. Paula, my sleuth, first encounters two of the suspects while she's watching the parade that launches the festival. She later meets one of them in a sports pub featuring an inflatable football player wearing a bandana. Paula's Stampede clothing style is to wear a different coloured bandana each of the ten days. Does that make her uniquely Canadian?

No, but it does make her Calgarian. I realized the characters in my mystery series naturally reflect the people who live in Calgary. In Ten Days, there's a wannabe cowboy. I have several Calgary friends who own horses they board on acreages outside the city and ride on weekends. When I lived in Montreal, I didn't know anyone who did this. Many characters in the series, including Paula, have moved to Calgary from elsewhere. Through its history, Calgary has attracted newcomers during its periodic boom times. In contrast, other locales might be characterized by the absence of family and friends, who have left for greater opportunities. The type of people in any story tells us as much about the place as its landscape. 

I still don't see Paula and friends as particularly Canadian, although readers outside of Canada might notice behaviours I simply see as 'normal'. Maybe Canadian novel characters tend to be remarkably polite. 

Reflections on Canadian characters got me wondering about the third aspect discussed on the panel, uniquely Canadian stories. I find these most noticeable in historical mystery novels, especially ones that fictionalize a real murder from our country's past. In Ten Days in Summer, I had fun making up a crime related to a lessor known fact of Canadian history. King Edward VIII, who famously gave up the British throne to marry Wallis Simpson, was a wannabe cowboy. When he was Prince of Wales, he bought a ranch in southern Alberta, which he visited with his wife after his abdication. My research suggested the Duchess of Windsor was less than enthralled with life on the range. I wove that into an imagined crime that played a small, but pivotal, role in the Ten Days in Summer murder.  

  The Duchess and Duke of Windsor at the E.P. (Edward Prince) Ranch in 1941.  

 The Duke as urban cowboy. 

I have read Canadian mystery novels that deal with contemporary events and issues that are uniquely Canadian. Since the time of U.S. Prohibition in the 1920s, our long and friendly border with the United States has prompted cross-border crime that continues today. Disputes over pipelines and clean drinking water on indigenous reserves have resulted in fictional murders. 

People generally read mystery and thriller novels for entertainment, and in the process learn much about a country's people, place, and stories. When I travel, I like to read novels set in the location I'm visiting. But I also read to learn about myself and my own country.       

I became so intrigued with the subject of uniquely Canadian characters, places and stories that I pitched the idea for a Calgary Public Library program. They've now scheduled the topic for Wednesday, January 26, 7-8 pm, as part of the CPL's Books and Ideas series. I'll be interviewed by Margaret Hadley, a former instructor of Detective Fiction at the University of Calgary. I expect we'll have a lively conversation. You can register for the program here with a CPL card. Non-members are welcome and can email or call the library at 403-260-2600. 

Hope to see you there, eh? 

  

       

                   

Fun With Fleas? by Karla Stover

 

for more information and to purchase click link below

https://bookswelove.net/stover-karla/

I admit it, I'm a fan of weird stuff---one reason I love YouTube videos. You can find anything  there. And since I've long been curious about flea circuses, and since we used to go to Seattle's Ye Olde curiosity shop where fleas wearing clothes are on display, I checked YouTube to see if anything was posted. Sure enough, there I saw one harnessed to and struggling to pull a little cart. Probably, only grooming monkeys are fond of fleas but PETA should have stepped in and rescued that flea; it was really straining.

One historical record says in 1742 a watchmaker named Boverick may have used gold to make a small coach and harnessed some fleas to pull it. Another says in 1578 a watchmaker named Mark Scaliot made a lock and chain and attached it to a flea to demonstrate his metalworking skills. There are other claims but it wasn't until the 1820s when the first flea circus showed up courtesy of an Italian named Louis Bertolotto. Using 435 fleas all wearing battle dress, carrying teeny little swords and seated on "golden saddles Bertolotto created a mock-battle, ( he liked to recreate political events of the time )depicting Napoleon's Waterloo defeat. Supposedly, though, in 1764,  a man named John Henry Mauclerc saw a four-wheeled "ivory chaise" with a figure of a man sitting in the chaise which was being drawn by a flea. Possibly more creditable was Charles Manbey Smith who, in 1857, said he saw a "small brass cannon on wheels being drawn by a flea." It cost him a penny to witness this miraculous event. By this time, however, the fleas were of more interest than their accoutrements. Bertolotto soldiered on and his fleas continued performing until sometime in the 1870s. Then a man named John C. Ruhl took a flea circus from Germany to California and small flea circuses entertained people in the United States until the 1960s. However, England did America one better. There was a flea circus at “Belle Vue Zoological Gardens,” in Manchester, England, and it worked until 1970. Not to be bested, some say that every year at Munich, Germany's Oktoberfest a flea circus operates still.

         There are approximately 2,000 flea species but it is the human flea that is used in the             circuses.
         Whether they can actually be trained to do tricks is debatable. They can jump, though,          as many pet owners will testify so if they're close to a ball, jumping might push                     it. Their natural jumping behavior could then be interpreted by the audience as a                    ‘trick’. By placing objects, such as a ball near the flea, the flea could then ‘push’ or             move it. With no one to care about the welfare of the fleas, glue was also used to                 fasten them to the  an attraction. Their struggles to get "free from the glue made                 some people think they were  having fun."

        Here are a couple pictures, but for those truly interested, check out eBay. Like             me, you might be surprised.