Sunday, July 22, 2018

The Scales of Justice And Time Are So Finicky




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Some people are known by monikers that do them justice and others not so. Oddly enough, this blog is about British Columbia’s first Chief justice, Matthew Baillie Begbie who, after his death, became known as The Hanging Judge.  I was going to portray him as a bad guy in the new novel, The Joining that I’m editing, due to his little known reputation, however he was anything but that once I looked into his history and what he had done. 
He left his law practise in 1858 in Cambridge, England, and came to the fledgling territory of Vancouver Island. He formed many of the early legislations and founding acts to make BC the province in Canada it is today.
Begbie travelled up and down Vancouver Island and the mainland, before and after the two colonies joined to become British Columbia, sometimes travelling as many as 3,500 miles a year, and twice he walked over 350 miles, in order to bring law and order to all parts of the province. He would then show up for the court case, whether it was on a stump in a field or in a barn, dressed in his wig and judicial robes, instilling the awe and respect of the Justice Department to many a backwoods miner or small-town crowd.  Obviously a man of intense vigor and stamina, he would astound many with his decisions and lawful will.
He garnered more respect from the native populations than any of the few scattered white populations doing unheard of things like speaking several native languages and making fair and just decisions, which were unheard of at the time. He was also known for allowing people on the witness stand to swear on their own highly religious objects instead of the Bible. Begbie was one of the first judges to try a white man for accosting a First Nations person, and find him guilty. Many First Nations tribes called him Big Chief for the respect he garnered among them. He even brought in legislation that when a white man died without a will, his common law native wife was entitled to the estate.
He also shot down many highly biased laws, like the one proposing a heavy tax on the length of pigtailed hair among Chinese launderers or the one proposing a head tax on Orientals.
He stood for and upheld the notion of “equality of all men before the law.”
The man was a paradox, a staunch Victorian, even knighted by the Queen herself. He hated hypocrisy, was friends with many American Republicans, and, while fond of women’s company, he never married.





An accomplished artist, Begbie would draw many witnesses in the court room and what he saw on his journeys, could sing, and acted in many play productions. At the age of sixty-one he canoed up the Stikine river to northern BC for a court case.
Many of the newspapers hated the man for his stance on the minorities of the province and wrote articles blasting his views. Perhaps that is where he got the disrespectful moniker The Hanging Judge that people only remember him by, when in those days most sentences were death by hanging.
After all the years of serving this province in a fair and just manner, I’m sure he’d be turning over in his grave at the injustice of his nickname.


For a teaser of my upcomimg novel, check out the video link below.



Frank Talaber’s Writing Style? He usually responds with: Mix Dan Millman (Way of The Peaceful Warrior) with Charles De Lint (Moonheart) and throw in a mad scattering of Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues). 

PS: He’s better looking than Stephen King (Carrie, The Stand, It, The Shining) and his romantic stuff will have you gasping quicker than Robert James Waller (Bridges Of Madison County).

Or as is often said: You don’t have to be mad to be a writer, but it sure helps.


https://www.facebook.com/FrankTalaber/
https://www.facebook.com/franktalaberpublishedauthor/ (My facebook short story page)



Friday, July 20, 2018

Learning to Grow Lettuce Plants in Water by J.Q. Rose


Hello and welcome to the BWL Publishing Insiders Blog!

Terror on Sunshine Boulevard by J.Q. Rose
Mystery, paranormal
Click here to find mysteries by JQ Rose at BWL Publishing

Learning to Grow Lettuce Plants in Water by J.Q. Rose
My husband and I were in the floral and greenhouse business for nearly twenty years, so I was familiar with the term, hydroponics. According to Dictionary.com, hydroponics is "the cultivation of plants by placing the roots in liquid nutrient solutions rather than in soil." 
In the spring of 2017, hydroponics became very real to me when Gardener Ted decided to try growing lettuce and a few other plants by building a system of pipes to grow plants in water. 

He has grown lots of vegetable and annual plants as well as foliage plants, mums, glads, and Easter lilies in our commercial greenhouses, and he plants a vegetable garden which produces delicious food all summer for our family in Michigan and a small garden in winter in Florida for us. Yes, he gardens twelve months out of the year. A dream come true for him.
Lettuce and other plants growing in Gardener Ted's  hydroponic system
Photo by J.Q. Rose
He's always experimenting with new plants and new ways of raising them. But learning how to grow healthy plants in water is definitely not like raising plants in soil! Figuring out how to move the water through the pipes, adding nutrients to the water, and keeping the pH at the right level led to huge challenges for him. He soon learned the weather conditions affected the nutrients in the water. Warm, cold, wind, humidity, etc.affected the growth of the plants. Gardener Ted knew how to deal with weather conditions when plants grew in soil, but figuring out what to do to keep his plants healthy when their roots were only in water was a puzzle, at times frustrating. But he triumphed over the unknown and developed a working growing chamber which produced healthy plants.
Delicious speckled lettuce grown using the hydroponics system
Photo by J.Q. Rose
He followed through on producing lots of lettuce grown hydroponically, but the garden lettuce seemed to grow faster. I liked the hydro lettuce because it was clean when he cut it, whereas the garden lettuce had sand and soil on the leaves. 

This spring of 2018 he made improvements to his system and his plants are growing beautifully. We are enjoying a delicious, as well as, a pretty salad every day. And one other perk when gardening, he enjoys sharing his harvest with neighbors, friends and family.


Are you a gardener? Do you have experience with hydroponic growing? 

Click here to connect online with J.Q. Rose


Thursday, July 19, 2018

Adventures in the Amazon: Motokar Madness! by Stuart R. West

I flew 3, 265 miles to Iquitos, Peru, and all I have to show for it is a case of diarrhea! I kid, I kid (not really). 

Actually, I learned quite a bit from our trip to the Amazon, both about myself and the untapped, vast unexplored world around us. The adventures my wife and I shared will surely inform my future books and writing. Over the next several months, I'll be sharing some of my voyages into the jungle. So strap in, folks, it's gonna be a wild ride.
My wife and I all touristy in a motokar death-trap!
But I survived! Barely. My first time out of the United States and man, did I go big.

Day one of our journey to Peru actually took a day-and-a-half, all of it travel. Three flights, three airports, three rounds of security and customs and trauma. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a sucktacular traveler: "Are we there yet?" "I'm bored." "Can't we just be there?" "He's looking at me funny!" (My poor suffering wife.)

At 6', 2", weighing in at 225 pounds, flight engineers clearly didn't have me in mind when they created their flying crackerboxes. Our overnight flight to Lima was a contortionist's nightmare. At midnight, the flight attendants fed us dinner, then hurriedly shut out the lights, their intention to have us sleep for eight hours so they wouldn't have to deal with us. Sure, uh-huh, right. It's like trying to sleep in a bookcase.

When we finally landed at the Lima, Peru airport, I desperately found myself wishing I'd paid attention to my two years of high school and two years of college Spanish. Honestly, the local people in the airport put me to shame, most of them able to speak passable English. And here I am--ugly American--stomping around, adding "O's" onto the end of English words. ("Luggage-o?")

The Peruvian people were very helpful, even if all of them had different advice. Out of pure luck, we finally realized we had to reclaim our luggage and check it again. Total fish-out-of-water moment.

But once we hit the Iquitos airport, I was a whale-out-of-water, a (not so) Great White. The departure area was pretty much the size of a living room, hotter than asphalt on a Summer day, a crowded, sweaty hub of humanity.
Okay, about Iquitos... Hardly the touristy, exotic getaway locale I expected (man, I really should've done some research), Iquitos is over-populated, full of political corruption (citizens are forced to vote by law and bribed to swing a vote for the equivalence of twenty bucks), trash-strewn, crime-ridden, humid, terrifying, and absolutely exhilarating and thrilling in a roller-coaster, pants-wetting kinda way. Like an island, Iquitos is only reachable by boat or airplane.
History lesson! Years ago, Iquitos's citizens came out of the jungle and adapted civilization as they knew it (learned from TV) in their new city. Literally hundreds of tin shanties can be seen right next door to the few wealthy residents. Up to four families share the small, ramshackle dwellings. 
Yet even the worst tin shacks--holes and all--have direct TV dishes mounted on the roofs. Things exploded about six years ago when the former jungle dwellers discovered the internet and smart phones. Welcome to civilization.
The amazing Armando, motokar driver extraordinaire!
Unfortunately, as an adjunct to "civilization," unemployment (the rubber industry--Iquito's past major source of jobs and income--dried up, leaving people jobless) prospered.

Unless you're a motokar driver.

We've all been in white-knuckled cab rides before. Now imagine that multiplied by 200,000 unleashed motokars.

What's a motokar, I hear you asking? Why, it's a three-wheeled motorcycle of sorts. Unprotected, the driver sits in front while the terrified passengers are sardined into a tiny cabin behind him. Different designs adorn the tarp (Spiderman, Scooby-Doo, appropriate flames of Hell), the driver's number posted on back.

It's the primary vehicle of choice (cars are a rarity) and a new source of income, drivers eking out enough soleils for a day's worth of beans and rice.

And driving laws? Heh, don't be silly. Someone told us, "In Iquitos, there are no rules, no lanes, no lines, and no laws." (Check out the video below if you don't believe me.)
On our trip from the airport to the hotel, I thought we were going to die (and here I figured the jungle would get me). Two-laned streets turned into five and six, hundreds of motokars jockeying for front position like a vicious roller-derby. Near misses were common, no sweat to the crazed, undoubtedly caffeine-infused drivers. From the left, hundreds more swarmed. On the right, a small dirt road unleashed another couple hundred. They fused together like a massive swarm of bees, all of them chasing the honey at the end of their furious flight.  They swerved, cut others off, bounced back and forth like pinballs. The song, "Ride of the Valkyries" played out in my head as I held on for dear, sweet life.

Miraculously, we arrived at the hotel unscathed. There we met the gracious organizer of our trip, our "Jungle Momma" and her husband. 
Then we slept.

The next morning, cocky and sure of myself, I proclaimed, "Hey, nothing to it! I survived my first day. Got this by the cajones! What could possibly go wrong?"

As it turns out, kismet's got it out for me badly.

For a different kinda trip, come on down to Peculiar County, a lovely little day-trip away. Just make sure you're home before dark and lock those doors.
Click here for a scenic tour of beautiful Peculiar County!






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