Author Archives: Garry Rodgers

About Garry Rodgers

After three decades as a Royal Canadian Mounted Police homicide detective and British Columbia coroner, International Best Selling author and blogger Garry Rodgers has an expertise in death and the craft of writing on it. Now retired, he wants to provoke your thoughts about death and help authors give life to their words.

SIXTEEN NEW YEARS THOUGHTS FROM GETTING OLD

A4It’s 2016 and I’m starting a new year, just like you. I’m turning sixty this year and finally resolved to do something I’ve meant to do for a long, long time—before I’m too old to carry it out—I cleaned up my hard drive, storing a half zillion documents neatly in folders… and I found this piece stuffed away. I have no idea who wrote it, or where I got it, but it made me chuckle reading these sixteen thoughts from getting old. 

A516. Where there’s a will, I want to be in it.

15. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it’s still on my list.

14. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

13. If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.

12. We never really grow up. We only learn how to act in public.

A711. War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

10. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

9. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.

8. I didn’t say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.

7. In filling out an application, where it says, ‘In case of emergency, Notify:’ I put ‘DOCTOR’.

A86. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.

5. I used to be indecisive. Now I’m not so sure.

4. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.

3. Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.

2. You’re never too old to learn something stupid.

1. I’m supposed to respect my elders, but it’s getting harder and harder for me to find one now.

Here’s a bonus thought:

Youth and exuberance are no match for old age and treachery 🙂

A6

Happy New Year and I hope 2016 brings you health and happiness—life’s most precious gifts.

ZAP YOUR APP

A1On Christmas eve, marketing guru Seth Godin sent an email link to Zapier’s website. “Zap who?” you ask. So did I, until I opened it and got blown away by what this amazing technology does for writers and online marketers. Zapier is a software integration application that allows over five hundred other apps to mingle efficiently. It “easily connects web apps you already use, making it easy to automate tedious tasks”.

Here’s Seth’s link to Zapier:

Powering A Digital Future With Zapier

A3Now anyone who knows me, knows I’m far from a techie. In fact, I’m a Luddite with a Capital LUD. Just ask my buddy, Jake, who I recently “helped” set up a technological monster called the Security Management System for a commercial marihuana producer.

I grew up in a computerless age and watched the moon landing on a black and white TV that got airwave reception. We changed the channel by going outside and turning the aerial pole while the guy inside yelled out the window when the picture got clear.

I took typing classes in the police academy when we were still pounding on mechanical typewriters filled with carbon paper. Whiteout was a huge technological breakthrough.

A4I remember the first “word processor” showing up. I was doing a wiretap application and this new-fangled gizmo saved me an incredible amount of time. When I left the police force, all the detectives were sitting at their desks pecking-out reports on laptops while the steno supervised them, troubleshooting IT stuff.

As a coroner, I saw the first voice-to-text app come in as the pathologists began dictating autopsy reports right while they were cutting. Now, as a blogger, I rely on a number of different software applications to produce content.

Which got me thinking…

I opened Zapier’s list of over five hundred compatible apps and went through it to see how many I either use or have used.

Twenty-seven.

Me, the iceman of the internet, is familiar with twenty-seven of these apps. Here’s the list:

A5Evernote, MailChimp, Twitter, Dropbox, Facebook, RSS, WordPress, Linkedin, OneDrive, MS Office, GoToWebinar, PayPal, AWeber, OneNote, YouTube, Amazon, Pinterest, Reddit, SumoMe, EBay, Excel, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Google +, LeadPages, Outlook, and Sharepoint.

I also just got a free download of the Scrivener writing software. I’ve heard so many good things about Scrivener from other writers and I’m looking forward to learning this app as well—particularly its ability to convert Word.docs into Mobi and ePub formats—as I have a pile of these eBook conversions coming up. I’m betting once the learning curve is done, Scrivener is going to really pay back in time… and time is money.

Makes me wonder how the over four hundred and seventy-three other apps that Zapier interfaces with might make the writing life easier and more productive.

I guess I’ll just have to thaw.

WHAT DID JESUS ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?

A9There’s plenty of evidence that Jesus of Nazareth—the Son of God—existed. Few sensible people doubt that. But there’s no biblical record or known drawings of what Jesus actually looked like. Most depictions have Christ as a tall, fine-featured, white man with blue eyes, a beard, and light colored, long flowing hair.

But is this accurate?

This week the internet was abuzz with a republished Popular Mechanics article, The Real Face of Jesus, reporting on a team of Forensic Anthropologists who did a serious study of what Jesus probably looked like. Their conclusion is a far cry from the picture Christian churches painted for two thousand years.

A12Richard Neave is a now-retired medical artist and forensic facial reconstruction expert from the University of Manchester who has a history of remarkably accurate work in recreating historical faces. He worked with Israeli archaeologists in a study of what a typical thirty-year-old Semite male from the Galilee region circa 30 A.D. would have looked like.

Realizing there’s no New Testament description of how Jesus physically appeared—and certainly no known remains to extract DNA from—Neave reached to the Bible for generalities of people’s looks from that time.

He considered the Gospel of Matthew which reported Jesus and the disciples were so similar in appearance that when the soldiers came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas Iscariot had to point out which one was Jesus—hence the “Judas Kiss”.

A6The Israelis loaned Neave three typical male skulls known to be from the Jerusalem region and the Roman era. Neave applied a computerized tomography process and created 3-D images or “cross-sectioned slices” of them. He then built a cast model of an averaged skull based on the images and applied the well-accepted method of clay modeling, using software developed measurements of what facial muscle tissue and skin would most likely be.

Two missing key pieces were the hair type and skin color Jesus had. The researchers relied on biblical scriptures and archaeological drawings found in Israel to determine that probability. They also concluded that Jesus had dark eyes and was bearded, following Jewish traditions.

A13The image that emerged was a dark-skinned, brown-eyed man with a wide nose, thick lips, and short, curly dark hair. From archaeological studies of average male skeletons of the time, they also concluded that Jesus was probably about 5’ 1” and weighed about 110 pounds. Given that Jesus was a carpenter and worked outdoors, they considered that his face would be weathered and appear slightly older than his reported thirty years.

Richard Neave cautions that his recreation is simply that of an adult man who lived in the same place and time as Jesus.

Alison Galloway, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a critic. She points out that artistic license was taken in the model, particularly around the mouth, nose, and eyelids.

A10“In some cases the resemblance of the actual individual may be uncanny,” Galloway says. “But in others, there may be more resemblance with other work by the artist.”

Despite this reservation, Galloway reached one conclusion that’s inescapable to most everyone who’s seen Neave’s Jesus. “This is probably a lot closer to the truth than the work of many of the great masters like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper and Diego Velazquez’s Cristo Crucificado.”

So it seems the real Jesus was a little brown guy from the Middle East, single and around thirty years old, with a rebellious religious fanaticism—exactly the profile Donald Trump would ban from entering the United States.