The Brown Knowser

It's fitting, I think, that I end my Music Monday series where I began, with Matthew Good . In November, nearly two years ago, I was searching for an idea for a blog post, and not coming up with much. I had a touch of writer's block, as can happen often when I try to write almost every day. While I was wracking my brain, I was listening to Matt Good's album, Lights of Endangered Species , when his song, "Non Populus" started. I love the gentle start to the song and the gradual build. Songs such as this, and "Weapon" are why Matt is one of my favourite artists. His latest album, Chaotic Neutral , comes out on September 25, and I can't wait. I consider myself to be chaotic-neutral, always chose that alignment when I played Dungeons and Dragons , in high school. I like to stir things up and I don't tend to weigh heavily one way or another when I encounter something new. Matt has released one song on Chaotic Neutral , complete with a video. Th...

I'm sure on a hot summer day, nobody cares that it's a small strip: when the water is flowing, it's a cool welcome. As the construction of Lansdowne Park comes to an end, I see the beauty of the grounds. There are lots of open spaces, lots of places to play, and lots to do. There's the stadium, where the north side remains as it always has. Same with Aberdeen Pavilion, also affectionately known as the Cattle Castle. New buildings offer shopping, pubs (with local, craft beer), and a movie cinema. There's Whole Foods and a well-stocked LCBO. I wish I lived in this part of the Glebe. Instead, I'll visit it, day and night, and I'll bring my camera. For this week's Photo Friday , I chose the water park, at night, after the water has been shut off and the people have gone home. At this hour, it's not just the back half, with the angled column, that is the art. It's all beautiful. Happy Friday!

The other week, when South Korea made the news in a way that didn't involve hostilities with North Korea or with another K-pop band, I read the story and shrugged my shoulders, and thought, yup, that's South Korea for you. The land where copyright infringement is par for the course. The latest infraction of trademark had a Canadian connection. A Korean coffee company introduced a Tim Horton's knock off, called Tim Morton's. Not so subtle. When I lived in Korea, in the late 1990s, I saw backpacks with a label that read Jonsport, similar to the famous California backpack company, Jansport. In the Seoul district of Itaewan , encountered the following sign for a nightclub. Club Viagra was on a bit of a hill, and a long flight of concrete steps lead up to the entrance. You have to get up to get in.   In my city, Chônju, a gift shop stole its name from a popular search engine.   So, no, the Tim Morton's coffee doesn't surprise me. What ...

Colonnade Drive didn't exist, nor did the industrial park. It was all overgrown fields and forest, with a railway line that separated Viewmount Drive and Borden Side Road from the massive oil storage tanks that have now all but rusted away. There was a creek that ran from Merivale High School, east, that travelled under Prince of Wales Drive and emptied into the Rideau River. Most of it has vanished from the Borden Farm landscape. The woods are gone, filled in with a housing community. Borden Side Road, which used to be a straight, narrow cut-through, where Viewmount ended at Chesterton Drive, was a quick thoroughway to Fisher Avenue. That road is also gone, replaced by a meandering extension of Viewmount Drive. My friends and I would go into those woods, either by walking to the end of Chesterton Drive, or my cutting through the long, narrow field behind Century Public School. There were a couple of trodden paths, and then we would follow the creek to where it narrowed, to whe...

I'm on vacation. And I have to be honest: before I wrote this blog post, my folks came to my house, and my father and I drained two-thirds of a bottle of a 16-year-old Lagavulin. Thanks to Ian Rankin, who personally told me to try this stuff. So, yes, I'm writing this blog post under the influence. But that's okay: I'm on vacation. On Saturday, as I was cleaning the house, I did what I tend to do when I'm working around the house: I streamed music from Google Play: when I stream music from this fabulous music service, I chose a theme. The theme was, simply, On Vacation. The first song to play on that playlist was by Vance Joy, entitled, "Riptide." I had heard this song before, but never paid attention to it. Until then, when I started my chores and started moving to the music. Further disclosure: I've been making a lot of typos, and have had to back up and start typing again. But I'm on vacation, and I'm taking it easy. And I'...

I never knew my grandfather, my dad's dad. He died when my dad, the thirteenth of fourteen children from Montreal, was only two. I think that because his dad left him at such an early age, my dad had built a lot of resentment towards him. My dad rarely spoke of him, and when he did, he was full of vitriol, brimming with anger. "He was a chirper," my dad would say, referring to our British ancestry. "The best thing he did was drop dead." Those were my dad's actual words. My dad and I had a bit of a falling out, during the last years of his life, but even in my lowest feelings for him, I never hated him, never wished him dead. It would crush me if I ever drove my own kids to feeling that way towards me. I didn't even know my grandfather's name until I was in my mid-30s, when my wife was carrying our first child. We were at my Uncle Don and Aunt Flora's house, at a gathering to remember the passing of yet another relative. It was the first...

My cycling has sucked this summer. Since the Rideau Lakes Cycle Tour , I have been on my road bike a grand total of... ZERO TIMES. On that beautiful Sunday afternoon, when my exhausted body returned home, I removed my bicycle from the back of my van and, with tired arms, I hung the bike, upside-down, by its well-travelled wheels, from the hooks in the ceiling of my garage, where it has remained ever since. Because I had fractured my wrist a few days before the 200-kilometre, two-day ride from Perth to Kingston, and back, and the ride was more painful than the beating my butt took, I wanted to rest it for the few weeks that the doctor had recommended. And then, I got used to not riding my bike. And even though my wrist started feeling better and I kept telling myself that I needed to get back on my bike, day after day I continued to sit on my ass. I need to ride again. And I will, and have, starting last weekend, although my first ride as slow, over a short distance, on m...

It's not just that they were found guilty of election fraud , or found in contempt of Parliament . It's not the loathing for the media , which is evident in the gagging of scientists and the fear and intimidation that is beaten into the civil servants. It's not the childish and petty attack ads that use distorted sound bites, quotes, and distorting of facts to scare the uneducated into believing every word they say. It's the overall negativity, the fear mongering, and total absence of a sense of vision, a lack of hope for a bright future. They are the Evil Galactic Empire of Canada. A climate of contempt for the average Canadian has been cultivated by the Harper Government. Please get out and vote.  I leave you with some wise words for a prime minister in the depths of a scandal:

It was one of those random acts of kindness. And we might have missed it, entirely. We weren't in our neighbourhood, weren't in our end of town. Where we were, we rarely frequented. And we had never made a purchase at this particular location. In fact, it's been ages since I purchased an actual paper book. With the exception of purchasing the last two publications from my friend, Peggy Blair , I haven't purchased a book in 2015. I know: it's sad. I used to be such a book worm, would burn through 15 to 20 novels a year, sometimes more. Reading would be the last thing I would do in the evening before turning out the light. I used to make a reading list at the end of one year, filled with books that would carry my through the following year. Not now. I may have read two or three books this year. I started one novel, months ago, The Girl on the Train , by Paula Hawkins, and enjoyed it. But I would read a chapter, or two, put it down for a few weeks, read another f...

My family and I are counting the days: only one week until vacation. We are going to be hanging around the house for the first couple of days, trying to get it in order, so that when we return from our trip, the house will be a welcoming place for us. My wife and kids will be going camping for a few days (my days of camping are over), and we will meet up at a cottage on the Bruce Peninsula. My trip will be also involving some stops along the way, both before our cottage escape and after, as I take in some Ontario craft breweries. One of them, a brand-new brew house, is in the delightful town of Elora. I wish that we were in Elora this past weekend, instead: there was a music festival that featured two of my favourite Canadian bands, Sam Roberts Band and Metric. Metric is releasing a new album, this fall, entitled Pagans in Vegas. I'll be ordering it as soon as it's released, as I've never heard a song from them that I didn't like. And, fortunately, they've ...

It would be an understatement to say that, since I've been photographing with digital cameras, I have taken thousands of photos. Tens of thousands of photos. I look around my house and I look at the number of those photos that I have actually printed, and I come up with two. Two photos: one, printed to a 4 x 6 print, of the whole family, when the girls were very young—maybe two and four. We shot it early in the morning, as the kids joined us to snuggle in bed. It was a happy morning, and the photo was shot with a point-and-shoot camera. It was a basic camera taking a basic, happy family moment. The other photo, a 5 x 7, shows the four of us, two summers ago, standing at the Rideau locks by the Chateau Laurier, our canoe held over our heads, as we finished our 200-km journey from Kingston to Ottawa . It was a triumphant moment, captured on my Nikon D80, my first and former D-SLR. My mom took the shot when she came to get us. Two photographs out of tens of thousands. When...

When the head of Canada's military said that men are "biologically wired in a certain way," as a way of explaining the reports of sexual assault and harassment within the ranks, it was a bone-headed statement. In hearing those words, I interpreted Gen. Tom Lawson's message to mean that while a soldier is trained to exercise control in a combat scenario, the soldier has no discipline when it comes to keeping his (or her) hands to himself (or herself). That's sad. But he wasn't wrong. We are, as humans, basically hard-coded for sex. As a guy, if I notice an attractive woman, my eyes will go to her, may even linger longer than a cursive glance (without leering). We are hard-coded to look. Looking without acting further is proof that we have evolved. Yet, with this wiring, we also think about sex. We might see someone and think something about sex, but again, as our society has evolved, we keep our thoughts to ourselves. The other week, I saw something, ...

Every so often, I suffer a migraine that keeps me in bed all day. Yesterday was one of those days. With yesterday's migraine, I was incapacitated. It was what I call a level-4 migraine. Because I was unable to function yesterday, the last thing I wanted to do was to write a blog post. My brain was fried, anyway, and so, today I do what I do every once and a while: publish a repeat post. If you know anything about me, I are no doubt aware that I suffer from migraines. These brain tempests first hit me when I was in my late teens. The very first time I experienced a migraine, I thought I was having the worst hangover of my life, only I hadn't touched a drop of alcohol in days. The pressure in my head was so severe that I was afraid I was having a stroke. The frequency of my migraines was so low that I often wouldn't recognize when one was starting, would assume I was experiencing just a simple headache, and so it would be too late to stop them by the time I reco...

When I was a teen, in high school, I was known for my love of wide ranges of music. I knew bands, I new their music. When I had a job, working for a paint and wallpaper store in a suburban shopping mall, I would spend most of my pay on the latest albums at Sam the Record Man. I'd make mixed tapes for myself and my friends, and there would always be music playing at my house. I was a music junkie. A friend of mine, Neil Talbot, would call me up sometimes, and when he heard my voice, he would start his own version of the game, Name That Tune. He would drop the needle onto some vinyl, a tune would play for a second or two, and he would then lift the needle and ask me what it was that he had played. I had a success record of more than ninety percent. Today, I still know my music, although I'm not as familiar with today's pop hits, even though my youngest daughter insists on playing Jump FM or Hot 89.9 . At the office, in our washrooms, CHEZ 106 is piped through speake...

It's called the Prince of Wales Bridge, but not many people know that. When one hears Prince of Wales in Ottawa, one often thinks of the road that starts at the north end of Dow's Lake, meanders between the Arboretum and the Central Experimental Farm, and runs south, along the west side of the Rideau River, towards North Gower. But no, this abandoned, 135-year-old railway bridge spans the Ottawa River and crosses Lemieux Island, where the occasional pedestrian ignores the prohibition signs to stroll to Québec, or to come in the opposite direction, into Ontario. It's rusted beams show graffiti artwork or the initials of those lovers who profess their enduring love. In the summer, weeds cling to it as they reach for light over one another, adding to the sense of abandonment. In this state of deterioration, it's a beautiful site. My thanks to friend and fellow photographer, James Peltzer , for reminding me of this picturesque spot. James was also the winner of this...

I have to admit it: I'm scared shitless. Not of the terrorists. Never have been. We haven't had a bona fide terrorist attack on Canadian soil and I'm not worried about walking down any streets. (Most streets, that is.) But there is a group of people that is threatening to destroy my country, and its leader makes the Emperor of the Evil Galactic Empire look like a pussy. On Sunday, Canadians learned that parliament has been dissolved and that the longest election campaign in modern Canadian history is underway. It must also be mentioned that it will be the most expensive campaign in our country's history, costing Canadian taxpayers tens of millions of dollars more than it would have, had the party that has boasted to be fiscally responsible called the election half as early. As we head into this election campaign, let us remember a few points about the current government. In the last budget, we were told that the books were balanced and that we would have m...

Where In Ottawa , revealled