The Brown Knowser

I did it again but there's no "oops." Ever since I signed up for my first Conqueror virtual challenge, I've been receiving promotional offers and notifications of new challenge routes. I don't mind getting these offers in my mail box because I'm genuinely interested in continuing the challenges for as long as I can. When choosing a challenge to join, I only have one criterion: the distance of the route must be at least 300 kilometres. Because I typically cycle the majority of the route (be it on a spin or road bike), I want the journey to last more than a couple of weeks. In a typical week of cycling, I tend to cover about 150 kms. Since about the middle of 2016, I vowed to never set foot in the United States again and at first I thought I wouldn't join an American virtual challenge. But I realized that this decision was silly (the virtual challenge one) because I'm not really setting foot in the U.S. and there is some beautiful countryside to see (th...

Perhaps it's the short days, the lack of daylight, that is getting to me. I find it even worse on days that are overcast. Feeling in the dark. Because I work in our basement—I used to work in the room that DW and I renovated after our elder daughter went away to university, where we set up a home office and had two desks that faced each other: I moved to the basement after our kid came home for the summer and decided to stay put—it's even darker. I have a light, above my head, that has a motion sensor. But when I'm reading from my computer screen or typing away, with very little motion other than my finger tips, the light goes out and the only illumination comes from my computer screens. I really should get outside, at lunch, but I find that I just don't have the energy. Thankfully, I find the energy at the end of my workday, when I climb the two flights of stairs to my bedroom, hop on my spin bike, and watch the sun set through the window. I read a blog post that w...

I've seen the statue several times and every time I have, I've had questions. What is that? Why is it there? What's the story? It wasn't until a couple of weeks ago, as my daughter and I were walking from her campus in search of lunch, that we passed by the tall statue and finally stopped to examine it. I searched for a sign or plaque that would tell the story of a tall donkey, with pink plaster casts wrapped around each of its forelegs, but found nothing. It took a plea on Twitter to find the answers. Sort of. Primrose is a donkey that was born prematurely in the UK without fully-formed forelegs, and veterinarians in Shropshire set the casts to help her develop properly. You can see a video here . So, I know who the donkey is and why she's got pink plaster casts. But I have one unanswered question: why is there a statue of her on Bay Street, Toronto, next to St. Basil's Catholic Parish at the University of St. Michael's College? What is the Toronto connecti...

Chicken Man and Cat Lady sitting in a tree D-R-I-N-K-I-N-G First comes pale ale; next, IPA When they're all done, they call it a day. That take on a kids nursery rhyme came into my head as soon as I made my way out of the LCBO. I hadn't set out to buy any beer that day. DW and I were in our local Loblaws, shopping for groceries to make dinner to celebrate my mother's birthday and my mother rarely has anything to drink. But when we turned down an aisle that was stocked with wine and craft beer, my eyes naturally turned toward the myriad cans. I couldn't help but stop when I saw a green can that showed a man on a bicycle, transporting a chicken on a basket. Unable to read more than the name of the beer because I was without my reading glasses (and my eyesight is getting worse and worse), I picked up a couple of cans and thought I would surprise myself when I was finally ready to sit down and try the pale ale. From Loblaws, DW said that we should stop by the neighbouring L...

Source: WallpaperAccess. I'm really late to the podcast world. My elder daughter has been listening to podcasts for many years, starting with one that discusses Dungeons & Dragons campaigns in a storytelling format. She has discussed some of the episodes with me and told me that she consumes podcasts so much that she has become used to listening to them at two-and-a-half times their normal speeds, while still understanding them, so she can listen to more of them, more quickly. I've only sped up one podcast, and listening to it at one-and-a-half times its normal speed, I had to pay attention. The first podcast that I heard, to be honest, didn't seem to count as a podcast to me because it was simply a CBC radio show that I listen to on a regular basis, but had missed the episode when it had originally aired. I wasn't listening to the show in the true sense of listening to a podcast. As a regular CBC Radio One listener, I often listen to Podcast Playlist , a show devo...

It's official. With our first snowfall, I'm officially marking the end of my outdoor cycling for the year. Though my last ride was Monday, November 8, I did hold out hope that I would be able to squeeze one more ride out of the season. This year will go down as a record for the number of rides I've done in a single season. I didn't actually count the number of rides that I've done, but I probably could if I wanted to. Thanks to my virtual journeys that I've done this year—and continue to do—every ride has been recorded through The Conqueror Virtual Challenges app. I first got on my road bike in mid to late April and rode it at least three times each week; sometimes, I rode as many as five times in a week. Even when I was riding with the Ottawa Bicycle Club, I would only ride twice a week, and not every week. It's a record year for distance travelled on my bike, too. Again, thanks to The Conqueror app, the distances have been tallied and I'm proud to...

I'm just imagining how the sky would have looked, had I stayed in Toronto, on the Lower Don Lands harbour pier, until sunset. As I said in Tuesday's post, if I didn't like the sky, I could always change it. Happy Friday!

I sort of feel like my father, in the 70s, when he came up with the name of a chocolate bar a couple of years before Cadbury released it: Wunderbar. Sure, the chocolate bar isn't my father's creation. Any time he ate something that he liked, he would exclaim "wunderbar!" as the literal German word for wonderful . At one point, he said that he thought wunderbar would be a great name for a chocolate bar. Apparently, it is. Source: Google. Fast-forward about 40 years or so: I was sitting on the patio in my back yard, sipping a porter, when I spy a plane flying overhead (my house is along the flight path of the Ottawa airport and airplanes are relatively low as they make their final approach). The plane was a turboprop and I recognized the logo on the tail as Porter Airlines (the tail literally has 'Porter' printed multiple times all over it). "Someone should make a porter that they sell exclusively to Porter Airlines," I told DW. "They should cal...

In October, when I was in Toronto with my family, I promised myself that I would visit a spot near the old port district to take a night-time photograph. I was rewarded with a great nightscape . After taking shots of Canada's supercity from this venue, I decided that I wanted to return to this location again, at different times. So when I was in Toronto on Saturday, after driving my kid and her cat back to campus, I thought that before I returned home, I would swing by this spot and capture whatever the view had to offer. It was a cold day in Toronto, colder than it had been in Ottawa when we had left, shortly after 7 that morning. A strong wind blew through the city streets, making it feel even colder, and when I stood along the pier in Lower Don Lands, the eastward-blustering wind brought waves crashing into the concrete pier walls and occasionally splashing near me. The chill kept me from standing by the water for long. When I first reached the boardwalk at Jennifer Kateryna Kov...

Ever since I started working from home on a permanent basis, since March of 2020, I seem to have lost all concept of the passage of time. It feels like we've had our kittens for years (it's only been just over a year) but seems like I last visited South Korea a couple of months ago (it's been more than two years). But there is a life-changing event that I can never forget because I've put it on my calendar as an anniversary, including the year so that the exact date is never forgotten. It was exactly three years ago, today, that I underwent reconstructive surgery to, as my surgeon put it, "remove all of the pain" from my foot. Those of you who've been following The Brown Knowser for years are familiar with my foot woes—probably more familiar than you wanted to be, I'm sure. What I didn't know at the time—or what I may not have understood when my doctor first explained the procedure—was that not only was he going to fuse a bone graft from my hip...

On Sunday, November 7, 2021, at 4:41 pm, in Ottawa, the sun set. It was the first sunset after Daylight Savings ended. And it was beautiful. I really wish that we would just move to Daylight Savings Time and leave it at that, year-round. I wish it wouldn't get dark this early and I'd rather have the sun rise later in the morning. After all, it's only going to get darker, earlier and earlier, until the Winter Solstice, in December. Why do we rush it by setting our clocks back? Who's with me? Happy Friday!

Just when I thought I had gotten used to applying filters to my photos, through Snapseed or Prisma , or even Tiny Planets , comes an app where I don't even have to provide a photo. All I need is a single word or a phrase. It's a great waste of time that one of my daughters introduced me to while she was at home, on her Reading Week break. The app is called NeuralBlender . It is an AI art-creation tool that takes words and interprets them into visual images, like abstract paintings. Sometimes, the resulting image leaves a lot to the imagination; other times, it does a pretty impressive job. Being cheap, and not wanting to input any personal information, I've only used the free app. It lets me modify whether my image is rendered with a horizontal or vertical aspect, or is just a square. If you want to see a higher resolution (512 x 512, versus 256 x 256) or have better blends, you have to pay. The free version suited me just fine. The first thing that I typed into the Create...

Americans are weird. That's what I take away from my virtual Route 66 challenge, judging by the attractions I've passed so far on my journey. And, mind you, these are only the attractions that I've found when I've input my distances into The Conqueror app and seen my surrounding environment. It doesn't include attractions that I pass, unbeknownst to me, while I'm actually moving. I don't see anything between points A and B—where I start at the beginning of the day and where I end up, when all of my exercise is done. So far, I've seen a giant space alien, an Abe Lincoln in a wagon, a leaning water tower, and several Route 66 museums. I suppose these are far better than the countless stops, where there's nothing around me but highways and flat lands, or the many strip malls, or even the occasional prisons. Actually, there are plenty of prisons. In all of the virtual challenges I've done so far, I've never seen any prison until I've crossed...

A few weeks back, DW texted me while she was out with her BFF. She had tried a new cocktail and was excited about it. "New cocktail for home—Dark and Stormy. Mmmm." I replied that I had had one before, and that I too liked the dark rum and ginger beer concoction, with just a twist of lime. I couldn't remember exactly where I had enjoyed one, but I thought DW had been with me at the time. Since then, ginger beer has been added to our grocery list. We've gone through one bottle of dark rum and have cracked open another. Candy-corn vodka. As Hallowe'en approached, DW was looking for some haunting cocktails to mix. We would be attending a party and she wanted something to add to the theme. She explored Blue Curacao, Grand Mariner, and Cointreau to add with the ginger beer. She even took a few cups of vodka and added a generous handful of candy corn to add to her witches brew. In honesty, the candy-corn-infused vodka tasted best on its own. I joined in her mixolo...

My favourite episode of the TV show Letterkenny has to be the one entitled, "Bock et Biche." It's the one where the gang heads across the border, into Québec, to attend a stag-and-doe party. It's a love story. As much as you can have on Letterkenny . As a beer lover, the opening segment of the show, where the main cast describes craft beer, was the best: In every episode, Wayne (Jared Keeso), Katy (Michelle Mylett), Dan (K. Trevor Wilson), and Daryl (Nathan Dales) can be seen drinking a beer, called Puppers , and I had always wondered if it was a real beer, instead of, like other shows that use props such as breakfast cereals and packs of cigarettes with made-up names. I suspected this was a fake beer. Folks, it's real. And according to the LCBO, it's brewed by Mill Street Brewery, which is owned by Labatt Brewing, which in turn is part of AB InBev. While the lager in Letterkenny comes in a bottle, it's only available in cans through the LCBO. And that...