The Brown Knowser

June was a pretty good month, all things considered. I got out a lot, despite my ongoing lung issues. I was able to spend time with so many good friends in all sorts of events: dinners, drinks, kayaking, and more. And I met new people. I took lots of photos in all kinds of situations. So many that, come the end of the year when I show my favourite photos of 2024, it's going to be hard to select just one from this month. But June is all but gone and next week starts the beginning of a new July. What will it bring? With any luck, more of June, only better. For my final post of June, 2024, I bid the month a fond adieu. Happy Friday!

I've said it before: Dry January is easy; Dry July is a challenge.  In January, it's cold and I tend to stay indoors. I don't socialize as much and, therefore, drink less. In July, it's hot and the patios are open. It's fun to socialize and, therefore, I tend to drink a bit more. It's not easy to restrain yourself from reaching for a cold brew on a hot July day. And yet, this July, I tend to do just that. Now, I've tried a few non-alcoholic brews and there will be some that I will likely pick up for the month, but I find it hard to locate a good zero-alcohol stout. Sure, they're out there, but they're often not easy to find. Over the months, however, I've seen online friends raving about a non-alcoholic Guinness, and I decided to try some out in preparation for Dry July. Here's what I've thought. Guinness 0 (0.05% ABV) Guinness & Co. Dublin, Ireland Appearance: It pours exactly like a Guinness. It has a nitrogen widget that creates...

It could easily fit in the palm of my hand. It looked new and it probably wasn't cheap. Big name brands, especially products made for tiny kids, usually aren't. But somebody got home, wherever home is, and discovered the loss. It was last seen by me on Wellington Street, where it becomes Kichi Zibi Mican, across the street from the Canadian War Museum, at the western set of traffic lights. Good luck to the parents of the owner. Happy Tuesday!

I tried to be respectful and polite. I simply wanted to try to understand. I have a curious mind and I had questions. As I stated a couple of weeks ago, I've been delving into the world of conspiracy theorists : in particular, globe deniers. Flat-Earth believers. Or, as flat-Earth debunkers often call them, flerfers . Eventually, I knew something would come along in one of my social-media feeds. And when it did, it was a random post from someone who I don't follow and who doesn't follow me. I get a lot of that in Threads, as the algorithm sometimes goes into overdrive. This time, however, they brought me someone who seemed to play into some of the YouTube videos that I watch. Someone named Roman Beskostõi posted the following question: "Do flat-earthers believe *all* planets are flat, or only this one?" — @rombesk I was curious to see if any true flerfers responded to his post, and I saw this response: "Flat-Earther here. I believe there are no actual planets...

I have to admit that I haven't been pushing this photo walk like I have with others that I've hosted. But that doesn't mean that I'm not looking forward to it. Next Friday, June 21, I'd like to invite you to a two-hour event to photograph the Ottawa River between Lemieux Island and the Chaudière Falls, with a side trip to the Chief William Commanda Bridge. Weather permitting, we should be able to capture some golden-hour, sunset, and blue-hour lighting along the river, at the falls, and of the Ottawa skyline. The overall walk shouldn't be more than five kilometres, at a gentle pace. There is no required level photography: anyone from novice to seasoned photographer is welcome. And any camera will do. In previous walks, I've welcomed people with smartphones and Polaroid instant cameras, though for this walk, you might want to bring a tripod that supports your camera, for blue hour. Or not. I've never needed a tripod for blue-hour shots with my smartphone ...

It was bound to happen, eventually. In March of 2016, long before the American election, my family and I were in the United States, and I had made the decision during this trip that it would be my last one to that country. I could see that it was becoming a very polarized place, and I was just done with it. Sure, Canada has its issues but the polarization doesn't seem as bleak. After the Orange Felon was elected, I really decided that I was done with the US and decided that I would avoid buying anything made in America. When we went shopping, I'd always check the origin of a product before adding it to our shopping cart. That also included beer. I haven't bought an American beer since 2016. Except for just recently. At my latest visit to my friendly neighbourhood LCBO , I saw so many new beer labels that I had to pick some of them up. I picked up a session IPA from Mill Street and some other local brews. I also saw a striking can of a brewery that I hadn't heard of, an...

There really is no excuse. Now that DW has a new, super-fast laptop (albeit, a Mac ) and some dedicated video-editing software, there's no excuse for me not to put my recorded clips together into a cohesive video that I can upload to my YouTube channel . Last year, as a comparison, I was working on my old Windows-based computer with a massively clunky video-editing program, and I still managed to crank out 15 videos over 12 months. This year, I've only produced two videos, the most recent one being put together over this past weekend. The most time-consuming part of my workflow is to edit my 360-degree video clips. I wirelessly connect my phone to my camera, edit a clip, and export it from the camera to the phone. When I've finished editing the clips, I have to get the footage from my phone onto the Mac computer. In Windows, that was easy: I simply plugged my phone into the laptop and moved the files from one folder to another. Because my phone is an Android device and ...

As I age, I'm starting to see less and less of the old me, and more and more of my dad. And it scares me. When I was younger—in my late teens to early 40s—I saw a perfect balance of both parents. From the top of my head to about my mouth, I saw my mom's side of the family. My jawline has always been from the Brown side. My torso was from my grandfather on my mom's side. He was tall, as are some of my uncles. But when we all sat at the table, I found that I sat just as tall as they did. My dad was shorter than I am, due to a compact torso and short legs. My legs are clearly from my dad, as they are also stumpy. They never seem to be in proportion with the rest of my body and are especially noticeable when I wear shorts. There's a reason that I don't wear them often. If I had legs like some of my mother's brothers, I would probably stand at close to six feet tall. When I was a young adult, I stood at 5' 7". These days, as I approach 60, I seem to ha...

For the past three weekends, DW and I have joined a couple of our friends and have headed out on various waterways in our kayaks. We have upgraded from a couple's activity to a foursome. We started the season on the South Nation River, paddling a stretch that we had intended to traverse on April 8, either in advance of the total solar eclipse or, if the weather gave us overcast skies, during the eclipse. The weather was perfect for kayaking, as long as no one tipped over. We ended up not pulling out our kayaks in April and waited until mid-May to head out on the water. One week later, we were back out; this time, on the Clyde River. We put in at a boat launch, in the small town (village?) of Lanark, about an hour west of Ottawa, and paddled upstream as far as we could go, past Kerr Lake, until we were stopped by a low set of rapids. We turned back but when we reached the boat launch, we decided to paddle a little further downstream, where we knew that a dam in the town would mark t...

It's been such a long time since I've done a review of a Mill Street brew that you might have thought that I had forsaken this great Toronto brewery. And perhaps, to some extent, I had. When Labatt bought this powerhouse brewery, I did feel a bit sad, that the owners had sold out to a macro-beer giant. And with the sad passing of the founding brewmaster, Joel Manning, I have to admit that some of my love for the brewery waned. But I have to admit, despite the changes, Mill Street still puts out great beer. So when I saw a neon pea-green can with Mill Street's logo at the bottom, as I shopped my friendly neighbourhood LCBO, I thought I was overdue for a revisit. If not, for anything else, for the memory of the kindness that Joel, and so many others at the Ottawa brew pub, had shown me so many years ago. Spin Session IPA (4.9% ABV; 25 IBUs) Mill Street Brewery Toronto ON Appearance: a slightly unfiltered, pale gold. It's not cloudy, as you can see the effervescence thro...

Image: Radiopaedia, via Google (not my lungs). This is something that I'm just going to have to get used to. I dreaded the worst when I went to my follow-up appointment with the lung specialist. After all, just a few days before, I received an e-mail from one of many health-report sites that my doctor and some of the area hospitals subscribe to. This report had the results of my recent CT scan, which I had done at the hospital in Renfrew. Of course, the report used a lot of medical terms with which I was unfamiliar. I had to do some Google searching to figure out what they meant, and the biggest one that stuck out grabbed my full attention. Partial collapse in both lungs. My brain went into overdrive, as I imagined doctors cutting into my sides, inserting tubes and re-inflating the lungs. Trying to remain rational, I hoped that the specialist would simply prescribe medication that would get my lungs back to normal. I called the specialist's office to get a follow-up appoin...

Yeah, like I needed more stress in my life. It isn't enough that I'm constantly worried about what kind of life my kids are going to have in this economy and environment, where owning a home is a fantasy and some governments are actually working against reversing the effects of climate change. We really have left our kids with a horrible mess. To escape the stresses of this world, I often escape to a good show on one of the many streaming services I have or I surf YouTube for a channel that will either inspire me, educate me, or entertain me. I've shared some of the YouTube channels to which I've subscribed in a previous post ( here, too )—some of those channels I've dropped but most of them I still tune to. I've also started subscribing to some YouTube channels that are not only educating me but they're also stressing me out. I stumbled upon one channel, SciManDan , a science educator who makes videos about debunking a lot of the misinformation that we see...