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Greetings from 53.5° north. The past week was filled with reading, beer, and cycling, plus a recognition of the need to set weekly goals for words written if I am ever going to complete that proposal for the book I want to write. Tracking progress towards goals and milestones is instrumental for making progress in everything else I do, so I wonder why it took me to this week to realize that for this particular item. I am going to stay silent on the actual content of the book until the proposal is submitted, regardless of whether it is accepted or not, but I will comment on progress on this site. With that, let's get on with the update - one book read, one segment completed, and two-but-actually-only-one new beers.  Reading Pile: Depending on how you count which week we are in 2021, today marks the end of the eleventh or twelfth week of the year. If I am going to read 52 books in 2021, I should have finished eleven or twelve books by now, but I am unfortunately not close to that goal. I have one book in progress that should be done in the next week, plus another that is quite short that should also be done in the next few days. That will still put me below pace though, so I need to get focused. Book #7 for 2021 was "The Splendid and The Vile" by Erik Larson. I picked this up from the library as I was intrigued by the name, without any idea that it was a historical account of World War II and the coterie around Winston Churchill. There was a lot about Churchill of course, but Larson goes into depth about one of Churchill's personal secretaries, his daughter, his daughter-in-law, his wife, a few close confidants, and to a certain extent, the King. Showing the quirks of the protagonist's personalities highlighted that as great as these people were, they were just people with hopes, dreams, fears, and ambitions much like anyone else. Churchill was clearly flawed - as we all are - but he was able to work with and around his flaws to lead his nation in a war that was constantly hammering his country. The Nazis thought Churchill's flaws would be Britain's undoing, but I think his flaws shone a light on his humanity, and it was this humanity that allowed his country to rally behind him. The book was filled with great anecdotes and quotes. I will not share them here for fear of spoiling the surprise. It is a rather long book, but it was a quick read, and highly recommended at that. Cycling Update: I am working on increasing my average distance traveled to 10 km per day. My average ride per trip is over 15 km, which I am happy with considering we are just coming out of the winter months. The daily average overall regardless of whether I rode or not is too low though, coming in at 8.9 km. My goal is to consistently get that above 10 km per day, or 3650 km in a year. The math behind my averages is as follows: It has been 172 days since I started logging my trips for my virtual cross-Canada tour, and I have traveled 1525 km. By the end of March I will be at the half-way point for a year and should be over 1600 km. However, a half year based on a 10 km per day average would mean 1825 km traveled. Much like my comments about reading and writing, tracking progress is important to keep me on track. In the last week, I was able to complete the Hinton-Edson segment, and am now about 25% of the way through the Edson-Edmonton segment. At my 10 km day average, I will complete the Valemount to Edmonton leg in two weeks. For now, here is a visual look at my progress.   New Beers: I was able to try one new beer this week, continuing a streak of disappointment with a favorite brewery. I also happily dug into a new beer from what I thought was a new-to-me brewery and was surprised to find that I had already had that beer. Beer #740 was yet another from Collective Arts, their IPA No. 15. I was a bit down on Collective Arts after the last few beers so I went into this one somewhat tepid. It was close to being great, so close. It had lots of grapefruit without the drying pith that so many IPAs fail on. Very smooth, but unfortunately it was flat and without much life. If this was not a can, I would have suspected an old keg. Overall a lot of promise but just not quite a winner. (3.25 / 5) The brewery that I thought was new-to-me was Trolley 5, a brewpub out of Calgary. They have a surprisingly large lineup and I tried their First Crush White IPA on the recommendation from a friend. I quite enjoyed it and was thinking about rating it 3.5 or 3.75 when I logged into Untappd. I first had First Crush in September 2018 and rated it 3.75 at that time. The consistent rating is a good sign that I do not vary in my assessments. Unfortunately though I was unable to claim another check-in, but my personal goal to drink one of every beer in the world is a stretch goal, after all. New Words:
So many new words, courtesy of Larson's book on Churchill. A number of the new words were taken directly from quotes from Churchill's minutes and memos that Larson peppered throughout the book. There are too many to address in one week, so I will do about one-quarter of them this week. ovipositor [ˌōvəˈpäzədər] NOUN zoology
indefatigable [ˌindəˈfadəɡəb(ə)l] ADJECTIVE
dogsbody [ˈdôɡzˌbädē] NOUN BRITISH informal
supercilious [ˌso͞opərˈsilēəs] ADJECTIVE
epistolary [əˈpistəˌlerē] ADJECTIVE
hidebound [ˈhīdˌbound] ADJECTIVE
machicolation [məˌCHikəˈlāSHən] NOUN machicolations (plural noun)
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Hello from 53.5° north latitude. It was a fairly quiet week with most of the effort this week channeled towards preparing for a bit of time off work. Hypersonic Missiles: A new arms race is underway, bringing with it the threat of a new Cold War. This article in the New York Times describes what the US is doing to develop a hypersonic missile system. Hypersonic is apparently defined at any speed over Mach 5, with some of the systems described in the article operating at Mach 10, 15, even 20. The weapons travel at "mile-per-second" velocity and are largely unstoppable. They operate too low for one defense system, too high for another, and could take out missile bunkers, seats of power, individual leaders, or even the US aircraft carriers.
This technology is not limited in scope to the American or Russian militaries. The Chinese, Indians, French, Japanese, EU, and Australians are also investing in the technology, according to the article. Interesting, scary, fascinating, and unbelievable, all rolled into one topic. Roosevelt quote on "The Man in the Arena": I came across this quote in a meeting this week. It is from Theodore Roosevelt in 1910: It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." --Theodore Roosevelt  That's some weird cloud, but fairly typical of the weather this past week. Reading Pile: Reading this week was focused one book, "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson. This was the easiest Gibson novel I have read to date, with fairly limited new concepts to have to assimilate. It was also his first novel after 9/11, and so I found it interesting to read a novel written a year after 9/11 depicting a time a decade or so after the fact, and how the characters processed and were still affected by what happened. Clearly the events of September 11, 2001 were fresh in Gibson's mind as he wrote the novel. As far as a story goes, it was good. Not great though. I was hoping for some sort of Wintermute meets Putin meets Versace-clone, but that didn't happen. It did have some memorable characters, but not ones that were memorable enough to feature in other interrelated stories. I suppose that might be too much to expect again from his novels, but I would love to see it. On a lighter note, Gibson penned a new acronym that I love: LOMBARD - lots of money but a real dick. Other reading started at the end of the week: the aforementioned "Command and Control" and a re-read of "On Basilisk Station" by David Weber.  New beer: Only one new beer this week, and that was the Ebony Dragon from Alley Kat. I didn't really like it too much but I wasn't sure why. I read a few reviews on Untappd and "resin" came up a few times. I wonder if that is indicative from the Denali hops. Something to explore. (3.25 / 5) I also unlocked Level 14 of the Beer Explorer badge on Untapped. I don't know what is the difference between the 25 countries unlocked last week and the 70 regions unlocked this week, and unfortunately the stats in Untappd are a bit lacking. I am contemplating becoming a Supporter again to figure out if I can parse that sort of detail out of the stats provided to Supporters. Speaking of stats, I hit 600 beers with 563 unique entries since March 23, 2015, which means a net new beer every 2.77 days.  New words:
at·a·vis·tic [ˌadəˈvistik] ADJECTIVE
lan·guid [ˈlaNGɡwəd] ADJECTIVE
apophenia [ap·o·phe·nia] NOUN
pri·a·pism [ˈprīəˌpizəm] NOUN medicine
Oc·ci·dent [ˈäksidənt] NOUN
vi·cis·si·tude [vəˈsisəˌt(y)o͞od] NOUN (vicissitudes)
lim·i·nal [ˈlimənl] ADJECTIVE technical
ci·bo·ri·um [səˈbôrēəm] NOUN
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