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Greetings from 53.5° north latitude where your humble blogger is happily officially COVID-negative (for now, at least), and is the still-proud-but-aghast father of an officially-in-her-teens-now teenager.
The past week was spent much the same as the previous weeks. A couple bike rides, some reading, some guitar, a lot of work. The news that the playgrounds were open again was definitely well-received in our house. Seeing the garbage can containing the old signs announcing the playground was closed was itself a bit of a tonic for my younger daughter, almost as good as being able to run in the park and get on the swings.
The only COVID item worth posting this week is this story about how Trump's COVID "game changer" hydroxychloroquine is worse than ineffective; it is actually deadly. The article is based on a study published in The Lancet. The most interesting quote from the article highlights the disconnect between Trump's declarations and the actual facts of this matter: "these findings provide absolutely no reason for optimism that these drugs might be useful in the prevention or treatment of covid-19."
But let's not dwell on the negative. Instead, let's focus on the sublime wit of Bike Edmonton and how they completely destroyed this monstrosity of a kid's bike.
Reading Pile: I spent a few days plowing through about half of a short story anthology, and then picked up the absolutely amazing "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss. I'm only about one-fifth finished it so I probably won't finish it until early June. Unless the quality of the writing decreases in the upcoming chapters, this will definitely be a contender for the best book I read in 2020. I am also a week behind in my War and Peace reading, and completely negligent in the reading of Monte Cristo. If the world is opening back up, I suspect EPL will open soon as well and that means I have to finish a few of my library finds as well, including that anthology. 
But for this week, I was able to finish one book with my younger daughter. Book #20 for 2020 was "Lord and Lady Bunny - Almost Royalty!" by Polly Horvath. This was an enjoyable story to read with a younger family member and had an decent story. Unfortunately though, it started out much better than it ended. By the end, we were constantly commenting on how moronic the characters were. Their shortsightedness was actually distracting. Not that there was a real sense of verisimilitude in a story about talking rabbits interacting with a young girl and her hippy parents, but whatever immersion there was in the story was lost by repeatedly asking if the characters could do anything any more idiotic. So maybe read this to an eight year-old and not a ten year-old.
New Music:
Most of my listening in recent months has been limited to artists that I already knew about and albums I already knew. However this week I turned on Track Radio in Tidal on a Foals song and was really happy to hear a track from Kurt Vile. I have been listening to his "b'lieve i'm going down..." and "Bottle It In" albums repeatedly for the last few days. Bottle It In is much more laidback and b'lieve has more enthusiastic guitar sounds, but both are solid albums with great lyrics and music.
New Beers:
Three new beer this week, bringing my total lifetime unique beers logged on Untappd to 658. The first was another from The Wild Beer Co. in the UK. This time it was the Jambo Imperial Stout. As you would expect with an Imperial, this had lots of flavor with dark raspberries if dark raspberries are actually a thing. Might have been too much flavor though as it took a lot to think through this one. It wasn't too boozy though, which was nice. (3.5 / 5). 
The other two were both from DAB, or Dortmund Actien-Brauerei. DAB touts themselves as the "ambassador of the famous Dortmund Beer style", and while they are "only" 152 years old, they claim a much older provenance by brewing in compliance with the Purity Law of 1516. I think it is fair to call them a macro brewery, but from what I have tried, they produce decent beers.
The first was their Export lager, This was a well made beer with a nice bready malt and a bit of hops. Pretty happy with this one. (3.5 /5). The second was their Maibock, which is a style I don't have a lot of experience with. I feel this was better than most of the average beers that I rate at 3.25, but it wasn't good enough to be 3.5. I guess I will have to branch out to the bocks and maibocks and see if I can find a really good example of this style. That is the beauty of being on a lifelong quest to drink one of each beer in the world. (3.25 / 5) 
New Words:
Very few new words this week, even though I read a lot. syllogism [ˈsiləˌjizəm] NOUN
wain [wān] NOUN (archaic)
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