No one fits you but me

My brother is back in the music game after a hiatus of a couple of years: "Andrew Ennals and his Chequered Past" debut April 10 at The Piston in Toronto. I doubt I'll make it to the show myself, but he's posted a rehearsal track of one of the new songs, "Allen Key." I'm glad he's fronting again -- he was backup for Beth in Battle Mode, and while I'm obviously biased here, I always thought their lead singer's diction wasn't as good.

The tune for "Allen Key" hasn't quite won me over, but the lyrics feature his characteristic emotional ambiguity. The handyman husband singing
Hung the mirror up — maybe you should take a look;
See the frame around us, like the cover of a book
that you just can’t rewrite
might be celebrating an unromantic but happy marriage, or pleading that they have too much shared history to abandon:So I'll put up these shelves, if you'll put up with me.

I'm also feeling a dash of wry amusement -- if there's one skill my brother doesn't have, it's the ability to assemble flat-pack furniture. He can write about it, though.

Snerk

Old Spice Chaucer

In Which Philosophy Professors Are Part of My Personal Experience

Last week I began reminiscing about a family I knew as a kid -- not neighbours, exactly, since they lived several blocks from us, but close enough to visit, especially as two of their children were the same age as myself and my brother. The parents, in my memory, appeared oddly formal, almost 1950s. I recall the mother as a tall thin woman with short dark hair, and the father as a stout man who looked a little like the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and disliked rock music, especially the Beach Boys, although the house record collection included Alan Sherman's My Son, the Nut, so perhaps that was more to his taste. Anyway on Friday I found myself wondering for the first time what Mr. and Mrs. Treash actually did when they weren't parenting; so I looked them up, found their obits (I hadn't realized she'd passed away, unfortunately); and discovered she was a professor of mathematics and he of philosophy. I'm not sure I would ever have guessed that.

Today I watched some clips from various amateur Gilbert & Sullivan productions, and, liking Jonathan Ishikawa, the baritone who sang Dr. Daly and Jack Point in Savoynet's The Sorcerer and Yeomen of the Guard, looked him up to find that he's an assistant philosophy prof at UBC (and has a blog that's pretty much entirely about the subject).

So, yeah. Philosophy profs -- they do exist. They walk among us. They may be more entertaining than you think.