In Which Philosophy Professors Are Part of My Personal Experience

[moon_custafer]

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.

Comments

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

Alan Sherman! Totally the Pop Culture God of my youth. His "Hello Muddah; hello Faddah" was the anthem of all of we kids sent off to summer camp.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

More G&S (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4gqAJlzH-g#t=34). The light in this one captures the TOS perfectly, but why is Spock green?