LONDON, ONTARIO – I invite you to join me in a tearful salute to the great Gary Brooker – the main composer, lead singer and pianist for symphonic rock pioneers, Procol Harum – who died last Saturday in Britain of one boring form of cancer or another at the age of 76. Everyone, of course, remembers Procol Harum’s first and by far biggest hit which took the world and the barely-formed band themselves by storm, A Whiter Shade of Pale.

LONDON, ONTARIO – Greetings, Hermaneutics readers. As many of you have noticed (“HG, where are you?” “Cat got your tongue?”) it’s been a month since I’ve posted anything new here. While I wasn’t surprised to see my viewership numbers drop from mid-January and into this first week of February, I was gratified that they only dropped by about a fifth and that a lot of the people who came here looking to see if anything was going on, decided to dig into the archives instead and checked out some of the more than two hundred essays I’ve posted here over the last four years. It makes my labours feel a little less ephemeral when a few dozen of my better realized flashes from the past can generate significant traffic during a period of downtime.