Pheaturing Ed Robertson From Barenaked Ladies

 

Hey, kids, welcome to the Phile for a Monday. How are you? Guess what? Only about fifteen more entries to go. Crazy, right? So, a bride and groom are going viral for their incredibly tacky RSVP card that makes the guest's meal choices contingent on how large a gift they give. Not the shiny paper nor the fancy serif font could redeem the Choosing Beggar of it all, not to mention how demanding it is of vegetarians and Jews who keep kosher. 

Skeptics insisted that there's no way that this could be for a wedding, and that it must be for a charity fundraiser. Either way, vegetarians deserve better! 

A mom in Chattanooga, Tennessee is going viral for her email to her local school board that sums up the hypocrisy of many anti-maskers. Hamilton County Schools opened last week, and while masks are required for students and staff, parents may fill out an "opt-out" form to exempt their children from the public safety measure. In practice, the mask policy is optional, and the mom asked why the dress code isn't the same way. The Tennessee Holler shared the email on social media, and the tweet has over 25,000 likes. "Good evening, I am writing to request the parent opt-out form to opt out of the school dress code. As the parent of a daughter at East Hamilton, I find the school's dress code policy to be misogynistic and detrimental to the self-esteem of young women. Rather than shaming young women into covering their shoulders (and other parts of their body), I believe we should empower female students to have agency over their bodies and to wear clothing that is comfortable for them and contributes to their ability to enhance their learning experience. In light of the opt-out option related to the recently announced mask mandate, I can only assume that parents are now in a position to pick and choose the school policies to which their child should be subject. As someone who holds a strong commitment to the feminist ideals and desire to raise my daughter to be a strong and empowered woman able to make choices for herself, I find that the school's dress code policy does not align with my belief system. I therefore intend to opt out of this policy and send my daughter to school in spaghetti straps, leggings, cut offs, and anything else she feels comfortable wearing to school. Please make a note that she is not, under any circumstances, to be dress coded, as I have clearly communicated my decision to opt out of this policy. Thank you." People applauded the mom for throwing anti-masker logic back at the school board's proverbial face. The mom told Raw Story that while she meant what she said about dress codes, the point of the email is about masks. "My goal is to draw attention to the importance of mask usage in our schools. We need to base decisions around this issue on medical data and be guided by the recommendations of experts in this area. But I'm up for fighting the dress code once we get the mask issue taken care of!" she said. 

Despite being discredited by multiple fact-checkers and valid sources that aren't your uncle's blog, some Trump supporters still believed in a conspiracy theory that promised Trump's return to the White House on Friday, August 13th. Ignoring all the logistics and laws involved with a president who lost an election entering months into the new president's term, word still spread across social media platforms and online forums as many thought if anyone could successfully defy democracy, it could be Trump. The theory picked up even more steam when Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow set the reinstatement date as August 13th to "right the wrong." (Of course, he has since denied ever saying anything about August 13th specifically.) Trump's former Attorney, Sidney Powell, also piled onto the chaos when he claimed that the Supreme Court would surely find evidence of voter fraud and set a new inauguration date for the one-term, twice-impeached president. While this might seem like nothing but a spooky Friday the 13th true-life "American Horror Story" to some, New York Times Journalist and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman reported that 29% of Republican voters believe Trump will return this year. 

People have been waiting for the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer for a long time and the long delay is making everyone worry. After all, the third Spider-Man film is due to hit theaters in four months but we have yet to see any footage. At one point, fans have started to believe that there won't be a trailer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe sequel. However, there has been a new update on the Spider-Man 3 trailer and when it will finally be dropped. There have been speculations that the Spider-Man 3 trailer has already been completed and is being dubbed before its release. In addition to that, it is believed that the teaser will be one of the several trailers to be screened along with Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings theatrical run. Interestingly, an insider has confirmed that the trailer is being dubbed in India. However, it is stated that there is no confirmation that the teaser will be released along with Shang-Chi's premiere. Releasing the Spider-Man 3 trailer might be a sure-fire way to get fans to head for theaters to watch Shang-Chi. After all, it would be an awesome treat to be one of the first people to see the teaser. On the other hand, there is a possibility that the film will be accompanied by a second Eternals trailer.

DC Extended Universe actress Margot Robbie is often regarded by comic book film fans as the definitive live-action version of Harley Quinn and her brilliant performance in The Suicide Squad pretty much solidifies that. Now, we still don't know what the future holds for the Australian superstar but it's safe to assume that she'll be sticking around in the DC franchise for more years to come. However, Margot worried many fans when it was recently reported that she plans to take a hiatus from playing the DC anti-hero. She would later clarify that she's not going anywhere and is ready for Harley's next adventure but according to a new rumor from Bounding Into Comics, Robbie is in danger of being booted out of the DCEU in shocking fashion. The entertainment website claims that The Suicide Squad's box office failure was a huge factor in her taking a break from portraying the character and plans allegedly call for her to be recast down the line. Of course, nothing has been officially confirmed yet so take this one with a huge grain of salt. Honestly, it's hard to take the report seriously especially considering James Gunn has already expressed his desire to work again with Margot in a future DC project. In fact, according to the Guardians of the Galaxy filmmaker, the two have been discussing ideas for quite some time now. Not only that, but it was Warner Bros. who requested Gunn to keep Harley Quinn in the project and for years now, the studio has been very pleased with the actress' portrayal of the character.

Instead of doing this blog thing I should be listening to this album...

It might be a good album. They tell me if I go to Walmart I might see some odd stuff. I didn't believe it until I saw this...

Hahaha. Ever watch that "Antiques Roadshow" Tv show? You never know how they're gonna describe something on it.

So, I mentioned people thought Trump would be President again last Friday. I knew that was impossible as he has a new job.

See? Hahaha. Oh, "Blue's Clues." 

If you spot the Mindphuck let me know. Okay, now from the home office in Port Jefferson, New York here is...

Top Phive Things Said By Fact-Checkers Shutting Down Theory That Trump Will Be Reinstated 

5. I have my tan suit on and front row seats at the Waldorf-Astoria Total Landscaping for this. 

4. The crowds are lining up outside the White House for Trump's Reinstatement Day... wait, that's just seven people waiting for a bus. 

3. Friday 13th is the day they picked for Trump reinstatement? 

2. Well no wonder the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell, picked August 13th for Trump’s reinstatement because it's also National Kool-Aid Day. 

And the number one thing said by a fact-checker shutting down the theory that Trump would be reinstated is...

1. Well, the reinstatement of Donald Trump, much like his wall, his inauguration crowds, his infrastructure week, his 2nd term, his military parade, his peace deal with North Korea, and much more, was just total bullshit. 

On the origins of the English language...

Okay, let's take a live look at Port Jeff, shall we?

Looks like landscaping is all done. 

The superintendent of a public school district in Florida that has instituted a mask mandate says some parents are furious with the decision, and there are a few who "must call our office every 10 minutes." Carlee Simon heads the Alachua County Public School District in north central Florida. The board recently passed a mask mandate for the first two weeks of school, defying Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis who, at the end of July, issued an executive order "to protect parents' freedom to choose whether their children wear masks." COVID-19 has been surging here in Florida, with the state recording a record-breaking 24,869 new cases on Wednesday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Anyway, I thought I'd invite Carlee Simon to the Phile to discuss this... why not? So, please welcome to the Phile Superintendent of the Alachua County Public School District in north central Florida Carlee Simon.

Me: Hello, Carlee, welcome to the Phile. So, what made your board vote to defy Ron DeSantis? 

Carlee: We have been watching the COVID data, the positivity rate numbers, and it was becoming concerning over the summer. But really where I think the board paused and decided they needed to pay much more attention to possibly having to change plans, was when we had two custodians pass away within two days of each other just over a week ago. Florida, COVID-19 epicentre in the U.S., breaks record with new cases I myself, as a superintendent, I have the authority to have a mask mandate for all employees and all visitors on our campus. But the next day, the board sat at our board meeting. We had experts from the University of Florida. They came and they shared the current data, as well as what they were seeing in their hospitals, and it was compelling information. The board voted unanimously to have a mask mandate for two weeks. 

Me: What kind of consequences could the Alachua County public schools face? 

Carlee: The governor had an executive order where he banned mandatory mask mandates and he has threatened to take funding from the schools. But that ended up being adjusted to where he is now threatening that he will take money from the superintendent and the board members' paychecks. And just yesterday evening, he realized that he doesn't distribute the paychecks to the superintendents and the board members. So he asked if they would, if this funding was cut, take the pay out of their own accounts... their own paychecks. We won't do that. If our funding gets cut, we will look at other options and we'll cross that bridge when we get there. But we won't take money from our students. We know how important it is. 

Me: Good for you. Personally, could you face consequences? 

Carlee: At this point, I haven't heard him make any threats personally beyond just impacting my salary. I do have, you know, threats from the community... the small community of people who are upset about having masks being required. Most of these are people who are right now focusing on their parental freedoms, and some of them are anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. So I do have that. But it is a small group. But they are loud and they are very angry. 

Me: You've been called some horrible names and even threatened with legal action. Is that right?

Carlee: Yes, I have. We have people who have decided that their way of expressing their anger has a lot of profanity attached to it and not always the kindest, as well, to a woman who's running an organization. But it's part of the situation and I'm just accepting it and moving through it. 

Me: Why do you think there continues to be such vehement opposition to wearing that piece of cloth? 

Carlee: You know there's people who, unfortunately, take opportunities when we are in crises and they manipulate what's going on. It's unfortunate because I think that the children are not really fazed by this. Obviously, there's some level where children aren't always comfortable. But the kids are behaving normally in school. They're enjoying their day. But the parents of these students, who don't want their kids to wear masks, they're furious. And we have a few who must call our office every 10 minutes. I don't understand because I do think it's a piece of cloth. It will protect people. And when you hear these stories about people who are on ventilators, I mean I would take a mask any day. 

Me: You've mandated masks. What about vaccines? 

Carlee: So right now, I'm trying to incentivize vaccines. The fact that the COVID positivity rate is going up, people are getting vaccinated. I think we're having a lot of, "I should have done it sooner vaccines." Then, we are incentivizing. We're paying $100 to anyone who's been vaccinated and anyone who gets vaccinated. We also are providing COVID leave for anyone who has a breakthrough case. And we have had employees. In fact, my staff attorney who has been vaccinated, she wasn't feeling well, she ended up getting tested; she was positive. So, she will be covered with our COVID leave because, essentially, our focus is to encourage people to get vaccinated. We want to make sure that happens. I'm sure we're going to have to have discussions about mandating vaccines. Our city is having that discussion now and we are watching it. But I think the topic is going to have to come up soon. 

Me: Carlee, good luck and thanks for being on the Phile. Take care.

Carlee: Thank you, Jason. 

I'm so excited about this! Today's guest is a Canadian musician, best known as the lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter of the band Barenaked Ladies. Their new album "Detour de Force" is available on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. Please welcome to the Phile... Ed Robertson!

Me: Hey, Ed, I am so excited to have you here on the Phile. I have interviewed Kevin Hearn a few times and even Steven Page a few times... I am glad I get to interview you at last. How are you? 

Ed: I am so good, Jason. Great to be here. 

Me: So, I love the new album... "Detour de Force." That's an odd name, right? 

Ed: Jason, for some reason that album title is perplexing every single person that interviews me. "Your new record, "De Tour De Force..." I've done fifty advanced interviews for this record. 

Me: Hmmm. It seems easy to me. So, how did this album come together? It took a while because of COVID, right? 

Ed: Well, it's the first album I can remember ever that I actually started writing as soon as I finished my last record. As soon as "Fake Nudes" was done I said, "Not this time, Robertson. You're not going to wait until all the touring's done, all the work is over and then you're staring down the barrel on an impending process with zero songs. Not this time." I've done that 14 other times, every time since "Gordon." This time I decided to get a leg up and as soon as we started touring for "Fake Nudes" I started writing for "Detour de Force." I didn't know I was writing for "Detour de Force" but I wanted to start writing right away. So that when we finished touring "Fake Nudes" I didn't have the same level of stress of staring at an empty song book or an empty voice memo recorder or word processor, however I ended up writing. 

Me: But with the other way it worked out so well, right? 

Ed: Jason! Don't argue with my process. Okay? LOL. 

Me: Hahaha. But you know what I mean. You wrote some great songs and had a great career. It's surprising to me that you would change it up. 

Ed: Yes. But the stress of that his stressful and not very good for me. So this time I wanted to try and get ahead of it a little bit. Not so say I eliminated it, there was a healthy level of stress opposed to daunting and scary level of stress this time. 

Me: What's that level of stress all about? What's keeping you going? 

Ed: It's true, we could say what do I have to stress about. I just want to be good. I want the songs to be great. I want the shows to be great every time. If I take that seriously I can't take it for granted. I can't just assume the songs are going to come even thought I've been writing them for three decades. I now have some sort of process, lots of different process to use. I can rely on the lessons I learned and I can rely on the knowledge I have. I have some level of confidence in my craft but a song still has to come from nowhere. I never managed to get to a place in my life where I'm confident it's going to happen. I know if I work at it it will come and I'll get something but I'm not confident that I'm going to write a record and love it as much as the record I just wrote. There's a time period that is full of doubt, full of self reflection, full of "gosh, I've written a hundred songs what do I have to write about?" Who is listening? What does everyone care? I have those moments of doubt and then I wrote a song like "Live Well." I just felt proud of it. I felt like, okay, if I could do that a couple of times, if I could finish "New Disaster" which is this close and sing everything I've been thinking about for years, about the firehose of bad news in the media, if I could get that one done I'm in good shape. 

Me: So, there's a "firehose of band news" that you were writing about? 

Ed: I don't mean you, Jason. It's a combination of we all know bad news sells. If it bleeds it leads. That in combination with the very amplified echo chambers of anti-social media have gotten us all in a constant state of anxiety. I noticed it, it was a little ways into lockdown, into the pandemic when we were all wondering "is this it?" What is going on here? We were constantly being told "if you think its bad now, well, it's about to get way worse. Stay tuned, after this message we are going to tell you where numbers are ramping up." It was just scary all the time. I noticed it was like a switch went off, the The National mentioned our moment to the end of the show. As Anne Murray said, "We could all use a little good news today." The market changed and I think people realized okay, it's bad, we got to be careful, it's important that we pay attention here, we got to listen to the science. But we also got to have a life, we got to still be in touch with people, we got to relate to things, we got to find some daylight. So I've been thinking about that sort of thing for a long time. It's funny because "New Disaster" became more timely. The song was written pre-pandemic and it seems it was written about the pandemic. I've been thinking about that steady stream of worry for a long time. 

Me: I love the song "Flip," which is a very positive song. Where does that come from, Ed? 

Ed: Well, it's a coping mechanism. I think. I've always been the class clown. I've always been there guy looking for the laugh. I've always been the guy that jumps off the cliff in his jean shorts for a laugh. Honestly it is a coping mechanism. I grew up insecure, I grew up the fifth child of an alcoholic father who by the time I came around was a distant accident. I had four siblings who were born a year of each other then a seven year gap the "mistake" shows up. So I grew up kind of feeling, despite my mothers incredibly loving, supportive nature, kids want their dads to like them. My dad was disinterested and I really took that on as a kid and didn't realize until I was well into my adulthood and several years in therapy it had nothing to do with me. My dad will ill and it wasn't my fault. It took a long time to figure that out. So for a long time I was crying on the inside clown and I learned a lot and I grew a lot. I got to a point where I could be both, I could carry that hand in hand, I could process some of the rawness, some of the disappointment, some of the anguish I felt and celebrate the ways I had lived through it and learned to live in spite of it. I didn't lead a tortured life, I look back and I have many fond memories of a great childhood and thousand memories of burgeoning career and a great time with my bandmates. But there was an underlined struggle to all of that that I really only managed to articulate in the last couple of years. I've gotten to the place where I could sing really directly about it and I could talk really personally about it. That's really liberating It strengthened my ability to focus on the absurd and the fun and see the good side and see the silver lining and also be honest about the rest of the cloud. 

Me: I can relate to some of what you're saying, Ed, even though my dad was my best friend and someone so different than your dad. Were people surprised about how you are and felt? 

Ed: I worried about people knowing I was struggling. It's ironic, all the tools I put in place to keep myself in pain or to keep myself struggling in silence so people don't haver to help me, or people don't know I'm having a hard time. I build this buttresses and moats and defenses and their all unnecessary, they're all of my own making. My friends love me and they want to help me. People actually admire and respect me. They're not just doing it by playing some long con in the end exposing me for the fraud they imagined I might be. It's really liberating to realize those things. For me it really came to a head when on route to being inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame I felt completely insecure. I was feeling that if people think this, what if that, what if I say this, what if they take it the wrong way. I realized I should just be enjoying this. It's not supposed to get any better than this and yet I'm preoccupied with the potential imaginary disasters that could unfold from it. That's when I really kind of got to work on some of the stuff I've been carrying around for a while, for a long long time. 

Me: You have a song called "Good Life" that reflects on your career. What did you learn about yourself writing it? 

Ed: I had a blast writing it. I wrote it with Kevin Griffin who I've been writing with for over ten years now. I remember emailing an MP3 of the demo to the guys and Tyler Stewart wrote back right away and said, "Barenaked Ladies documentary channel banger." LOL. I still think about that every time I hear the song. It's a fun, literal retelling of the bands story. I had so much fun being super specific while writing it. I remember... every songwriter dreads the bridge when it's time to write a bridge. So Kevin and I wrote a pretty good bridge and we thought what's going to come next. Is it going to be a guitar solo or keyboard solo? What's going to happen after the bridge? Kevin excused himself, I forget if he had to go make a phone call or visit the restroom, whatever it was and I wrote the whole rap section which occurs right after the bridge. Instead of a solo there's a kind of a rap section. And I wrote that whole thing, "had a plateful, so ungrateful. had the gate full..." all that stuff and I sang it to Kevin when he got back and he looked at me and said, "Goddamn it, you really are Ed Robertson, aren't you?" LOL. It was the perfect song to say it on. He's got a million hilarious quips when we're writing songs to keep me coming back for me. I love "Good Life," it really is a good life and it was nice to reflect on the bands career like that and make a documentary channel banger out of it. 

Me: What's your favorite song from this album, Ed? 

Ed: Well, when I sent "Live Well" to the other guys Tyler took me aside and said, "I think this is the best song you've ever written." And it was the song I was probably the most nervous about. 

Me: Why is that? 

Ed: It's very raw and it's very personal. It was very difficult to write and I was worried how it was going to make some people feel. I was worried how it would make my family feel. I was worried how the band guys would relate to it. And all three guys in the band went, "Dude, we love this song. It's so beautiful and can't wait to be playing it." I don't know if its going to get a lot of attention on the record because it's kind of a mid-tempo very emotional song but it's one of the things I'm most proud of on the new record. 

Me: Ed, I'm so glad I finally got to have you on the Phile. Take care and thank you. 

Ed: Thanks, Jason.

That about does it for this entry of the Phile. Thanks to my guests Carlee Simon and Ed Robertson. The Phile will be back tomorrow with Alice Cooper. Yes! Alice Cooper! Spread the word, not the turd. Don't let snakes and alligators bite you. Bye, love you, bye. 

Give me some rope, tie me to dream, give me the hope to run out of steam, somebody said it could be here. We could be roped up, tied up, dead in a year. I can't count the reasons I should stay. One by one they all just fade away...