'Your brother hates music,' says my s-i-l. No surprise. I hate music too, when it plays in the background, because when music plays I have to listen to it. This puts me at odds with, at a conservative guess, 90% of the population because they seemingly can't abide silence. Not sure why. Are they afraid of their own thoughts? like those people in the experiment who gave themselves shocks rather than sit for fifteen minutes without stimulation. Whatever, it was always a problem for me at work, because it's hard to hear the nap room monitor-- or indeed another staff imparting information-- when Lady Gaga is blasting from the player. Of course, it could just be my hearing going, because I've been losing the higher pitches for at least a decade now, and lower pitches when there's ambient noise. And music is ambient noise for me.

But then there's that scientific conclusion that your musical preferences are set in your teens and twenties, and that maybe I wouldn't mind music at work if it was the Beatles or the Mamas and Papas. What made me think that was coming home the other day and crossing paths with a guy on a bicycle whose boombox was blaring behind him. But the box was booming Dock of the Bay and it didn't bother me at all.

The air show however, with its sonic booms, is noise, pure and simple, and physically painful. It's supposed to rain tomorrow and Monday and I sincerely hope it does, with low cloud cover obliterating the CN Tower. One day of it was quite enough, thank you.