I don’t like writing, or thinking, about Donald Trump and everything is presidency represents. First of all, it’s gross. He’s awful. Second, the situation seems so obviously terrible that my comments don’t add anything to the discourse. If it’s not obvious to you why threatening democratic allies, promoting dangerous misinformation, and encouraging hate towards trans people is bad, I’m not going to convince you.

That leaves me saying nothing. If I read a diary of someone who lived through the 1940s in Europe and it didn’t mention World War II, I would be bewildered. If I (or someone else) looks back on this website decades from now, they might wonder: What did he do about it*.

* The ‘it’ will be more obvious in historical hindsight depending on where we end up, but in general, I’m talking about a political climate of intolerance, corruption, and dangerous stupidity.

I’m a Canadian who lives in Canada, but today I ended up on the United States Department of Health and Human Services website. What I saw that scared me more than any of the dangerous garbage that Trump and his enables spout off.

The site will change, but when I looked at it back in February of 2025 (screenshot) if featured a photo of Donald Trump with Robert Kennedy Jr. – A guy who has an entire section on his Wikipedia page called “Anti-vaccine advocacy and conspiracy theories on public health”. In the parlance of the show Succession, the “are not serious people.”

The next most prominent thing is a photo of a smiling white woman with the darkly Orwellian headline “Protecting Women and Children.” This leads to a page from the Office on Women’s Health” where you learn that what seems to be their most important health issue for women is blatant fear-mongering about trans people in sports.

Fuck that.

It’s somehow much more disturbing when the garbage I expect from Trump shows up on an official government department website. A real government department that matters to people’s lives.

Trump also keeps talking about taking over Canada (and now Greenland). It’s absurd on the surface. I would have assumed fifteen years ago that no country could take over a part of another modern democracy. Then Russia took Crimea from Ukraine. It’s not acceptable to even suggest taking over another country.

What am I doing about it? Not much. I don’t know what to do.

I’m relieved that we in Canada didn’t hand over control of parliament to the Conservative party, which is parroting Trump-style nonsense more and more.

Trump is dangerous and needs to be stopped. But this type of passive-voice statement isn’t changing anything.

In our home we some times enjoy some prepared frozen breaded fish. A box usually comes with four pieces of fish. Occasionally, when the stars align, there are five pieces.

When this happens, we celebrate this bounty by singing “Bonus fish! Bonus fish!” to the tune of Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit Gloria.

So, things aren’t all bad.

When you see video of a rocket launch, you hear them talk about “max q.” This is the point where the rocket is under the maximum amount of dynamic pressure from the atmosphere.

As the rocket accelerates, the pressure from pushing through the atmosphere increases. Eventually, though, the atmosphere thins, and the pressure reduces. There’s a crossover point where the pressure is highest: max q.

Similarly, when you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle at home over the holidays, the puzzle process has a max q.

The difficultly of a puzzle decreases with each piece you place, as fewer options are left for the remaining pieces.

However, the difficulty of placing a piece increases as you run out of easy and obvious placements.

There’s a crossover point somewhere in the middle where a puzzle is at its most difficult. There are still lots of pieces and positions left, and the easy placements have run out. This is puzzle max q.

You might think someone in their late-forties, like myself, is too set in their ways to change their life. Well, dear reader, I switched to putting the tabs on the side of my browser! It’s never too late.

If you’re anything like me, when you can’t sleep and your phone is too nearby, you might find yourself going down a YouTube rabbit hole.

Maybe it’s heart-warming surprise virtuoso performances at TV-show singing contests (the apparent shock here is often than people who aren’t traditionally attractive can be talented). For me, it’s live concerts where the crowd sings along with the audience. Maybe it’s the crowd helping out Lewis Capaldi when he’s struggling to get through a song, or the singer of Snow Patrol marvelling at the festival audience taking over for him. I love these. Especially when the artist themselves are obviously delighted. It’s like emotional candy.

Of course, enjoying this experience in real life is even better. I’ve gotten to sing Better Man along with a baseball stadium full of other Pearl Jam fans in Boston – or sing Sonny’s Dream along with The Once at the St. Mary’s Church in Indian River, PEI.

Once of these YouTube rabbit-holes brought me to the video for the song Monsters by James Blunt. If you have or have ever had either a soul or a father, it will probably make you cry. If you’ve lost a parent, It might need a full-on emotional content warning.

The video is such an obvious tear-jerker that there seems to be an entire sub-genre of reaction videos on YouTube where you can watch people experience it for the first time:

The further I get through life, the more I realize that most things in live can be seen as trade-offs.

Some things are obviously trade-offs. Should you take that new job? On one hand, you’ll get better pay. On the other hand, you may not get on as well the the team as your current job.

Beyond the obvious cases, I’ve come to believe that everything is a trade-off. On top of that, we usually don’t have a great sense of what we’re trading off.

Obviously-bad choices are just trade offs that are weighted against our preferred outcome. Obviously-good choices are trade offs that are weighted to our preferred outcome.

I find thinking of things as a trade-off helps with post-decision regret. If you made a big decision and it’s not perfect, just remember that this decision had trade-offs, and any other choice would have just had a different set of trade-offs (maybe much worse).

There’s no sense in making sweeping absolute statements about aesthetics.

That said, no electric guitar should have gold hardware.