Category Archives: 2025 Archive

THE WORLD SERIES

Posted, October 31, 2025

As I write this the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays are gearing up for game six of this years World Series. As a person with one foot in Europe and one in Canada and having grown up in Canada of course I am rooting for the home team. The truth is, it is our only professional baseball team in Canada at this point. And that is a bit of comment on the whole nature of this being a “world” final sporting event. Outside of the United States and central America the sport only exists in pockets around the world and has had a long legacy of being challenged as an Olympic sport as a result. Not dissimilar to basketball in that regard. So the name World Series is somewhat aspirational in nature but as it is a business they get to call it whatever they want. It’s not that different to some places in the world with replicas of the Eiffel Tower claiming to be the largest Eiffel Tower in world. Sorry kids, there is only one Eiffel Tower.

Like other Canadians I am totally enthralled in the fight and hoping “our” team, which usually consists largely of Americans, Cubans, and many from central America will defeat their team of similar national heritages, with a couple of Japanese players as well. Not a lot of Canadian Content in what many are dubbing our “national” team.

For some it also has a political layer. Canada is under siege from Mr. Trump and his tariffs and threats to take over Canada and make it the fifty- first state. It has hurt us a lot, and to have a Canadian team be potentially winning this very American of games is a sweet irony.

We also ignore that as a professional team, these players may at times be a “team” but ultimately their agents will remind them that at contract time they only negotiate one on one.

But these points aside, I do love to watch any sport that is played at a high level. And this is certainly an example of that. I don’t know much about baseball but watching what some of those pitchers can make a ball do, is only a bit short of the cartoon pitches where the ball goes around the batter a few times before finding the catcher’s glove.

I was sitting watching the game and found myself having to google various terms of course. I started with slider and the references were all to hamburgers, another American thing.

Like everyone else who is enthralled by this competition right now, we know in our hearts and minds that the horrific treatment of Gaza continues, that Putin has not let up in Ukraine and that most economies are struggling. But that gets turned off for a moment while we focus on this. It is like the few times I have been sitting in procession of cars travelling from the funeral home to the graveyard and watching kids playing, birds singing and people seemingly not realizing I have lost a loved one. We all live in many worlds and for our own mental health need to have some things that give us pleasure, even when we know the bigger picture may not be as rosy. My parents told me stories from some happy times from their youth as kids and when when I looked at the dates involved realized it was in the Depression.

As the underdog, the Blue Jays are similar to that championship Toronto Raptors team from a few years ago. A few veterans, some rookies who had been cleverly acquired and more than a few overlooked seasoned players on a comeback. This is the team fighting the all- powerful team with the funds to buy the best players in the world. Sounds like a movie script to me. Probably a Hollywood production but shot in Canada.

Go Jays go, and Happy Halloween!

Django

SIMPLE & COMPLEX

POSTED: OCT 1, 2025

I like simple…. I  like complex….

But my relationship has changed with these two concepts as I have aged.

The two terms are not as binary or mutually exclusive as I once thought. Most things exist in both realms but sometimes the significance of something is whether you choose to evaluate the complex elements or ignore them for the simple impact or big picture. All about the forest and the trees at times and at other times very much about the trees.

Part of what looking at the complex gives us is depth as we dive in the various layers of almost anything – whether it’s the detail of a design or the hidden reasons for behaviour. And another key component of complexity is context. Yes, our old friend context is always critical and in any equation with many factors, it is that context that matters.

As I age, I see this distinction in simple and complex in almost everything.

Electric cars are better than gasoline powered cars when it comes to carbon emissions. But dig deeper and depending on the source of the electricity to go into the car battery (eg generating electricity from coal vs generating it from solar or wind power) plus the loss of power in the transmission of the electricity from source to the location of the charger and associated environmental damage from that transmission, plus the issue of the extraction of minerals to create the batteries, plus there is no current way to deal with the batteries once they come to the end of their life, and we realize the real environmental equation is not so simple.

Or you can respect a person for one set of skills and in simple terms consider them a friend but dig a bit deeper and you may not respect them for their life choices.

During an election a few years ago, I asked a friend why he had a particular politicians sign on his lawn. He explained that he had followed the politician stand on many key pieces of legislation and did not agree with all the policies of the party that the politician represented, disliked the politicians ambition and a variety of his personal traits.  But on balance – it was simple – the other candidates were worse.

My head spins today when I watch the news. I once believed I understood the world, with its simple truths, and complex issues but today realize it was probably my ignorance that led me to the conclusion that I understood it. The wisdom to come to that conclusion I think like most things is both simple and complex. As I bury friends and watch the world decay, the complexity of it is right before us and we have access to dig deep into almost any topic very easily, but I find myself valuing more of the simple things. A nice day, homemade jam on a fresh baquette, a nice chat with a friend or a refreshing swim. I can choose complex on my time and on my terms.

Django

LOVE

POSTED: SEPT 1, 2025

I am quite intrigued by language, and as I am really only proficient in English that is where I spend most of my adventures in exploring words and wordcraft.  One that is a perennial favourite for me is the word LOVE.

Now I know that many other languages tackle the broad notions that the English word Love covers by breaking it down into other words or variations on a word, so that would be a more sophisticated way to go. But English – no way, we use it as a positive emotional catch-all.  It relies on the context to put things in perspective. So you might love your grandpa and love a cheeseburger but it is the context that we have to apply to know that you don’t love them in the same way or on the same scale.

It is also interesting how putting a word before or after it gives it a new set of meanings – making love, for example is not necessarily really about making or love.

As a result of this broadness of application, the significance of the word is often diluted as it is so overused, whether in the sale of consumer products or as a general term for affection of some kind.

But that same broadness of application and dilution in some contexts makes it more special in some contexts. In the dating world (yes, I am dating myself for using such a term) the word is not used lightly as it has profound implications. So all of the throwaway references to loving the new soap you are washing your clothes in or loving the new improved garbage bags, may be liberally used in all contexts other than the person who you might actually be in a relationship with, but not want to add that layer of seriousness or commitment to. So, the word gets tucked away for such purposes only to come out when triggered.

And why am I riffing off on such a subject today? Well, an old friend I ran into on the internet and we got to chatting. Some backstory might help to understand her relationship with the word love. I knew her as we were both working in the kitchens of cruise ships fifty years ago. Yeah, fifty years – a while back. And in the mid 1970’s relationships were quite fluid, where the level of commitment was a very wide spectrum. But within that love the one you’re with world, people still would find themselves in committed wonderful deep relationships. So my friend, on a few occasions in her life had encountered men who chose to share with her that they loved her. And on each occasion once her partners opened that can of worms they could not handle her response. As soon that as soon as one of those lads would reference that he loved her she would be out of the relationship. She would also be in a mess, in that she had valued the person and saw a future with them but the word had a real stigma for her. I never knew why and one of the guys who was a fallout of this phobia I knew quite well and he was so messed up by the rejection, left the cruise ships and joined a cult. Yes, another strange characteristic of the times.

I was never really close to her and have not kept in touch very well over the decades so it was strange for her to relate to me why she had a problem with someone expressing their love for her. I had made up in my imagination that it might relate to a bad experience with a stepfather or weird uncle and learned that yes, it was in fact a family relationship not the kind my imagination had conjured up. No, her problem stemmed from being a real monster as a kid, much like myself, and hearing from her mother throughout her life that she was loved. From an early age she realized the statement had an unsaid back-half of the sentence like “I love you, …..despite being a mean-spirited little bitch that has caused nothing but pain and hardship for your father and I and your siblings”. When she dropped rocks off an overpass onto the windshields of the cars below at twelve and trashed a corner store at fourteen and stole a car and then crashed it in her later teens, was all before she really ramped up the bad behaviour further in her late teens, each time her mother would start the conversation at the Principals office, Police station, or hospital with I love you or You are loved.

But I realized that after all this time, her sharing this with me, a person who she had not chatted with in about a decade, was an indication that she was moving forward, understanding her emotions better and putting it all in context. We are all just trying to figure ourselves out, and some issues take longer than others.  She was also happy to chat to find out if I had an email for that mutual friend from decades ago. It was not to reconnect in some romantic way but to explain to him why she had treated him the way she did and to apologize. Good for her.  I did not have an email but sent her the contact for someone who I expected would have it.

Django

ETHICS & THE KISS CAM

Posted: August 1, 2025

A couple weeks ago at a Coldplay concert outside of Boston, a couple were seen on the Jumbotron (kiss cam) in a warm embrace. It was heartwarming to see two people enjoying themselves at the concert and in their enjoyment of each other. Then the fellow ran off when he realized they were onscreen. Chris Martin “called it” of course… either very shy or in an affair, and before long this was all that was on the internet. Apparently, it was more important than the slaughter and starvation by Israel of the people in Gaza, or the relentless bombing of the Ukraine by that regions war criminal, or the dismantling of the last shreds of equality in the United States with One Big Shitty Bill.

The world was seemingly mesmerized by what turned out to be a tech executive with his company’s head of HR. It was quickly revealed that he was a married person so beyond the obvious inappropriate unethical corporate behavior this was also a personal moral failure.

But what intrigued me was the coverage that followed over the next several days with many commentators suggesting that what someone does in one aspect of their life is not relevant to their corporate life. There is a term for people with such ideas – stupid.

If a person is prepared to cheat on their most significant partner, and ignore the honesty needed in the most important of relationships, we can only expect that they will also be prepared to cheat on items with similar gravitas – business partners, their taxes, their finances etc. Now I am not trying to put  ignoring a  parking meter as the same as murder, but the decision making that goes into an immoral or unethical decision, particularly an ongoing set of immoral or unethical decisions and the deceit that is required to maintain the coverup, is a decision maker you don’t want on your team, or managing anything, let alone investors money, or the security of your personal identity.

I certainly have made mistakes in how I have dealt with others at times as well. And I don’t know this fellow’s situation and the nature of the relationship he has with his wife. What I do know is that when I see the level of discourse on whether it should affect how we think about him as a decision maker, it is another piece of evidence our society is falling apart, and that there is a growing percentage of the people we share the planet with who are very confused about how to conduct themselves and interact with others. Perhaps this is how we ended up with Trump.

Django

CANADA DAY

POSTED: JUNE 30, 2025

Canada Day, JULY 1,  has always been a big thing to me. Like many Canadians I have had grandparents who were from somewhere else, and at least one parent who had chosen the country to call their new home.

We have gone in phases of course with many who will hyphenate their heritage and loyalties, Italian-Canadians, Irish-Canadians etc. but today with the threats to the country so real, and the challenges so great, it is exciting to see most of us just dropping that hyphenated portion and be proud of the country we have chosen.

Like the rest of the world, we have a lot of problems, some of our own making. Top of that list is our conflicted history with the Indigenous Peoples. But I think we are on the right path to reconciliation, even if it is early going.

I will be celebrating the day with a lot of Canadians and Canadian supporters on En Plein Air, here in Malta. I will be doing some cooking of course. There will be maple syrup, and various Canadian products. Its hard to source many of them in Malta but there will be a lot of Canadian Wines and Beer and some Alberta steak and some seafood from the Maritimes. The only thing I wont be serving is Poutine. I have always just found the combination of fries, gravy and cheese, gross. The soundtrack will range from the old stuff – Rush, Joni, Guess Who, Mr. Young of course, through the years of The Hip, Rough Trade, Sarah Mclachlan and then into the current crop but all in a mix, much like our country.

The attire will include various shirts involving the Maple Leaf, with several hockey shirts in the crowd.

We will end the evening with some Canadian Ice Wine, butter tarts, Nanaimo bars.  The weather in Malta will be a great day and we will probably spend part of it out anchored off Gozo.

I have hosted this party before and with some certainty can set out clearly how the day ahead will go. I can’t however predict the future for Canada, but like all Canadians will have my elbows up, ready for what comes next.

Happy Canada Day!

Django

THE TURN

 

We all know the turn. Its that point when everything shifts -often in a significant way. In the book where the protagonist is seemingly losing whatever battle has been waged but then some event occurs and that underdog is now moving ahead.  Optimists look for the positive upswing, pessimists know there will always be a downswing.

In the ebb and flow of most things the turn occurs and when it is a dramatic turn well that’s something we can’t take our eyes away from.

Usually most of us will have an interest in some big world events that are going well or not, and at the same time some personal things, health, happiness, financial security, love, that will be going well or not, but the whole thing is a mixture of some aspects getting better and some getting worse. It keeps us on an even keel psychologically.

But every now and again a lot of stuff will turn so powerfully bad that its hard to see the elements that have remained positive.

Donald Trump has really shaken me.  I am losing count of the new American States that Trump is musing about annexing: Canada – 51st , Greenland – 52nd , Panama Canal 53rd , Mexico 54th , Palestine with Gaza as 55th and West Bank as 56th or are they to be 55A and 55B?

And this of course to be part of the United States that are not really that “United”.

And how are these states to be treated – like they currently treat Puerto Rico?  YIKES!

While this is going on down here on earth, the Musk Monster is musing about which planets should also be annexed.

And those employees at USAID who had dedicated their careers to trying to have a positive outreach for the U.S. are now about to be unemployed. The incremental inroads the United States has made in outreach in a treacherous world over decades was wiped out with the stroke of a sharpie. This is one of the organizations that kept events like 9/11 from happening much earlier. At this point every month of hardship created by actions like Israel and the U.S. destroying Gaza is pushing more young men to be prepared to die for the cause of fighting America.

So why am I going on with such a perspective that is all about the negative. Well, there is not much that is positive right now. As I age, I am increasingly seeing friends health change quickly. One day they are thriving and the next struggling to survive from one condition or another. Another big example is climate. In a relatively short period of time our planets health has swung from coping to perilous.

Oh, oh, I can feel a metaphor coming on……

 

THE TURN

Newfallen snow,

Lovingly rolled,

And assembled.

Now reduced

To a tophat

And carrot

In a pool of water.

 

 

But perhaps I have just tuned in to the movie at the wrong point. Things were bad, then they got worse, then another level of worse …… and now perhaps…… the turn.

Django

KNOWNS, UNKNOWNS, KNOWN UNKNOWNS, UNKNOWN KNOWNS & THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR

POSTED: January 1, 2025

A few nights ago, I had a call from my buddy Jim. He was ranting on about moving to cash. Apparently if you have any investments this is something you do when you think the investment world is at a turning point. While it may affect me if the investment world is at a turning point, it is not something I can really do anything about as all my investment funds are tied up in perishable foods for the week in my pantry.

But for him, this is a big deal. Like me, he is seventy, and while he has travelled a different path we have both seen ups and downs in the world, whether armed conflict, recessions, political coups and regime change and of course a major pandemic and the erosion of the atmosphere. But his income is derived from the investments he has made, not from a pension or government assistance or doing any work for an income, so there is some pressure to not get it wrong. So while he was chattering on about leading indicators, fundamentals, break up values and the like I was able to translate this to mean he was anticipating THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR.

Because we go back so far as friends, I think this term originated with the risk, while sitting in one of our bedrooms, smoking, or looking at magazines we should not have had, or drinking something pilfered from one our parents alcohol cabinets, that there would be the knock on the door from a parent.

For us, the term was just reduced to The Knock, but the definition remained the same – a term for anticipating that somewhat foreseen event, with unknown timing that would change the direction of future events. Of course, the term has literal and very negative applications for fallen military and police personnel, but there are good examples as well. Certainly, every woman I have known who is in her third trimester of pregnancy has a bag packed and by the door ready for the quick trip to the hospital for the big event.

But most often the unknown timing of whatever the event is, poses a problem. Friends who are very elderly know what is to come, and usually make a lot of preparations ahead as they don’t know when that knock on the door will come but that it is inevitable, and with the passage of time its inevitability becomes more certain.

Like many things in life, its all about the preparation. If the knock is a power failure for example its best to have some non- perishable foods put aside to get you through several days and some cash as your credit cards wont work.

And yes, this heavily relates to the Jahori Window from the work of the psychologists Luft & Ingham in the 1950s and the heavy use of the terms known knowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns at Nasa, that Rumsfeld repeated in his speech to the U.S. Department of Defense when trying to justify an attack to find weapons of mass destruction. A knock on the door is foreseeable (a known unknown) in some cases, like living in a hurricane zone in hurricane season, the only variable is when it might occur, in contrast to an uncharted meteorite which is an unknown unknown.

This conversation, like many with my buddy Jim involved considerable time, and with me in Malta and him in Toronto occur at strange hours of the day to be consuming a fair bit of wine so sometimes the wine is consumed at one end of the line and coffee or tea at the other. This one involved wine on both ends so the discussion of known knowns and unknown knowns regarding a knock on the door takes on a special dimension when wine is involved.

At our age we are both grappling with the meaning of everything and how it fits in the world – an ever-changing world.  In this case our big epiphany (I expect self evident to anyone else) was that while it is important to be prepared as much as possible for various things that might be a knock on the door, it is equally important to recognize that we can not anticipate some of those things – a negative medical diagnosis for example – so we need to very much live in the moment. Yes, make plans for the future and yes be organized for those predictable risks that we can foresee, but enjoy the moment, and the people we are with.

We have a whole fresh start on the year. I am going to make 2025 a memorable one, and hope you do as well.

Django