Donald Trump + William Onyeabor + Catherine Warwick

To the shock of people who haven't paid attention to anything for the last nine years, Trump is picking the least qualified crackpots and criminals he can possibly find for every government position. The best-case scenario for this country is that they'll be too incompetent and have too many competing agendas to accomplish anything, and that our enemies will be chivalrous enough to not attack us while our defense secretary is a Fox News host who doesn't wash his hands because he doesn't believe in germs. I'm trying not to stress about how screwed we are because that won't help anything. It's still a touchy subject with me, though.

Yeah, as hard as I'm trying to be spiritual and enlightened and stuff, I haven't yet figured out how to generate any tolerance, patience, or love for pathologically stupid people whose pathological stupidity directly makes my life worse. (I did take the time to make sure this one was actually a Trump supporter and I wasn't misinterpreting soem kind of weird sarcasm.) And if being so unkind to her was wrong, why did it feel so, so good? By the way, this is probably the only purple-haired woman on Earth who supports Trump. She's probably unaware that right-wing misogynists use women with unnatural hair colors as a derisive shorthand for everything they hate about liberalism and/or feminism.

ADDENDUM: Literally today. These people have never had an original thought in their lives.

Anyway, I need to talk about something else. I'm obsessed with the late Nigerian musician William Onyeabor this week. I've loved his catchy, repetitive electronic melodies and simple yet sometimes deep lyrics for over a decade, but I'm in a phase of loving them even more right now. Here are a couple of songs that have been on repeat in my head. He has plenty of equally deserving songs, but I'll limit myself to two and increase the chance of someone actually listening to them and appreciating my taste in music, which is all I've ever really wanted out of life.

Heaven and Hell

Fantastic Man

Speaking of "Fantastic Man," that's also the name of a cool documentary about him that I want to share with everyone but can't because I don't know who else cares about such a niche topic. I just think history and culture and music are really interesting. It's only half an hour, so you don't have much to lose. I found it by accident while trying to find information about "Crashes in Love," a movie he claimed to have made in 1977 that nobody has ever seen because that's just the kind of person he was.

Now here's a little mystery that's gnawed at me this week, and possibly nobody else in the world cares, but this is my blog and I'm going to write about it. When Catherine Warwick was fourteen, she sang a few songs on the soundtrack album for the game known as "Mother" in Japan and "EarthBound Beginnings" in the US. The most famous of these is "Pollyanna," a deliciously optimistic number that's perfect for forgetting about how screwed we are, but "Bein' Friends" is almost as good.

Pollyanna

Bein' Friends

After that, she had a couple of unsuccessful attempts at a music career, then reportedly became a music teacher and started a family. I only know that because of my recent unsuccessful attempt to find out if she sang a couple of songs in the Lego Island Xtreme Stunts game. The uncredited singer really sounds like her to me. The voice is perhaps just a touch deeper, which makes sense because she would have been twenty-seven instead of fourteen. These songs were both as good as anything on the radio in the early 2000s, so you should listen to them even if you don't share my curiosity. The first is a chill techno track and the second is a sweet love ballad. Honestly, LEGO media from the 2000s included so much good music that deserves to be on streaming platforms but isn't.

2-Step

LEGO is All I Need