POND HOCKEY

 

Regis Francois Gignoux (1816-1882)
   To change the subject, and to provide pictures rather than prose, I call your attention to the painting above. It can be purchased for $195,000 (USD), which is about $267,650 (CND) on Jan. 24.

   Canadians should be interested because, "This painting holds historic value as it is one of the earliest known scenes of boys playing ice hockey." Gignoux, the artist, is not from Quebec, but from Lyons, although the scene may be from Canada, or the northeastern, U.S. The painting and quote are both from Questroyal Fine Art.
  Another winter scene was found at another gallery. As well, Gignoux painted Niagara Falls. 

  He is known for his outdoor winter scenes, but this one is from underground at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. 

   Gignoux is a representative of the "Hudson River School", which, as I have indicated, produced paintings I admire. See, " The Hudson River School" and "Jasper Cropsey".

Sources: 
  Gignoux's picture is from Harvard Art Museums and this good description of the cave painting is found in: "From Historic Paintings of Mammoth Cave: Nature’s Underground Art Gallery," by Bob Thompson February 28, 2023, Kentucky Monthly. 

"Marie-François-Régis Gignoux (1816-1882) was a French landscape painter who was active in the United States from 1840-70. Gignoux visited Mammoth Cave in 1843 and painted a view of the cave entrance and the extensive Rotunda. At the bottom left is a party of four people. On the left is probably cave guide Stephen Bishop, with his torch-throwing stick and supplies for the cave trip carried around his shoulders. To the right of the guide is the artist, Gignoux (wearing the hat) and his tools of the trade to paint the underground wonder. To the right of the artist is Gignoux’s assistant seated in front of a rock with the artist’s selection of colors. Above the assistant, climbing up a ladder, is another cave guide with a number of lamps to help illuminate the darkness. What looks like a roaring fire actually is a number of the open-flame lamps brought together, which put out a great deal of smoke."

FACTLET (19)

 Logorrhea
   Here are the earliest definitions of the word as found in the Oxford English Dictionary:
1902–
Excessive volubility accompanying some forms of mental illness; also gen., an excessive flow of words, prolixity.
1902
Logorrhea refers to the excessive flow of words, a common symptom in cases of mania.
1907 In the case of a man suffering from the insanity known as logorrhea the ideas come rapidly tumbling over each other.

   I looked up the definition of " logorrhea" because it appeared in this piece: "It’s Time to Talk About Donald Trump’s Logorrhea: How Many Polite Ways are There to Ask Whether the President of the United States is Losing It?, By Susan B. Glasser January 22, 2026, The Atlantic. Here is how it was used and the Factlet is in bold:
"Donald Trump is an editor’s nightmare and a psychiatrist’s dream. Amid all the coverage marking the first anniversary of his return to the White House, one story—which did not get the attention it deserved—stood out for me: a Times analysis of how much more the President has been talking and talking and talking. The findings? One million nine hundred and seventy-seven thousand six hundred and nine words in the Presidential appearances, as of January 20th—an increase of two hundred and forty-five per cent compared with the first year of Trump’s first term in office, back in 2017."

   I realize I recently said I would not bring up this 'subject' again, but technically it was brought up by someone else and you have to admit that the Factlet is an interesting one. Here the data are illustrated:

They are from this article, which indicates that Trump is talking far more this term than he did in his first. 

  The article also charts the use of particular words, geographic terms, company names and even superlatives. The article: "How Trump Is Talking Differently in His Second Term," Jonah Smith, Jan. 20, 2026, The New York Times. I am not sure how exactly the tabulations were made, but they seem to originate from this source: Roll Call's Factba.se. 
The Bonus: 
   Here is another interesting Factlet, found in a very good article in The New Yorker. The fact checkers at that magazine are known for their rigorous scrutiny. I wonder how long it took them to validate this statistic?
   "America’s busiest national park isn’t Yosemite or Yellowstone; it’s the Great Smoky Mountains, which straddles the heavily forested border of North Carolina and Tennessee. Half the country can drive there in a day."
   From: "The Backcountry Rescue Squad at America’s Busiest National Park: In the Great Smoky Mountains, an auxiliary team of élite outdoorsmen answers the call when park-goers’ hikes, climbs, and rafting adventures go wrong," Paige Williams, The New Yorker, Jan. 12, 2026.
P.S. About the fact checkers, see: "The History of The New Yorker’s Vaunted Fact-Checking Department," Zach Helfand, Aug. 25, 2025, The New Yorker.
  The last Factlet was about Menopause. 

Anaïs Nin's Library

    I will do this quickly in order to push the unpleasant post below, farther down the page. This one will be the third in a row about a private library assembled by a woman; the last two belong to Geraldine Brooks and Louise Penny. Here is what Nin's library looks like.

  Given Nin's interests, one can say that this is a library for adults only. If now you are interested, then simply go to the Wikpedia entry for Anaïs Nin, where you will likely spend the rest of the day. There is little need for me to say much more since you will surely go deep into the erotic rabbit holes hinted at in the article provided. She had, for example, two husbands (at the same time), one in the east and another in the west, which she referred to as her "bicoastal trapeze."

  

This is the outside of the house in Los Angeles. It was designed by Eric Lloyd Wright, whose grandfather was Frank and the Wikipedia entries for both will provide you with more interesting content than I am offering. 

    Her full name is, by the way, Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell and she was a flamenco dancer, who also practiced psychoanalysis and slept with her psychoanalyst, Otto Rank. 
    To provide a bit more content, which will push the unpleasant subject below out of sight, I will mention an earlier post about people with Very Long Names. 
    I have also written often about Single-Author Journals and Nin has two devoted to her: Anaïs: An International Journal and A Café in Space: The Anaïs Nin Literary Journal.
    If you are new to the subject of erotica, see my: "Erotica: A Beginner's Guide."
    I have also done several posts about collections of books by men. See, for example, "Boys With Books."
Source: 
 "Anaïs Nin’s Los Angeles Hideaway Still Keeps Her Secrets: Shrouded by the pines of Silver Lake, the erotic writer’s minimalist, midcentury residence is a lasting monument to her life and legacy," Kurt Soller, The New York Times Style Magazine, March 21, 2022. 

Doomscrolling Defined

             Headlines From the Front Page of the New York Times
     There is no escaping this subject, even when you turn to Mulcahy's Miscellany. You will be able to figure out quickly what the subject is, by looking at the following headlines. These are from just one day, today, Jan. 20, 2026. From one front page! There were a few more found on the e-edition of the NYT, where the same subject is involved, if not explicitly mentioned: "We Ask Only That You Don’t Harm Greenland" and "Volunteers in Minnesota Deliver Groceries So Immigrants Can Hide at Home."
    My resolution early in this new year is to not mention this subject again, but you know how difficult it can be to keep one's resolutions. There will be a massive global regret when we realize how much time we all spent on such a subject.

"The Trump Drama Hits Davos"
"Trump Threatens 200 Percent Tariffs on French Wine"
Trump Issues M.L.K. Day Proclamation After Criticism
"Trump’s First Year Could Have Lasting Economic Consequences"
"Trump 2.0: A Year of Unconstrained Power"
"How Trump Is Remaking America, State by State"
"When Trump Took a Whack at the C.D.C., Atlanta Lost Something, Too"
"Federal Reserve Inquiry Clouds Trump’s Supreme Court Bid to Oust Lisa Cook"
"How Trump Uses the Oval Office to Flex Power on the World Stage"
"‘This Is Trump’s Goon Squad, for Christ’s Sake’"
"After Trump Shut the Border, a Texas Shelter for Migrants Emptied"
"With Threats to Greenland, Trump Sets America on the Road to Conquest"
"European "Leaders Push Back as President Reinforces Greenland Threats"
"Falsehoods Fueled Trump’s First Year Back in Office"

                     The Subject Could Not Be Avoided, Even in Cartoons

And, again, even when not directly mentioned, the subject is obvious.

Acronym of the Year - Already

 FAFO
   Today, the temperature rose several degrees (many more in Fahrenheit) and I have another excuse for not blogging. I couldn't resist doing this post, however, since I can be the second person, early in this new year, to suggest that at year-end, FAFO will be the acronym that will best summarize all of 2026.
  The person who called FAFO to my attention is Professor McWhorter and I am pleased to be able to agree with someone, something perhaps we should all try this year. Here is what he said and he is a linguist - and he is also black since apparently we are still supposed to be concerned about such things.
  "My bet is that we will hear a lot about the FAFO doctrine this year. By December, it will be a contender for a spot on my list of the most important words of 2026."
   I will not bother to define the acronym. You will learn what it means soon enough.

Source:
  "The Normalization oF 'FAFO' Might Be Good For English," John McWhorter, The New York Times, Jan.8, 2026.
(HINT - Hesgeth is involved for those of you who are baffled.)

OATS (6)

          I suppose I should really get back to blogging, although I can't say I have been deluged with queries about my absence, or noticed a demand for new posts in MM. Right now I am feeling like those people who aren't ready to return to the office. Actually, I have far less motivation than they, since I don't get paid. Still, it is depressingly dreary outside and I might as well do this since there is nothing else I can do for which I might be paid.

   Apart from lacking in motivation, I am also lacking in both intelligence and imagination and am having difficulty in coming up with a topic, although maybe all I need to do is ask the AI guy: "What should I write about?" The answer, however,  might be something difficult, about which I know nothing, so I will now try to come up with something. 
   I have decided to remain contrarian and will revive an old series, even though the subject is not a positive one, especially at the beginning of a new year. It is basically about getting old and dying, which many people do, even those who think 80 is the new 50. 
   The series is called "OATS" and that is an acronym for OldAgeThemeS. It was originally undertaken to irritate a couple who I will describe as "never-deathers", in denial of the existence of doom. "OATS" is, in other words, not for those who are feeling their oats and don't want to be reminded of mortality, or for those wasting their time at the gym.
   I see that the first "OATS" was done five years ago and I confess that the couple for whom it was intended is still around. About four of those years, however, were spent by them, not me, in abstinence and the gym and they will be irritated to be reminded of that. That first post has the title "Contrarian News For Old Codgers: The News Is Not Good", and it consist of a discussion of Michael Kinsley's book, Old Age: A Beginners Guide. 
   The second "OATS" post, does what this one will also do -- offer you better writing that is provided by someone else. The writer in the first post is Margaret Drabble and you are presented with some of her thoughts which were found in, The Dark Flood Rises. For her comments see: "More Contrarian News for Old Timers." 
   Now, finally, here is some good prose about the bad subject of old age.

   This is from Staring At the Sun by Julian Barnes.

  “Jean had often wondered what it would be like to grow old. When she had been in her fifties, and still feeling in her thirties, she heard a talk on the radio by a gerontologist.”Put cotton wool in your ears’, he had said, ‘and pebbles in your shoes. Pull on rubber gloves. Smear vaseline over your glasses, and there you have it: ‘instant ageing’. 
  It was a good test, but it naturally contained a flaw. You never did age instantly; you never did have a sharp memory for comparison. Nor, when she looked back over the last forty of her hundred years, did it seem initially, or even mainly, a matter of sensory deprivation. You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you. It wasn’t that you couldn’t walk as far as you used to, it was that other people didn’t expect you to; and if they didn’t, then it needed vain obstinacy to persist.”....
 “ She lived increasingly inside her head, and was content to be there. Memories, there were far too many memories; they raced across her sky like Irish weather. Her feet with each succeeding year, seemed a little farther away from her hands; she dropped things, stumbled a little, was fearful; but mostly what she noticed was the smirking paradox of old age; how everything seemed to take longer than it used to, but how, despite this, time seemed to go faster.”
[Jean above is 100, but this is a fictional work.]

Sources for the Morbidly Curious:
  The third OATS discusses MAID, a subject to which I will soon return.
  The fourth OATS suggests that all that brain exercise may not be good for you. 
  The fifth OATS is about Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Natural Causes, of which she died.

Oddments (2) Year-End 2025

 For a definition of "oddments" see "Oddments (1) where you will also learn about the CASTRATI and how pickleball has contributed to noise pollution. 

Local Headline of the Year
   In "Survival of the Weakest" I suggest that there seems to be a surge in psychological issues (and the acronyms required to describe them), and that we are all increasingly mentally unstable. More proof is found in this headline: "LHSC Ending Unlimited Mental Health Benefits Saying Popularity Made It Too Expensive," Matthew Trevithick, CBC News, Dec. 5, 2025.
"London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) is getting rid of unlimited mental health benefits for staff, blaming ballooning costs and former administrators for implementing it without proper due diligence or oversight....Two years on, the man tasked with overhauling LHSC argues it was just one of several bad decisions made by those no longer in charge at southwestern Ontario's largest hospital network."
   Given that most of the headlines this year were depressing ones, here are some that are funny: HEADLINES. 

TV ADS
   

Those who don't believe in MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) are generally only those who have not seen, over and over, the Trivago ad in which that guy appears, or those who have not watched all the ads "ON BETTING."

New Technological Developments
   The year was not a total loss. There was this, whatever it is.

A Quote or Two
 "Nevertheless, a world in which all citizens are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas, even if they hold views accurately deemed absurd and hateful by establishment elites, is better than one in which such elites control who can speak. Although it’s important not to downplay the dangers and harms associated with some of today’s most popular social media pundits—Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Tommy Robinson, Russell Brand, Nick Fuentes, and so on—we should not aim for a world in which they are prevented from advocating those views to audiences who want to hear them....Dan Williams in his cleverly named substack: Conspicuous Cognition. 

   "Reading Searle’s review, though, it struck me that very few of the many contemporary writings on the university concern its revitalization as a place to pursue excellence. We stress instead the avoidance of homogeneity, perhaps precisely because we no longer believe that we can teach people to think hard on their own. By Oliver Traldi, "John Searle's Campus War" in Fusion, Dec. 23, 2025.

    "The idea that in my discipline, philosophy, there are hundreds of fine-grained dogmas (many of them concerning “social justice”) that one must accept is entirely destructive. To do philosophy effectively, you’d better be ready to say what you believe to be true and can somehow substantiate. In my more than 30-year career, I saw many failures of this sort, for understandable reasons. If you did not recite the dogma, your kids could lose their health insurance.
   I think the period of my career (roughly 1990 to 2023) corresponded to a collapse in the quality of research and publication in philosophy and other humanities and social science disciplines. In 1980, there were big, distinctive and idiosyncratic philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, W.V.O. Quine, Arthur Danto and Judith Jarvis Thomson. By 2010, their voices had been muted, and perhaps no one as bold as they were could have survived grad school. My impression is that many practitioners of other disciplines feel roughly the same. Academic production is more homogenous, blander, safer and less sincere."
Fro: "As A Professor, I've Seen Woke and MAGA Censorship. Which Is Worse?", by Crispin Sartwell, The Washington Post, Oct. 13, 2025.

Wikipedia
  Recently I did a post relating to Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, which are two projects to be highly valued. Back in 2019, I did this post about Wikipedia, "Wikipedia - Happy Birthday" which you use daily and which should also be highly valued, even if you think only AI is important. 
  Today in the Globe and Mail, they re-published an article by Simon Garfield, who you are more likely to believe: "An Encyclopedia Like No Other: How Wikipedia Became One of the Greatest Achievements of the Modern Age," July 11, 2025. Here is just a bit from it. Make one of your year-end donations to WIKIPEDIA (I have no relationship to it, but, like you, I use it all the time and do donate when they ask for help, which is fairly rare, unlike most other entities, especially at this time of year.)

   "Wikipedia, which launched Jan. 15, 2001, has remained true to its original intention, the establishment of a volunteer-edited, free, live encyclopedia, a resource able to respond immediately and predominantly accurately to changing events. Exceptionally for such a popular resource, Wikipedia does not track you or sell any of your search information. It does not carry advertisements or monetize itself beyond regular appeals to users for small donations. It is fully accountable, with every keystroke credited and dated to a specific user. It is continually trying to improve its accuracy, reach, diversity of content and contributors. And beyond all this, it is a thing relentlessly and reliably useful.
  Being both intellectually rigorous and shamelessly trivial, it reflects the world as it sees itself. Its anniversary should be a cause for celebration, an overdue confirmation, I think (due perhaps even from its many early critics), that it has become one of the greatest things online, a rare representative of the internet for good. It is also, I suggest, one of the greatest inventions of our modern age."

HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR!