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!

Photos - 2025

 Sunrise in the East

Sunset On the West

Credits:
1. The top two photographs are by Daniel Pullen and there are more in this article:
"Battling The Sea On The Outer Banks,' Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, Nov.12, 2025.
2. The third photo is from: "2025: The Year in Pictures - Reflections of Turbulent Times," NYT, Dec.31, 2025. The caption:

Jan. 9 Los Angeles

"A house destroyed by the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and engulfed thousands of homes. Once known for its stunning views, the Pacific Palisades area was left unrecognizable by the blaze." Kyle Grillot for The New York Times

3.The photo of the ICE posters is from: "ICE Plans to Spend $100 Million on Influencer-Driven 'Wartime' Recruitment Campaign," The Washington Post, Drew Harwell & Joyce Sohyun Lee, Dec. 31, 2025.
  "An internal ICE document shared among immigration officials details plans to use influencers and geo-targeted ads to rapidly hire thousands of deportation officers."
4.The picture of the rubble of the East Wing is from" "New Images Offer Closer Look at Demolition For the White House Ballroom," Jonathan Edwards, The Washington Post, Dec. 31, 2025. Also lost were many old trees. 

   Pictures Are Worth Thousands of Words, But These Sum It Up For 2025

"Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful: A damage assessment of the President’s first year back in the White House", By Susan B. Glasser, The Atlantic, Dec.31, 2025

  "No matter how low one’s expectations were for 2025, the most striking thing about the year when Donald Trump became President again is how much worse it turned out to be.

   Did we anticipate that Trump would come back to office wanting to rule as a king, consumed by revenge and retribution, and encouraged by sycophants and yes-men who would insure that he faced few of the constraints that hampered him in his first term? Yes, but now we know that bracing for the worst did not make the inevitable any less painful. In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them."

Cashiers

 High Living in the High Country
   Cashiers is a very small town located in the mountains of North Carolina, southwest of Asheville. To pronounce the name properly say "KASH-erz" or "Cash-ERS." I suppose the demonym applied to the residents would be simply, "Cashiers." 
   The derivation of the name for the town apparently is related to the fact that those who founded it, often acted as cashiers for the gold miners in the area. Curiously enough, Cashiers is still a good name for the town, since some of those who now have homes there, handle large amounts of cash.
   There are now over 1,000 billionaires in the U.S. and Cashiers has more than its fair share. These Hillbillionaires were drawn to the area for the same reason the Vanderbilts went to Asheville;  the natural beauty, cool and clean air and peace and tranquility.
   You will likely not spot many in the town square since they tend to congregate close-by in clubs with names like "Chattooga" and "Cullasaja." A house at the latter club just sold for $12 million. At the Mountaintop Golf & Lake Club, the initiation fee will be $275,000 starting on Jan.1, which is about $375,000 Canadian if I have aroused your interest. 
  I don't think many of the rich are residing in those huge mountain homes at this time of year and I doubt if they have to cover the costs by putting them on VRBO.  Visit in the summer and fall when you can mingle with the families that provide us with Tabasco and Russell Stover candies, or perhaps play a round of golf with the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. 
  For more information see these two articles: 
"What We Know About America's 1,135 Billionaires --- Exclusive, up-close Look at the Richest people in the U.S..." by Theo Francis and Inti Pacheco, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 6, 2025.
"The North Carolina Village Where America’s Wealthiest Go to Fly Under the Radar: Home to at least four billionaires, the low-key, ‘no frills’ enclave of Cashiers has one of the country’s highest concentrations of wealth," E.B. Solomont, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 26, 2025.
  "In the Blue Ridge Mountains, the unincorporated village has no mayor, no local police force and no central public water supply. There is a limited public sewer system, just a handful of sidewalks and one Ingles supermarket, affectionately known as "Mingles" because it is where locals tend to socialize. But what Cashiers does have is uber-wealthy homeowners who have been coming to the area for more than a century. With a full-time population of just 825 -- and at least four billionaires with homes in Cashiers -- the unincorporated village has one of the highest concentrations of wealth in the country, according to data from Altrata, a wealth-intelligence firm. It also remains one of the most under-the-radar -- by design." [Now you know where they are.]
   For 'normal' tourist information, see "Cashiers Valley, N.C. 

   For a more upscale view, see, The Laurel Magazine
If you are just curious about demonyms see: "Unobvious Demonyms." 
The Bonus:
A recent film has a demonym in the title: The Baltimorons: A Christmas Movie. That is a joke, of course, since those from that city are "Baltimoreans."

Geraldine Brook's Library

    At the beginning of the month I wrote about the library of Louise Penny. I will end it by focusing on the books in Geraldine Brook's barn. Apart from showing another collection of books in a private library, you will learn about some books you may want to acquire for your own.

   I recognized the name "Geraldine Brooks", most likely because of her journalism. An Aussie, she was a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and contributed articles to other magazines. She has also written many books and one of them, March, resulted in a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
   Her husband was Tony Horwitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and passed away in 2019. He also wrote books and both of them published works of fiction, as well as non-fiction. In short, if you look up either author you will have enough reading material to take you deep into 2026. 

   Ms. Brook's books are found in a 1740s farmhouse on Martha's Vineyard. Many of Mr. Horwitz's were also there, but some were donated to libraries after his death. 

   The books are generally segregated in the categories of fiction and non-fiction. 

   

The books found between these windows are ones written by authors who have visited and stayed at the house on Martha's Vineyard. 

Sources:
  The pictures and the information are from this article: "Geraldine Brooks Takes Us On A Tour of Her Home Library: The bestselling author's collection isn't focused on fancy editions - it's full of small treasures from a literary life,' Jacob Brogan, Washington Post, Dec.20, 2025.

  The Wikipedia entries for both of them are entertaining in and of themselves. One of her books, Foreign Correspondence, is based on her attempts to track down old penpals across the world. She was born in Australia because her father " was an American big-band singer who was stranded in Adelaide on a tour of Australia when his manager absconded with the band's pay." 
  Mr. Horwitz was born in Washington. His father was the neurosurgeon who operated on the D.C. policeman, wounded during the assassination attempt on President Reagan. Mr. Horwitz collapsed while on a walk in 2019. 
  The London Public Library has several Brook's books, including the recent, Memorial Days. You will also find there, Spying on the South, the book that Horwitz was working on when he died. They also have his, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. 
The Bonus: 
  If you still need more to read, see the Wikipedia entry for their son, Nathaniel Horwitz, or the entry for the company "Hunterbrook." He founded it with his college friend, Sam Koppleman. All of what follows looks very interesting, but I will leave it up to you to investigate it.
   Hunterbrook is a "media company and a hedge fund that asks a question that spits in the face of old-school journalism rules: What if an investigative journalism outfit could profit directly off of the malfeasance that it uncovers?"      
   "Koppelman and Horwitz’s company is called Hunterbrook — a portmanteau between Koppelman’s middle name Hunter (after Hunter S. Thompson) and Horwitz’s Brooks (after his mother, the author Geraldine Brooks). The idea is simple, if surprising to industry insiders: They have two companies — the media company does financial investigative journalism. The financial company invests based on that work, taking short positions on a company that the newsroom is about to skewer publicly or taking long positions on its competitors.
   Based on this elevator pitch, Hunterbrook the hedge fund raised $100 million in seed cash all within the past year to invest based on the work of Hunterbrook the newsroom." For more see: "This Hedge Fund Wants to Save Investigative Journalism — By Using It to Game the Market," by By Calder McHugh, Politico Magazine,05/25/2024.

Greg Newby (R.I.P. 1965 - 2025)

 Project Gutenberg
   Over 50 years ago the American, Michael Hart began assembling a digital library of eBooks which would be freely available to everyone. There are now over 75,000 works in the collection which can be accessed by anyone with a computer. Thousands of volunteers are involved and one of the major ones was the Canadian, Greg Newby who was born in Montreal. He died in Whitehorse on Oct. 21, 2025 and his passing is worth noting.
   A thorough obituary by John Last is found in The Globe and Mail, Oct. 31, 2025: "Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby Helped Put a Trove of Literature Online." It begins this way:
   "Greg Newby was eight years old when he wrote a letter to Santa Claus and finished it with a simple request: “Make sure other people get things too.” 
   It was that spirit of generosity that drove Mr. Newby throughout his life as he helped spearhead one of the most significant public service projects in modern internet history: Project Gutenberg, a massive online library of more than 75,000 free, public domain texts....
   He is remembered by his colleagues at the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the non-profit overseeing the Project Gutenberg collection, as a “Fourth Industrial Revolution visionary,” who helped marshal the chaotic, creative forces of the early internet to help serve the public interest....
   Mr. Newby quickly became “undoubtedly the most consequential volunteer” in the history of the project, according to Simon Rowberry, a historian and author of The Early Development of Project Gutenberg, c.1970-2000. "
   

   He was clearly an interesting fellow, who ended up in the very far north.
  "The following year, Mr. Newby relocated to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he soon swapped his massive collection of science fiction books for a collection of altogether different type: retired sled dogs. Always animal lovers, Mr. Newby and Ms. Kingsley already owned five dogs when they moved into a house with eight retired huskies onsite. “All of a sudden, we had 13 dogs,” Ms. Kingsley recalls.“
   At first … we had a ‘no more than seven dogs in the house’ rule,” she said. But Mr. Newby could not resist a puppy dog stare, sneaking more and more dogs into the house while Ms. Kingsley was away. “Soon, we had 16 dogs in the house.” His family says he cared for more than 80 dogs over his lifetime.Mr. Newby’s time in the North also saw him develop his passion for outdoor pursuits, nurtured throughout a childhood of family camping trips and Boy Scout excursions. While he participated in his first ultramarathon as early as 1998, he later competed in several 100-mile sled races and Arctic ultramarathons – resulting in frostbite to his toes.
   Mr. Newby cycled through several other jobs in his last few years: a stint at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, where he oversaw the purchase of a $100-million supercomputer; a role with Compute Canada, a national research group; and finally, a period as eServices manager at the Government of Yukon. He and Ms. Kingsley have called an off-grid cabin on the shore of Lake Laberge their home for the past five years. 
   But this remoteness did not isolate him from the community of internet pioneers he had helped nurture. On message boards across the internet, news of his passing was greeted with great sadness by former students and collaborators, who admired his stoic nature and steady leadership. His final years with Project Gutenberg saw the pioneering use of new artificial intelligence technology to convert thousands of public domain texts into audiobooks, in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft. The technology was made publicly available, for free. In 2023, Time magazine named it one of the best inventions of the year."
Sources: 
   Mr. Newby's website is here: "Greg Newby's Personal Pages."
   See the Wikipedia entry: "Gregory B. Newby." 
   More is found on the Gutenberg.org website. 
   For Canada, see also, Gutenberg Canada. 
The Bonus:
   Remember also, another massive volunteer project - INTERNET ARCHIVE.
"Closing the Book on 2025
   As another year comes to a close, we are so grateful to share all of the achievements and projects that 2025 brought us, with all of you—our amazing supporters and patrons. See below for some of our most significant moments from this year, none of which would be possible without your continued support. 
What We’ve Achieved
1 Trillion Web Pages Archive
   This year, the Wayback Machine archived its 1 trillionth webpage—making us the largest publicly available repository of web history. These web pages represent more than just numbers; they have a real impact on people's lives, research, and memory. Since 1996, the Internet Archive has worked with libraries and partners around the world to build a shared digital library of humanity’s online history: capturing websites large and small—from breaking news to forgotten personal pages—so they remain accessible for future generations. Details are provided here."