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!

"BLACK FRIDAY"

Combat Linguistic Imperialism (& Marketing)

  You also must be tired of reading or hearing about “Black Friday.” My proposal is that we eliminate it. If merchants object, since the sales that day put them in the black, then let’s get rid of those words and call it “Red Friday”, for the other colour in the Canadian flag. Apart from the overuse of “Black Friday” driving us bonkers, consider that it is also American. I had planned to do a lot of research about “Black Friday” and present you with a long essay. But, as usual, Wikipedia does a fine job and even covers Canada. For that matter, one also learns about “Black Friday” in Libya and Wales, where it is more appropriately known as Dydd Gwener y Gwario Gwirion ("Silly Spending Friday").

Use the money you were going to spend and make a generous donation to Wikipedia. About that, I am serious. Have you noticed how many of the AI-generated answers to your questions are based on Wikipedia essays? Eliminate the middle man before it is too late.

  To the merchants’ objection, I will yield, but suggest that it be called something else AND moved to our Thanksgiving. Too many people up here are too busy on American Thanksgiving to go shopping anyway, since they are either watching football or shovelling snow. Snow, another reason to have “Red Friday” earlier.

Cyber Monday The same goes for "Cyber Monday" since it is also an American 'thing'. Let's keep it, if we must for the merchants, but switch it to our earlier holiday date. We could call it "Canuck Monday". My comment about Wikipedia being valuable, holds in this case as well. Look up "Cyber Monday" and you find this CANCON: "Cyber Monday came to Canada in 2008.[15] The National Post featured an article published on November 25, 2010, stating that the parity of the Canadian dollar with the US dollar caused many Canadian retailers to have Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales of their own. According to the article, an estimated 80% of Canadians were expected to participate in Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.[16] Speculation has been made that with all major US television broadcasters—which are typically available to Canadians—emphasizing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales for stores that are also doing business in Canada, Canadian retailers needed to mimic sales offerings in order to keep Canadian dollars from being spent in the US.[16]" To bring my point home about Wikipedia, see the entry for "Canuck" and you will find that it is a slang term for "Canadian", "though its semantic nuances are manifold".

An editorial cartoon portraying Johnny Canuck (c.1910)

"Jack Canuck: O yes! you all come with the glad hand when you know I'm prosperous" [Caricatures of American President Taft and businessmen. Commenting on the American desire to take advantage of the healthy Canadian economy].

Post Script
Some American readers may be surprised to learn that we have Thanksgiving up here. While theirs takes place on the fourth Thursday of November to celebrate the "Black Friday" that follows, ours takes place on the second Monday of October to give thanks that our crops come in earlier. The Bonus In an earlier post, I discussed "Canadian Thanksgiving" and "Columbus Day", which you are now generally advised not to celebrate.

Purchasing Power

  

Global Real Estate Deals
   The President of the United States is ridiculing some countries and is, in turn, being ridiculed for his ridiculous idea of simply buying some places he wants. It may be, however, that he was a better student of history than he was a businessman.  Such deals have been done. Louisiana and Florida were purchased, as was Alaska, and the Danes sold to the Americans their much warmer properties in the Caribbean. 

  It is generally thought these days that areas were simply possessed (mainly by Europeans), rather than purchased. That was not aways the case. For examples see the Wikipedia entry for: "List of Territory Purchased by a Sovereign Nation From Another Sovereign Nation." 
Post Script:
  When Wikipedia first appeared it was also the subject of ridicule and feared, particularly by those who answered questions in libraries. It seems, however, that it works well and I doubt if AI alone would have come up with a list such as the one provided above. If you don't have enough money to buy even a bungalow, perhaps a donation to Wikipedia would make you feel better. Then, to make sure it is still around for a while, send some money to the Internet Archive since you may have noticed that some things that you used to look at on the Internet are now found only on the Internet Archive. Both are provided free from non-profit organizations that exist mainly because of volunteers. 

WIKIPEDIA - Happy Birthday

  Wikipedia was born on Jan.15, 2001 and is now over 18. I think we can all agree, however, that it has been a mature adult for several years. I recently received an email from the Wikimedia Foundation that was full of beautiful pictures of the earth and the things on it. It was their way (as the host of Wikipedia) of saying "Thanks" to me for the few bucks I have contributed to their operation and organization. I am not generally an especially charitable person, but I gave money to them because I use them all the time and I am satisfied with the products they provide. You do too and you probably are also. If you go searching for information about aardvarks you will find Wikipedia and be happy with what they tell you about aardvarks. Send them a donation and birthday wishes.
 
   I was hesitant to offer this endorsement and promotion because my skepticism, about the benefits to be derived from such online connections and internet/web-related things, has increased as the costs for such connections have been made more apparent. The enthusiasm for social media, Facebook, google, algorithms and other digital doodads has diminished as we learn more about ransomware, clickbait fabrications and fake news. A new book asks the question, "Is social media destroying democracy?" and the Canadian government has set up a team to protect us from the mysterious manipulations that might occur in the upcoming election if we don't start building our own walls. Still, even if one is less than sanguine about the latest technological developments coming out of Silicon Valley, one can still say that Wikipedia seems to be a good thing that works well, even though it is the result of the collective work of very large non-profit committee.
 
   Everyone thought such an electronic encyclopedia was an idiotic idea. The name, "Jimmy Wales," which is the name of the co-creator, is a name that seems like it should be in the credits for an Austin City Limits episode, rather the on the page of a reference work. How reliable could an entry be since it could be created by an idealogue or an imbecile? Who was the authority? How could it be produced without the motivation provided by profit and who would work for free?
 
   Initially they seemed like good questions since many imbecilic entries were created and there were hoaxes and pranks and deliberate attempts to sabotage and manipulate the information that was posted. Professors indicated that citations to Wikipedia were not to be used in the creation of essays and reference librarians everywhere relaxed.
 
   Fairly quickly things changed. Jimmy Wales responded that he hoped professors would not countenance the use of Wikipedia, just as he hoped they would disapprove of the use of a regular encyclopedia to produce a research essay. Soon, some professors were asking students to create Wikipedia entries and by the 10th anniversary Wikipedia was asking members of the academic community to create content on public policy issues. The librarians at the New York Public Library held an 'editathon" over six hours, during which they allowed the content creators to come to the library and use the rich research collection to improve the articles relating to  the musical-theatre categories. A major science journal compared the information for some topics in Wikipedia to those in the Encyclopedia Britannica and found out it was not doing too badly. Those thousands of people who were continuously scrutinizing and instantly massaging and improving the contents were apparently doing a very good job.



   Who are these people? That is a good question. One of them was a Canadian named Simon Pulsifer who, while working on the mayoral campaign for an Ottawa candidate, provided 78,000 edits and created between 2,000 and 3,000 articles. Perhaps he was odd and surely he was obsessive, but was he any odder than some of the very odd and obsessive creators of the very authoritative Oxford English Dictionary? They were also mostly volunteers and a few were certifiable. One was a hermit who rarely came out of his cottage and another was an American army surgeon and murderer who cut off his own penis. Most of his useful citations were sent from the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. He is pictured above. In terms of obsessiveness, one of the OED volunteers contributed over 165,000 'slips' which were written by hand and sent by post.



Being a book-loving reader of this blog and now convinced of the usefulness of Wikipedia, perhaps you would like to have a printed set of this reference work in your own library and are wondering how many shelves it would occupy. I am not sure, but if you google "Wikipedia" you will find an entry for it and learn that contains around 6,000,000 articles on almost 50,000,000 pages.

Before you hit the print button, you should know that back in 2015 there was an art project in a New York gallery where an attempt was made to download the then "11 gigabytes of very compressed data" and it took about two weeks. The end result was 76,000 volumes which included a table of contents consisting of 91 volumes. The price: $500,000. It was not printed.

Sources:
See: "Celebrating 10 Years of Wikipedia," Verne G. Kopytoff, The New York Times, Jan. 17, 2011.
For an example of when Wikipedia began to be received more positively by the academic community see: "Editing Wikipedia Entries for Medical School Credit," Noam Cohen, The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2013
  Information about the Canadian contributor is here and, who knows, he may still be contributing: "Prolific Canadian is King of Wikipedia," Alexandra Shimo, The Globe and Mail, Aug.4, 2006.
  The NYPL "editathon" is written about here: "Wikipedia's Deep Dive Into a Library Collection," Amanda Petrusich, The New York Times, Oct. 21, 2011.
  For the article about the attempt to print Wikipedia see "Wikipedia Moves to the Bookshelves," Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, June 17, 2015.
  The information about the odd OED contributors can be found in these books which you should certainly have a look at anyway: The Professor and the Madman and/or The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. 
  Among the many new books in which social media and the accompanying shiny things are being assessed more critically see: Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Apparently the Age of Surveillance Capital reminds us of the cost of free things and that "if you are not paying for it, you're the product." Although Wikipedia is  free, it is not gathering and tracking our "every move, emotion, utterance and desire" to sell to advertisers or using the "data exhaust" we are leaving behind to determine the direction in which we are heading.