Are you ready for “Cloud Dancer”?
Various media have reported this week that a color by that name is to be
2026 “Color of the Year.”
Who says so? Why, Pantone, a private company whose pronouncements
every year are treated as if they have the authority of a new posting of
Internal Revenue Service regulations. The New York Times, for one,
converged a panel of four writers from their Styles department to debate
the choice of “Cloud Dancer” (overkill, perhaps?).
Incidentally, “Cloud Dancer” is merely fancy, shmancy for “White.”
According to Pantone Color Institute vice president Laurie Pressman,
“An ethereal white hue, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer serves as a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society rediscovering the value of measured consideration.”
As you may recall, the “Color of the Year” for 2025 was beige. (1)
How was your beige year?
*
I’m declaring the 2026 “Color of the Year” to be strawberry. And I’m not convening a panel to discuss it!
*
From time to time, this blog has commiserated with the ultra-rich over their various discontents with their lot in the modern world. (2) We return to the subject today with the plight of David Rubenstein, billionaire co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a global investment fund. (3)
By his own admission, Rubenstein “plowed millions—‘modest amounts,’ he calls the sum—into his children’s private-equity funds.” Alas,
[t]oo much comfort, he said, puts the children of the wealthy at a disadvantage. “You might have grown up spoiled, without the drive to achieve something.”
Excuse me, while I dry my eyes.
*
To go back to the old (maybe apocryphal) exchange between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Fitzgerald: “The rich are different from you and me.”
Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”
The true response would be:
“Yes, they have no awareness of their fatuity.”
***
(1) https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2024/12/too-cold.html
(2) https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-discontent-of-ultrarich.html
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7509882774440556801/4687582235502923161
<<<<>>>>
UPDATE
In a recent blog (https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2025/11/trust-me-im-doctor.html), I speculated that the "MRI" that Trump allegedly underwent was really a stress test because of his “chronic venous insufficiency.” On Dec. 2, it was reported that Dr. Ron Blankstein, a preventive cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, pointed to the phrase “no evidence of arterial narrowing limiting blood flow” in Trump's physician's report, which suggested, he said,
that the president underwent a stress test, which could mean a doctor suspected or wanted to rule out heart disease. Most standard M.R.I. exams, he said, do not show the coronary arteries.*
