How Was Your Beige Year?

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

(3)  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/david-rubenstein-carlyle-kennedy-center-private-equity/684985/

<<<<>>>>

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.*

• https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/health/trump-mri-results.html 

 

Beer Bust

*

Unless you’ve been unconscious for the past week or so, you know that the world’s most prominent sporting event—the FIFA World Cup, the soccer tournament of tournaments—has been going on in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar. Holding the tournament in a land of (to put it kindly) soccer minnows of course makes as much sense as holding the premier auto racing series, Formula 1, this year in such noted automotive venues as Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Abu Dhabi. 

Qatar, after winning its bid for the World Cup, set about hiring thousands of workers from impoverished countries such as Nepal to build a number of world-class stadiums. Many international companies signed on to be sponsors of the tournament, including Budweiser, who was assured that it would be the only beer allowed to be sold in those new stadiums. Imagine the chagrin in the suds headquarters when two days before the opening match, a decree came down that, Qatar being a Muslim country, it would not allow alcohol sales at the sporting venues. This turnabout was especially hard on the England supporters, who like to get tanked before kickoff. In The Guardian, Marina Hyde’s cynical take on this development was

let’s face it – serving only Budweiser was already a de facto beer ban.*

One didn’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool cynic to expect that the “no-alcohol-please-we’re-muslim” proclamation was not all it seemed to be. 

The New York Times reported that 

[t]he main difference between the luxury and non-luxury seats at this year’s World Cup is alcohol.**

The so-called ban, The Times reported,

didn’t affect the flow of free beer — or free champagne, Scotch, gin, whiskey, wine and other drinks — available to non-regular fans in the V.I.P., V.V.I.P. and hospitality areas. The rules, it seemed, did not apply to them.

At a $3,000-a-seat hospitality lounge at Al Bayt during the U.S.’s game with England, for instance, the bar menu included Taittinger Champagne, Chivas Regal 12-year-old whisky, Martell VSOP brandy and Jose Cuervo 1800 tequila.

 

*

Upon reading The Times report, I couldn’t help but couple it with an exposé of a week earlier by The Guardian of the £29 million a Tory peer, Michelle Mone, secretly received from a firm supplying PPE through a government contract during the coronavirus epidemic. It was a firm that Mone actively lobbied the government for.

Documents seen by the Guardian indicate tens of millions of pounds of PPE Medpro’s profits were later transferred to a secret offshore trust of which Mone and her adult children were the beneficiaries.***

Alas, all was not smooth sailing for Mone after PPE Medpro secured the government financing. The poor dear had to cancel a planned wedding ceremony in the Palace of Westminster because of COVID restrictions. So she and her fiance, Douglas Alan Barrowman, switched the venue to Barrowman’s home on the Isle of Man, which had fewer COVID restrictions.

While the couple were making wedding arrangements from this base, Barrowman seems to have also been focusing on moving profits gained from PPE Medpro around various Isle of Man registered trusts, companies and accounts.****

But the bride had her Jimmy Choo shoes, the affair had an opera singer and five bands, and the couple could go on to enjoy their yacht, which, presumably, had smooth sailing.

*

All of which proves Fitzgerald right and Hemingway wrong: the rich are different from you and me—they are hypocrites and cheats on a higher plane.

***

* https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/nov/18/beer-ban-beckham-and-a-vagina-stadium-the-world-cup-in-inglorious-technicolor-qatar

** https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/sports/soccer/qatar-world-cup-vip.html

*** https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/23/revealed-tory-peer-michelle-mone-secretly-received-29m-from-vip-lane-ppe-firm

**** https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/23/the-yacht-the-wedding-and-29m-michelle-mones-life-during-the-covid-crisis