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Bob Ramsay

Born in Edmonton. Educated at Princeton and Harvard. Speechwriter. Book editor. Copywriter. Communications strategist. Presentation trainer. Marathoner. Explorer of the world's distant places. Travel writer. Op-ed page writer. Fund-raiser. Board member. Speaker series host. Arts addict. And of course, relentless enthusiast.

WHATEVER YOU DO, AVOID OLD PEOPLE.

Leave a Comment / Omnium-Gatherum /

James Watson said that. The co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix and Nobel Prize winner was in Toronto years ago when someone asked him what (I think he was 80 then, not the 96 he is now) was his secret for staying young?

Watson’s point, of course, was to force yourself on younger, suppler minds so that your own doesn’t harden like peanut brittle.

Avoiding old people when you’re old yourself is hard, in the way that avoiding booklovers is when you’re a booklover, hot-rodders when you’re a hot-rodder, and alcoholics when…all to say, elephants like to sleep with elephants.

Read on…

WHATEVER YOU DO, AVOID OLD PEOPLE. Read More »

SANTA CLAUS OR SANITY CLAUSE?

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Last week in England, a vicar told a group of Grade 6 pupils that Santa Claus isn’t real.

He then told them their parents ate the biscuits the kids left out for Father Christmas. Many of them burst into tears and their parents complained that the Reverend Dr Paul Chamberlain had ruined their families’ Christmas.

The Anglican Diocese of Portsmouth then apologized on Chamberlain’s behalf, saying: “Paul has accepted that this was an error of judgement, and he should not have done so. He apologized unreservedly to the school, to the parents and to the children, and the headteacher immediately wrote to all parents to explain this.”

Read on…

SANTA CLAUS OR SANITY CLAUSE? Read More »

WILL THE DAY COME WHEN ALCOHOL IS TREATED LIKE TOBACCO?

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The fact that this question is even askable, let alone answerable, speaks to how drinking is fading, and what role your own diminished drinking might play in that.

I ask because once again, a respected medical authority has concluded that no amount of alcohol is safe to drink, and because we’re plunk in the middle of drinking season. These “none is too many” reports are growing each year, and the number of Canadians who drink alcohol is falling.

We were all brought up knowing that tobacco will kill you if you consume it over time, but drinking will kill you only if you consume too much of it. But what if the second half of that last sentence is false?

Read on…

WILL THE DAY COME WHEN ALCOHOL IS TREATED LIKE TOBACCO? Read More »

OUR VERY OWN MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS.

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Yesterday, December 6, marked the 35th anniversary of the Montreal massacre when 25-year-old Marc Lépine murdered 14 women and wounded another 10 (as well as 4 men) at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Lépine then killed himself.

He chose the engineering school because the women there were training for ‘non-traditional’ jobs, yelling “I hate feminists!” as he made his way through the classrooms, separating the women from the men and gunning them down.

Two months later, Ursula Franklin, a professor of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, spoke at a commemorative service there to mark this rare and shocking tragedy.

Read on…

OUR VERY OWN MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS. Read More »

STAY IN SCHOOL.

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It’s not been a month since Americans voted in surprising, even shocking ways to put Donald Trump back in office. The time-honoured categories of age, race, gender and wealth weren’t the compass points everyone hoped or feared. Millions of women voted for Trump, as did young immigrants. Many Blacks rejected the Black candidate.

But what caused so many Americans to vote against their own tribes and seeming self-interest?

David Brooks has named America’s great new division, the fault line so few people saw, The Diploma Divide.

Read on…

STAY IN SCHOOL. Read More »

A SECRET CHORD.

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I had open heart surgery in 2011. Two days later my heart stopped. In the weeks that followed, while my body healed, my psyche fell into a deep depression. It seems this happens a lot after such invasions. For the next six months I watched TV for days on end, or slept in my office, pretending to work.

Eventually I got better. The Remeron helped, as did my wife Jean, a physician. But she said afterward she was surprised she hadn’t heard me listen to music that entire time. Not once.

This was a huge shock to hear. I love music the way a Swiftie loves Ms. Swift. I was raised on classical music. It’s always playing in the background of my day, including now on my computer as I write about how we don’t seem to use the tools that are just sitting there for us to pick up and help ourselves. We don’t do what the world and our own experience tell us will make us less sad, even more happy.

Such lethargy is baked into what depression is.

Read on…

A SECRET CHORD. Read More »

LET’S CANCEL CULTURE.

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The Giller Prize ceremony takes place on Monday.

Two big things have changed since last year’s Giller. It’s no longer called The Scotiabank Giller Prize because of a gymnastic compromise whereby the award’s lead sponsor agreed to pay for the sponsorship but remove their name. (This uniquely dysfunctional compromise reminds me that Canada is also the only nation where pharmaceutical companies can either mention the name of their product in their advertising, or what it’s used for, though not both.) But I digress…

Also, between last November and this, some Giller nominees and judges have refused to let their names stand for Canada’s biggest literary prize. Indeed, many writers who have nothing to do with the Giller have also waded in to say, “If nominated I will not stand; if elected I will not serve.”

As if.

Read on…

LET’S CANCEL CULTURE. Read More »

PEOPLE AREN’T BORN DICTATORS.

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They become them. It takes time to learn the skills of dictatorship, just as it does anything else. 10,000 hours hardly gets you into Dictator College. Indeed, the skill developed from constant practice in dictatorship is a rare and hard-won skill, like being a concert pianist, not the reflection of a general attitude to life, like singing in the shower.

Vladimir Putin didn’t start acting as a dictator until 2014 when he invaded Crimea. Victor Orbán became Prime Minister of Hungary in 2010, but he took five more years to build his first border fence. Even Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro, who also took office in 2010, took four years to plunge his country into dictatorial chaos.

Whether Donald Trump has the discipline to move from being a caricature of a dictator to acting like one is open to question. But he has already satisfied one necessary condition of successful dictatorship by getting elected. We’ll find out next year if it’s a sufficient condition as it was with the most powerful dictator in modern history.

Read on…

PEOPLE AREN’T BORN DICTATORS. Read More »

GHOSTING THE OLD.

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Last week I was walking on Bloor Street past the hoardings on the new Royal Ontario Museum, the kickstart of their second make-good to right the wrongs that architect Daniel Libeskind inflicted on the ROM in 2007.

Like many hoardings, these showed what we’ll enjoy inside and out when the new OpenROM expansion is finished in 2027. It was an elysian vision of happy families of many colours, gender identities, and physical frailties, all enjoying the biggest museum in the land.

But what there wasn’t many of was people of many ages.

Indeed, there were only 5 people with gray hair, the same number of people who were in wheelchairs.

Five out of 329. One point five per cent.

This is not only wrong, it’s dumb.

Read on…

GHOSTING THE OLD. Read More »

The price of righteous wrong-headedness.

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I’m sure the ‘woke’ movement began with clean hands and an open heart.

A decade ago, too many people were kept away from the corridors of anything, let alone power, because of their gender, colour, faith and age.

But as with many revolutions, DEI has swung too far, lopping off innocent heads, silencing critics and brooking nothing less than total compliance for the deeply ironic idea of zero tolerance.

There’s a price to pay for this excess, and one far greater than having to reveal your pronouns in public.

Two examples this month reveal just how far the rot against competence has spread.

First, The New York Times reported on how the University of Michigan’s commitment to DEI ground its world-renowned arboretum and botanical gardens to a halt. The arboretum’s strategic plan “calls for employees to rethink the use of Latin and English plant names.”

Read on…

The price of righteous wrong-headedness. Read More »

“IT AIN’T WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW…”

Leave a Comment / Featured, Omnium-Gatherum /

“…that gets you into trouble.” As Mark Twain said: “It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

This can mean anything from “My drinking isn’t hurting anyone,” and “The pain in my chest will go away on its own,” to “In Springfield they’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” and “America is run by childless cat ladies.”

But even denial and lies have fallen on hard times in this great age of untruth. Until now, lies needed at least a sideways glance to the reality that they aren’t true. The liar had to care, not so much about the truth of what they said, but about how their opponents felt about the lie.

But last month, even that went out the window.

First, in the U.S. vice-presidential debate, JD Vance chastised the moderator by saying: “The rules were, you weren’t going to fact-check and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.”

In other words, fact-checking is cheating.

Read on…

“IT AIN’T WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW…” Read More »

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