Omnium-Gatherum – Ramsay Inc.

Category: Omnium-Gatherum

PASSPORT, PLEASE.

Trump Tower, Trump Hotel, Trump (and Kennedy) Center, Trump Institute, Trump Park, Trump Highway, Trump Boulevard and, as of last week, Trump Station (replacing Penn Station in New York), and Trump International Airport (replacing Dulles International in Virginia).

These last two are just possibilities for now. They’re the quo in the quid pro quo of Trump unfreezing billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project. If Senate Democrats say yes to Trump’s offer, the taps will open. They’ve said no so far, though this is only the opening round of negotiations.

Read on…

February 14, 2026 No Comments

ANNALS OF FRIENDSHIP.

I was meeting someone new for coffee. He’d come via a mutual friend and was starting a new career in his mid-50s that overlapped with mine. For 50-plus years, I’ve been more willing than most to meet with job-seekers because…you just never know where the conversation will go. So we met at a Starbucks on Bloor.

He’d e-mailed me his resume and I’d dutifully looked him up on LinkedIn so I wouldn’t have to waste time during our meeting by asking basic questions. I noticed he’d held a senior job at a company where one of my best friends had been the CEO before moving on.

After our usual unpleasantries about the Toronto weather, I said all bright-eyed that I was great friends with this other man who he must know as well because they must have worked together.

Read on…

February 6, 2026 No Comments

SHOOT FIRST.

The most remarkable fact to come out of the Minneapolis killings is not why they happened, or how unjust we think they are, or whether the two victims, both white American citizens aged 37, one a poet and the other a nurse, were, in the words of America’s Secretary of Homeland Security, domestic terrorists.

To me, the big question is, why did ICE shoot 3 bullets into Renee Nicole Good and 10 into Alex Pretti?

Surely, one bullet to each would have done the job, or two at most, given how close the shooters were to the shot.

Read on…

January 30, 2026 No Comments

MY RETIREMENT PLAN IS A LOTTERY TICKET.

There; I’ve said it. The guilt of carrying around my deep secret just got too much to bear; I need to come clean and confess that every week, I buy “Three Lotto Max tickets (with Encore).” This costs me $16 a week or $832 a year. But I forget some weeks (I’m old), and I’m out of the country other weeks (I wander), so let’s make that $600 a year.

Please don’t tell me I could find a better way to invest or spend that $600. I know a lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged. As Morgan Housel said: “Buying a lottery ticket is the only time in our lives we can hold a tangible dream of getting the good stuff that we already have and take for granted.”

Read on…

January 24, 2026 No Comments

THE PRICE OF FRIENDSHIP.

Last Saturday, the U.S. kidnapped Venezuela’s President. On Monday, Donald Trump threatened to annex Greenland. On Tuesday, Marco Rubio added Cuba to the list. On Wednesday, American forces seized a Russian tanker in the North Atlantic. So today, mentioning what to do if America invades Canada feels neither fanciful nor juvenile. Indeed, serious people like Thomas Homer-Dixon and Bob Rae are claiming “We need to prepare for the possibility that the U.S. uses military coercion against Canada.”

Just in case it does between now and the next reporting cycle, here are some highly passive-aggressive forms of resistance for Canadians to practice on our invaders.

We’re known as the world’s most polite people; I say let’s use our overwhelming strength to save ourselves, or at least to slow America’s takeover of our home and native land.

Read on…

January 9, 2026 No Comments

COME JULY, YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO TELL HUMAN WRITING FROM AI WRITING.

Two years ago, I wrote about the next new thing from Silicon Valley. It was called ChatGPTand it claimed to be able to “write.” So I tried it, and quickly saw it was pretty bad. Bland. Stilted prose. No voice. No edge. We real writers had nothing to fear.

By last July, ChatGPT and its large language models had suddenly become pretty good.

So I asked it to create a blog that mirrored “the one produced by Toronto writer Bob Ramsay”, with an essay at the top, followed by 10 items made up of off-beat things that had caught my fancy that week.

Read on…

January 2, 2026 No Comments

THEY SAY YOU SHOULD GET OUT AND DO NEW THINGS.

They say it’s the key to living longer, and who doesn’t want that? Get a new hobby. Make a new friend. Better still, make AI your friend.

But when you’re 76 like me, being a novelty-seeker grows harder with each passing year. My days of ice-climbing,spelunking, free-diving and bank robbingare pretty much done.

But there are some new things I can do, and in telling you my story, these are things I want to urge you to do. They don’t have to be new physical things. They can be new psychological things or, in my case, new psychiatric things.

These are things I’d either spent my life actively avoiding, or walking by and muttering to myself: “Women do that. Men don’t do that. It would be weird for me to do that. I would be weird if I did that. I am not weird. I won’t do that.”

Read on…

December 26, 2025 No Comments

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS.

You’d think we’d be out of breath by now. Two thousand and twenty five candles.

But every December, no matter how wired or worried the world feels, it stops, takes a collective breath and wishes a peasant baby born under Roman occupation a happy birthday.

Somehow, people are still RSVPing. Millions on the guest list don’t believe in the birthday boy. Millions more of us attend out of habit or the faint echo of a childhood choir ringing in our ears. That’s the thing about birthdays: you don’t need to believe in them to celebrate them – because life, any life, is still the most astonishing thing there is.

Read on…

December 19, 2025 No Comments

THE COLOUR OF THE YEAR IS…

It’s called Cloud Dancer, and it promises “a whisper of tranquillity and peace in a noisy world.”

But actually, the real name of the Colour of the Year is…White.

…as White as the background these very words are printed on. As White as…the driven snow…and as White as Christmas because “May all your Christmases be Cloud Dancer” doesn’t really scan.

Read on…

December 12, 2025 No Comments

PATRIOTIC PRICING.

Dynamic means to move. Dynamic pricing means the price of an Uber ride moves, always up, never down, when an external factor like a nearby Taylor Swift concert, or a flash storm or a nuclear attack makes car rides hard to find. If anything, AI will make dynamic pricing move faster and more invisibly.

For example, you’ll pay more for exactly the same coffee maker as I do, not because you live in a different city, or on a different street, but because you have a better credit rating. Indeed, very soon, very little in our lives will not be subject to the constant that different folks will get different strokes.

Meanwhile, back here in Presentville, Donald Trump just introduced dynamic pricing to America’s National Parks. Starting January 1, you won’t pay more if it’s a warm and sunny day at Yellowstone, or a Grizzly Bear is posing for Instagram selfies. You will pay more if you’re not an American.

Read on…

December 5, 2025 No Comments

HOW AI CAN DO YOUR BRAIN’S HEAVY LIFTING.

Back in June, I wrote a blog titled “How to use AI.”

Like many of us who earn our keep by our wits, I’d used ChatGTP and Perplexity as search engines on steroids. “What is Elon Musk’s e-mail ? “How will the new CFL rules make Canadian football more like American?” “Will we have rainbows day after day?”

Then I decided to use AI to plan. It did this shockingly well and lightning fast for a very specific trip to Japan.

I quickly learned AI’s uses are advancing so fast that what was earth-shaking last year is ho-hum today. For example, back in June, only a tiny fraction of Ontario physicians used AI to write up your visit, schedule referrals and prescribe medications. By next June, most of Ontario’s 18,000 family physicians will be using AI for that. So your doctor will actuallysee you and hear you when you come in for your physical. Game changer!

Read on…

November 28, 2025 No Comments

AT 25, YOU WERE BARELY YOU.

Ask anyone to write a letter to their 25-year-old self and they won’t be kind.

Indeed, given the responses to our writing contest last month – we asked you to write a 100-word letter to your 25-year-old self — being 25 is one of the most arrogant, unknowing, unseeing and cringeworthy times of our lives. Did I really spend all that money on a watch? Hook up with a known psychopath? Treat my best friend like dirt? And don’t even talk to me about drinking and drugging. We’re lucky to be alive.

I remember back in the 80s my film festival friend, Helga Stephenson, asked if I would help her ‘chaperone’ a party for TIFF’s young financial supporters. They were all under 30. They were smart, attractive, fit and cocksure. They beamed with certainty. Helga said as we left: “Life hasn’t happened to them yet.”

True that.

Clearly, the older you drift from 25, the younger 25 looks. By the time you’re twice that age, life is often a muddle, or a slow-motion leap off the cliff. Get to threescore years and ten and it can be a tragedy in the making. Get to 80, and more tires are coming off the car than staying on.

Category: Omnium-Gatherum

PASSPORT, PLEASE.

ANNALS OF FRIENDSHIP.

SHOOT FIRST.

MY RETIREMENT PLAN IS A LOTTERY TICKET.

THE PRICE OF FRIENDSHIP.

COME JULY, YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO TELL HUMAN WRITING FROM AI WRITING.

THEY SAY YOU SHOULD GET OUT AND DO NEW THINGS.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS.

THE COLOUR OF THE YEAR IS…

PATRIOTIC PRICING.

HOW AI CAN DO YOUR BRAIN’S HEAVY LIFTING.

AT 25, YOU WERE BARELY YOU.

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