Omnium-Gatherum – Ramsay Inc.

Category: Omnium-Gatherum

Familiarity breeds content.

Question: do we enjoy things because they’re new or because they’re old?

Answer: Yes.

This is true in every endeavour, culture, life, and even secret life. An especially instructive example reminded me last week.

On Wednesday I went to the opening of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s 101st season. Yes, the TSO is 101 years old . But oh my, is it ever new again.

The first piece was Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, which no one knows, and far less famous than his other piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue, which everyone knows. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, maybe because it wasn’t etched into my brain the way Rhapsody in Blue is. So I couldn’t hum along, which is a big deal for me. Or maybe I was just a victim of ‘branding’. What if Gershwin had flipped their names and called one Rhapsody in F and the other Concerto in Blue?

Meanwhile…

September 30, 2023 No Comments

Why are there no prizes for promising old writers?

I asked myself this on Monday when I and 600 others gathered at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to hear the British writer Robert Macfarlane give the first annual Weston International Award Lecture, a prize (with $75,000) that Macfarlane had accepted two minutes earlier. Funded by the Westons and run by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, it’s the latest dish on a growing buffet of prizes for artists, and particularly for writers, to reward excellence (and Macfarlane is easily that), but more and more, to promote promise.

From medicine to movies, accounting to influencing, the world is awash in promise. That world, however, is largely limited to the young. Indeed, “promise” means you may someday have a brilliant future. So the world places a bet on you fulfilling that promise because you have many years ahead to do that.

There are also a rising number of ‘mid-career’ prizes, (including some by the Writers’ Trust) given to people with a couple of decades in the trenches, who need a little help to make their next work their big one. These, too, are ‘promise’ awards.

But there are few to no prizes for promising old writers.

True, there are lifetime achievement awards in writing and every endeavour from surgery to sky-diving. But 70-year-olds don’t get rewarded for their promise. Their glow comes from past performance.

I wonder why this is.

Meanwhile…

September 23, 2023 No Comments

Rich old white guys

I wish they had the grace to be content being all four of those things.

But no.

So many of them, especially in America, cast themselves not just as outsiders, but as victims, their rights hijacked by by trans people (1.03% of US adults), by gays (7.1%), Jews (2.4%), Muslims (1.3%), Asians (7%), Blacks (13.6%), Hispanics (19.1%), and of course, women (50.4%).

I thought of this irony while I was watching Tracie D. Hall interviewed this week by Omar El Akkad at the Toronto Reference Library about freedom of speech and banning of books – in the US where Ms. Hall is the executive director of the American Library Association, and in Canada, where To

Meanwhile…

September 16, 2023 No Comments

“One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.”

Anthony Burgess wrote that, and as someone accused of rushing to go to the opening of an envelope, Not Going couldn’t come a moment too soon for me.

In the thimbleful of benefits of Growing Old, surely this is the best, with nodding off at will a close second. Life costs less when you stay in, takes less time and brings on less stress, certainly than when Going counted for so much more.

I was reminded of this because TIFF opened this week, and at age 48 is deeply into its own middle age. I was involved in the earliest years when you could walk into any movie, and if you didn’t like it, you’d walk out and go to another movie next door. My wife and her medical colleagues would take a week off work in order to binge on Festival films. Their diet was coffee and croissants, and they competed to see the most films each day.
Meanwhile…

September 9, 2023 No Comments

That little $100 million.

In 2015, billionaire John Paulson donated $400 million to Harvard, the largest donation in its history. This prompted Malcolm Gladwell to enquire what possible marginal good that could create for Harvard whose endowment today stands at $53.2 billion.

Why not give it to a smaller university, where it could do much more? This is what Hank Rowan did 30 years earlier when he gave $100 million to Glassboro State University, a tiny, almost bankrupt school in South Jersey. Gladwell did an enlightening podcast on that gift and where philanthropy works hardest.

Meanwhile…

September 2, 2023 No Comments

The Full Monthy Python

Twenty years ago, at 4:10 p.m. on August 14, the power went out across eastern Canada and the US, sparking the largest blackout in history. Jean and I both walked home from work and decided to stroll along Toronto’s Bloor Street where members of the public were directing traffic and restaurants were serving meals on the streets because their freezers were kaput and the food would spoil.
Meanwhile…

August 26, 2023 No Comments

We don’t have a lack-of-doctors problem. We have a lack-of-access problem.

Hard time finding a family doctor? Scads of them have left town or stopped running clinics. It will get worse. Nearly 20% of Toronto family doctors plan to retire in the next five years. But the problem isn’t too few trained doctors or too many sick Canadians. We can import enough physicians to give every Canadian a family doctor.

In 2014, Dr. Danielle Martin, then from Women’s College Hospital, testified at a US Congressional hearing on the difference between the Canadian and US systems. In one of the great examples of young-female-non-American beats old-white-male-American-senators-at-their-own-game, Dr. Martin, now the head of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, made one thing clear: Whether you’re a patient or a doctor or a business class flier, it all depends what line you’re in.

Meanwhile…

August 19, 2023 No Comments

UFOs land on Congress floor.

Whatever happened to the good old days when the US government could hush up any news of UFOs?

Now renamed UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), they’ve been getting big press in the past weeks from the strangest of places: mainline media. That ‘old’ media is simply reporting on something just as mainline, a US House Committee Hearing on any number of subjects over many decades, from a US President trying to overturn the results of an election, to the Watergate break-in.

Indeed, it doesn’t get more traditional than white men in blue suits testifying in Congress about something that other people in power don’t want revealed.

But there are four things that make these hearings on ‘little green men’ different.

Meanwhile…

August 12, 2023 No Comments

On fire.

One of life’s enduring myths is that a book can change your life. But looking back on your own life, can you point to a single volume that set your life off in a new direction? Neither can I. But books shape our lives all the time, and I’ve just started one that’s already changing how I view our extreme weather, and Canada, and Alberta, and the petroleum industry, fire, risk, travel, and of course mass death.

I first came across John Vaillant in 2011 when a friend urged me to read The Tiger, his true story of the hunt for a Siberian Tiger in Siberia. This tiger not only attacked people without warning or mercy, he went after the hunter who first wounded him. The tiger targeted him. It was mesmerizing stuff. As The New York Times said: “Few writers have taken such pains to understand their monsters, and few depict them in such arresting prose.”

Meanwhile…

August 5, 2023 No Comments

My name’s Bob and I’m an iPhonoholic.

On Tuesday, Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka announced he would make a state visit to China to meet Xi Jinping.

By Thursday, however, that trip was cancelled because the Prime Minister had tripped on the stairs while looking at his phone, concussing him. He appeared on video, in a blood-spattered shirt, to tell his nation the news.

For many years now in Holland, bicyclists have been forbidden from riding their bikes while using their mobile phones because of the large number of accidents they cause. This happens especially with North American visitors who, jet-lagged and on unfamiliar ground, barely make it out of the bike rental shop without mowing down a pedestrian.

In America, at any time throughout the day, 660,000 drivers are trying to text while they drive. One in four car accidents in the US is caused by texting and driving, which means 1.6 million crashes each year.

Worse still, texting while driving is six times more likely to cause an accident than driving drunk.

Why is this worse?

Meanwhile…

July 29, 2023 No Comments

Big weather; big new layers of risk.

We are avid kayakers who have paddled the waters of Georgian Bay for 30 years. There’s one big risk known to everyone there: the weather. A storm can come out of nowhere and beach you, blow you off course, capsize you, or bolt you with lightning. The risk is simple and one-dimensional, though it can be deadly. Our motto has been “any rock in a storm” and it’s saved our lives.

Then five years ago, we circumnavigated Manhattan by kayak. There, the risks were exponentially higher: there’s tidal risk, there’s current risk, there’s boat traffic risk and there’s even helicopter-wash risk. Suddenly, the risks had multiplied. New York made Georgian Bay feel like a safe warm bath.

Then this past week, we planned to paddle down the Hudson River for four days, starting at Hyde Park, home of the Roosevelt Presidential Library, and landing in midtown Manhattan.

Meanwhile…

July 22, 2023 No Comments

Decay is what happens when you’re making other plans.

I’ll be 74 next month, so I’m used to forgetting things like my best friend’s name, or my PIN number, or my glasses and keys, one of which I always eventually find on the top of my head. This is the slow, steady drip into decrepitude.

But what’s shocking is to do something you’ve done well all your life, and suddenly you can’t do it at all. This has happened three times this summer.

I used to sing well and was the “Head Choir Boy” in high school. But on July 1st, I tried to sing O Canada and could barely carry the tune. Instead of three octaves, my range was cut to what seemed like three notes, except as I later learned, in the shower where I’m still The Boss. Still, to suddenly not be able to carry a tune was a shock.

In June, I went skipping with the grandkids over the rocks at our cottage on Georgian Bay. I have to tell you I’m a great rock-walker, deftly leaping from one uneven surface to the next, and have been all my life. But suddenly, I got wobbly. These rocks weren’t a challenge; they were a deathtrap. We all know what happens when you’re old and ‘fall.’ I quickly retreated to the sandy shore.

Then last week, some friends asked me to join a beanbag-throwing game. The hole was 20 yards away and you just had to throw the bag into it. Mine never got near that hole. It splayed everywhere but. I’ve been great at ‘ball’ games all my life and beanbags should be no different. What was this fresh hell?

Category: Omnium-Gatherum

Familiarity breeds content.

Why are there no prizes for promising old writers?

Rich old white guys

“One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.”

That little $100 million.

The Full Monthy Python

We don’t have a lack-of-doctors problem. We have a lack-of-access problem.

UFOs land on Congress floor.

On fire.

My name’s Bob and I’m an iPhonoholic.

Big weather; big new layers of risk.

Decay is what happens when you’re making other plans.

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