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Tags: Toronto

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 January 2, 2026

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 December 25, 2025

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 December 5, 2025

SLOW TALKERS.

In the days ahead we’ll be seeing more tremulous, slow-talking, slow-moving people in public life. This is inevitable; our world is growing older. It’s also a good thing that we can help that become a normal thing.

Last week, I attended the Weston International Award for Nonfiction at the ROM which was given to Leslie Jamison, the American essayist and memoirist who writes deeply confessional pieces for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. My interest was professional; I, too, had written a recovery memoir.

Jamison speaks quickly, with manic energy. As with most events like this, the author spoke about her work, then she was interviewed by a high-profile person in the world of writing, then she answered questions.

Read on…

September 27, 2025 October 31, 2025

HIS KARMA RAN OVER HIS DOGMA.

The biggest business collapse in history happened in 2008 when Wall Street banker Lehman Bros., which had $691 billion in assets, filed for bankruptcy. Lehman’s fall sparked the 2008 global financial crisis and proved that no bank, and no company, is too big to fail.

In this vein, what happens if Tesla goes broke?

It’s lost $777 billion of value since December and a tide of analysts is claiming it’s been wildly overvalued from Day One.

Read on…

March 22, 2025 April 18, 2025

WILL THE DAY COME WHEN ALCOHOL IS TREATED LIKE TOBACCO?

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…

December 14, 2024 January 31, 2025

“IT AIN’T WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW…”

“…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…

October 19, 2024 October 25, 2024

OUT-OF-OFFICE, OUT-OF-MY-MIND.

Composing an out-of-office message used to take 30 seconds and was usually written minutes before you headed to the airport on vacation. As a friend’s OOO noted: “I am offline until Sept. 29. Off the grid. No email. No phone. No texts.”

In a very few words, this sent a big, clear message.

Now, out-of-office emails have become Rorschach Tests for our relationship to our inbox, our friends and ourselves. True, fewer of us have an office to be out of anymore. But email, far from being dead, is gobbling up the world. We now send and receive 361 billion emails every day.

My first clue that emailing was becoming a platform for pearl-clutchers and virtue-signalers came last year when I read on the bottom of a friend’s email: “I am sending this email at a time that works for me. I don’t expect you to respond to it until normal business hours, or when it suits your own work-life balance. I encourage you to make guiltless work-life choices and support flexible working.”

September 21, 2024 November 15, 2024

Walking by cars on a sunny evening.

I used to walk from “A” to “B” in downtown Toronto to feel good about myself. Clocking 10,000 steps on my FitBit; finding delightful new alleyways and shortcuts; neither spending money nor polluting the world; all these gave my steps an extra lift.

That’s all changed now, and for the better.

This summer Toronto’s traffic congestion will be something the city itself perpetually strives for and fails to be: world-class. Indeed, it’s already on the podium. Last year Toronto ranked 7th among the worst cities in the world for traffic congestion, just below New York and Bogota.

This happened because City Hall and Queen’s Park banded together (a rare thing) and green-lighted the annual pothole repair work, lane widening, lane narrowing, and bike-lane building that turns every summer into a driver’s nightmare.

AND they decided to dig up Queen Street West and East at the same time.  

AND do major repairs to the Gardiner (through to 2027). 

AND build the Ontario Line, a major new subway that runs through gobs of blocks of downtown. 

Read on…

May 18, 2024 July 3, 2024

Am I a whiner to mourn the death of my diner?

The news that Flo’s Diner in Toronto had closed hit me hard. But why? It was just a diner.

True, I’ve eaten there since it opened on Bellair in 1991, and long after it moved to 70 Yorkville. I was a regular and wore my old-guy-corner-booth-bacon-and-eggs persona like a medal. Not for me The Four Seasons or Park Hyatt, where a piddly bowl of porridge and coffee will now set you back $40.

I’ve always been a diner guy. Years ago, Brothers on Yonge just below Charles was my eatery of choice. It was run by two brothers who kept baseball bats behind the counter to go after anyone who forgot to pay. No one forgot to pay. But Brothers closed long ago, and the idea of opening a diner today seems as viable as the idea of buying a stick-shift car or a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor St.

Flo’s co-owner Pierre Hamel said it was a dispute with their landlord that led to its closing and laying off 15 staff. Hamel said: “We came out of COVID really, really strong, and we would like to stay as long as we can.”

Read on…

April 6, 2024 May 24, 2024

Negotiate up, not down.

Twenty years ago we took the Hurtigruten, Norway’s storied sea-ferry service, up the Norwegian coast, docking at tiny towns where it delivered mail, passengers and freight. At most of these often isolated ports, we were greeted by a brass band playing Norway’s national anthem, sometimes a boys and girls choir, and even the mayor wearing their ribbon of office. It was a big deal for these small places.

Last week on a Lindblad Expedition, the National Geographic Orion docked in Samoa, on our way from Fiji to Tahiti. We were greeted by a band playing traditional Samoan music and a troupe of male and female dancers wearing leis and grass skirts. They performed for 20 minutes just for us.

But this time our reaction to the local citizenry greeting a visiting ship was ….mixed. Should the 59 of us onboard feel guilty for enabling an old trope between oppressor and oppressed? Or should we feel good that we’re helping Samoans promote their Indigenous culture via traditional regalia and age-old dances?

I say good.

Read on.

March 9, 2024 April 19, 2024

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