The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is It Ok To Sometimes Be Toronto Centric?

Episode Date: April 6, 2021

Are there days when it's okay to talk about Toronto?  If there are then today is one of them!  I'll explain.Also the top five plagues of all time and what we learned from them?  And are you getting enough sleep? 

you are just moments away from asking this question is it okay to be toronto-centric is it okay to be toronto-centric that was the question. Peter, what are you thinking? I know a lot of you are either like yelling in your car, no, it's not okay. Or you're out on your walk or you're just sitting down and you're going, no, no, it's not okay. I used to be one of those people. In fact, many days I'm still one of those people, but I really used to be one of those people. When I started my career, you know, first of all, I was in British Columbia, then I was in Manitoba, then I was in Saskatchewan.

In all of those places, I was confronted by Toronto-centric, you know, bosses, if you will. Certainly when I got into the news business, I was confronted by Toronto-centric bosses, if you will. Certainly when I got into the news business, I was. I can remember when I was in Saskatchewan as the national reporter, working for the national, racing around the province, trying to do stories that were of national importance. And, you know, two importance and you know two things i remember two things about that time and my dealings with toronto one was peter what the hell is potash and i have to explain that all the time what potash was

and the other one was yeah good piece but you, but, you know, do you think you could maybe when you get around to doing your stand-up, you know, that part where you're on camera, do you think when you get around to doing your stand-up, you could do it with a green elevator in the background? Those were in the days

when green elevators dotted the prairies. And some guy in Toronto would say, you know, because that's the only way we're going to know you really in Saskatchewan. Got to see a green elevator. Toronto-centric. Now, these days, I'm still not Toronto-centric,

but there are days when I feel Toronto-centric. Yesterday was one of those days. Why, you may ask, did you feel Toronto-centric, Mansbridge, yesterday? Toronto has three major league sports teams. Three. There are not a lot of cities that can say that. But Toronto has three. They have a major league baseball team.

The Toronto Blue Jays. They have a major league basketball team. The NBA Toronto Raptors. And of course, they have the NHL Toronto Maple Leafs. They also have TFC, Toronto Football Club, and Major League Soccer. So I guess really they have four. But yesterday the focus was on the main three. At least the main three in my books.

Baseball, basketball, hockey. So let's take them in that order. All three of those major league teams played yesterday. The trifecta. The triple header. The hat trick. So we start off with this bizarre scene, absolutely wacko scene in Texas,

where the Blue Jays are the visiting team for the home opening, Texas Rangers. The season opener. Arlington Stadium. More than 40,000 people there. No attempt at distancing in Texas. Not for baseball. Not for most anything these days.

They're living with the, they're living with the pandemic. So you saw these crazy scenes of a packed stadium. Some people wearing masks, not many. So you have that as one part of the story.

The other part was, man, those Blue Jays look good this year. Oh boy, do they look good. Great pitching. Great fielding. Great hitting. Great attitude. And they won. great fielding, great hitting, great attitude,

and they won. They were in New York on the weekend. They took two out of three from the Yankees, supposedly the best team in baseball. Maybe they'll turn out to be. But they sure weren't this opening weekend. The Blue Jays took two out of three from the Yankees. Then they go into Texas, take the home opener.

Now it's just the first four games, but they're looking pretty good. So that was part one of the story. Part two of the Toronto Raptors. Who have been pretty horrible of late. But they weren't last night. They looked great last night. And they got a buzzer beater at the end from their latest, newest Raptor, Gary Trent Jr. Hits the three-pointer at the buzzer.

Raptors win. Two out of three. Then, late last night, I stayed up. Stayed up for it all. The Maple Leafs go to Calgary. They're in Alberta. They're playing the Flames

who've had a real up and down season. Mostly down. But they're still the Calgary Flames. And boy, they usually turn up to play Toronto. Toronto gets ahead 2-0. The Flames catch up. They go into the third period.

It's back and forth, back and forth. And who else? But Austin. Austin Matthews has a big game. Couple of goals. Leafs win. So you have the three main Toronto professional sports teams all playing yesterday, all winning.

Leafs, Raptors, Jays. A good day to be Toronto-centric. So hopefully you'll excuse me. Let me off for this one time. Because trust me, it doesn't happen often. Yesterday, we were talking pandemic as we often do especially on mondays and part of the discussion yesterday was was talking about what was actually comparing how we were doing versus the last big pandemic the last last big plague, if you will,

that confronted the world. And that was 100 years ago, a little more than 100 years ago. The 1918, 1919, a little bit into 1920. Influenza. We've talked about this before. They called it the Spanish flu, even though it really had nothing to do with Spain, other than the fact it was first detected among soldiers by Spanish writers.

It had already been known to be sweeping through various soldiers in France, Belgium, at home in the United States and in Canada and in Britain. But nobody was allowed to report on it in those areas

because of censorship. However, censorship did not exist in Spain on the writings and people wrote about it and therefore it was called the spanish flu even though it wasn't didn't start in spain anyway a number of people wrote and said you know what glad you mentioned what happened 100 years ago but you keep leaving the impression that pandemics or plagues were, you know, they're only going to happen a couple of times. When in fact, they've happened many times.

And I never meant to leave that impression. But I did think yesterday, you know what? Why don't we look at the five top worst, most damaging plagues of all time? Because it's a good little history lesson. So where do you go for history? You go to history.com. And sure enough, they just happen to have a very recent article

exactly on that. The five worst plagues. And what's interesting about these, I mean, there is good history in these stories. That helps actually us understand what's going on now. The first one that they mention in their top five, you know, it's like watching a sports channel at night. You're in the top five goals of the last week.

Top 50 touchdown passes. Top 53 pointers. Here we go with the top five of the world's worst pandemics. And how they finally ended. Number one is the Plague of Justinian. So when did that happen? 541 CE. CE, basically, those initials are for some people replacing BC.

The old way we used to talk about dating things. BC was referred to by some BC being before Christ. CE is current era. So it's the same thing, same dates, same numbers. But the letters following them are a little different, and you can probably guess why. The Plague of Justinian arrived in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 541 CE. It was carried over the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt, a recently conquered land, paying tribute to Emperor Justinian in grain. Plague-ridden fleas hitched a ride on the back of black rats that snacked on the grain.

Well, it was devastating what happened. the plague decimated constantinople spread like wildfire across europe and asia and north africa and arabia killing an estimated 30 to 50 million people which at the time represented about half the population of the world people had no real understanding of how to fight it other than trying to avoid sick people. That was the conclusion and is the conclusion of Thomas Mokaitis, who's a history professor at DePaul University. As to how the plague ended, the best guess is that the majority of people in the pandemic somehow survive, and those who survive have immunity. So basically, it ended when there was no one left to die. Next one was the Black Death.

You've heard of the Black Death. It was devastating, equally devastating. Partly because the Justinian plague never really went away. And when it returned 800 years later, it killed with reckless abandon. The Black Death, which hit Europe in 1347, claimed an astonishing 200 million lives in just four years. There's a similarity to some of these plagues they kind of last two to three to four years and as you well know we're in the second year of the current plague

the current pandemic as for how to stop the, people still had no scientific understanding of contagion. But they knew that it had something to do with proximity. That's why forward-thinking officials in Venetian-controlled parts of the world decided to keep newly arrived sailors in isolation until they could prove they were not sick. Sound familiar? isolation until they could prove they were not sick sound familiar at first sailors were held on their ships for 30 days which became known in venetian law as trentino trent being 30 right as time went on listen to this as time went on, listen to this, as time went on, the Venetians increased the forced isolation to 40 days, or a quarantino, the origin of the word quarantine,

and the start of its practice in the Western world. That had an effect. If you take only one thing away from this little history lesson today, you're going to remember that. You're going to dazzle your friends when you say, do you know where the word quarantine came from? And they go, no. And you say, well, it's actually, you know,

it goes back to Venetian law. During the Black Death, when they said, when visiting sailors come to town, they've got to wait 40 days before we'll let them out. Which was a quarantino. A quarantine. Isn't that impressive? I never knew that. Next up, the Great Plague of London.

London never really caught a break after the Black Death. The plague resurfaced roughly every 10 years. From 1348 to 1665 40 outbreaks in just over 300 years and with each new plague epidemic 20 of the men women and children living in the british capital were killed by the early 1500s england imposed the first laws to separate and isolate the sick homes stricken by plague were marked with a bale of hay strung to a pole outside if you had infected family members you had to carry a white pole when you went out in public cats and dogs were believed to carry the disease so there was a wholesale massacre of hundreds of thousands of animals.

The Great Plague of 1665 was the last and one of the worst of the centuries-long outbreak, killing 100,000 Londoners alone in just seven months. All public entertainment was banned. Victims were forcibly shut into their homes to prevent the spread of the disease. Red crosses were painted on their doors along with a plea for forgiveness. Lord, have mercy upon us, was written on the doors.

All this, by the way, is in history.com. It's a great write-up. I learned a lot from reading this. It takes you 10 minutes at the most to read this article. But do you see some of the themes, the current themes that we're facing? On a much different level, but faced in these previous eras.

And how they dealt with it. Doesn't it sound familiar? Stay in your house. Don't go outside. Stay away from other people. As cool as it was to shut up the sick in their homes and bury the dead in mass graves, it may have been the only way to bring the last great plague outbreak to an end. Number four, smallpox.

A European disease ravages the new world. Smallpox was endemic to Europe, Asia, and Arabia for centuries, a persistent menace that killed three out of ten people it infected and left the rest with pockmark scars. But the death rate in the old world paled in comparison to the devastation wrought on native populations in the new world when the smallpox virus arrived in the 15th century with the first European explorers. Indigenous communities were wiped out by smallpox that was brought to North America by European explorers.

There hasn't been a kill-off in human history to match what happened in the Americas. 90 to 95% of the indigenous population wiped out over a century. That's according to one of the scientists who's been studying this. Mexico went from 11 million people pre-conquest to 1 million. Those are staggering numbers. I never, you know,

I realized what had happened to indigenous populations, but not to this extent. 90 to 95% wiped out over a century well centuries later smallpox became the first virus epidemic to be ended by a vaccine in the late 18th century a british doctor named edward jenner discovered that milkmaids infected with a milder virus called cowpox seemed immune to smallpox. Jenner famously inoculated his gardener's eight-year-old son with cowpox and then health organization announced that smallpox

had been completely eradicated from the face of the earth All right, last one at the top five. Cholera, which, as it turned out, became a victory for public health research. In the early to mid-19th century, cholera tore through England, killing tens of thousands. The prevailing scientific theory of the day said that the disease was spread by foul air, known as miasma. But british doctor named john snow suspected that the mysterious disease which killed its victims within days of the first symptoms lurked in london's drinking water snow acted like a

scientific sherlock holmes investigating hospital records and morgue reports to track the precise locations of deadly outbreaks. He created a geographic chart of cholera deaths over a 10-day period and found a cluster of 500 fatal infections surrounding the Broad Street Pump, a popular city well for drinking water. As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this eruption of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street pump in Broad Street wrote snow. And that's where the end started. Didn't cure cholera overnight, but it eventually led to a global effort

to improve urban sanitation and protect drinking water from contamination. didn't cure cholera overnight but it eventually led to a global effort to improve urban sanitation and protect drinking water from contamination while cholera has largely been eradicated in developed countries it's still a persistent killer in third world countries lacking adequate sewage treatment and access to clean drinking water. So there's your history lesson for today. I'm telling you, I was, when I read this last night,

between periods of the Leafs game, I thought, this is great stuff. And thank you to History.com. I want to share this with listeners to the bridge because I think it's fascinating. Now, maybe some of you knew all of that already. I didn't. I sure didn't know about Quarantino. I do now.

And it makes sense. I mean, just look at the word. But, that's a nice little piece of history. You having trouble sleeping? What's your sleep pattern been like over the last year since the pandemic started? Mine's been up and down. We're going to talk about sleep when we come back. You know, when I started to notice that I was getting older,

one of the ways I started to notice, well, there were two ways. One, I started to lose my hair. And two, i started sleeping less and i think most most older people not all my dad my gosh my dad used to sleep the the older he got the more he slept in terms of at night you know his his sleep at night was was solid. He'd get his eight hours right to the end. Not so for me.

It's gone kind of the opposite way. I used to get eight hours, no problem. Now it's more like, you know, good night's sleep for me is, I guess, six, six and a half. Now that's not enough. Most will tell you, and I have one of those special rings that monitors everything, all your kind of main data from sleep to heartbeat to all of those things. And I look at it every morning, sure enough on the sleep thing and they really break sleep down they do everything you know resting sleep um i mean it's a whole bunch of

things that are in the uh in the sleep category and i'm you know most days it says okay. But I'll tell you, not all days. It ain't that good on me. But, you know, it measures total sleep, efficiency, restfulness, REM sleep, you know, rapid eye movement, deep sleep, latency, timing. It breaks it all down. And, you know, I would say, I don't know, 30, 40% of the time, I don't get as good marks in sleep as I should. The rest of the time, it's actually pretty good.

Anyway, there have been all kinds of studies on sleep in the last year because sleep for a lot of people has been affected by the pandemic. And not whether or not they're sick but if they're worried if they're focused on things other than getting rest if they're waking up in the middle of the night if they're having you know bad dreams what have you and so a lot of these studies are trying to determine not just that because some of that's kind of obvious but more so what to do about it how to deal with it and so these various studies have been looking at professions where sleep is really important and how people deal with that issue in those professions.

There was a piece last week on the BBC website. And it was actually titled, How to Stay Awake and Alert at Work. Because I think some professions have found, gee, people are kind of falling asleep during the day at work which is not a good thing anyway one of the professions the main profession they studied was the profession of air traffic control and they dealt with a number of air traffic controllers at heathrow airport one of

the busiest airports in the world the pressure is on these men and women who are in the control towers and and dealing with all the incoming air traffic not so much in the last year it's been down a bit but still at the big airports, Heathrow has been like really busy anyway. One of the few airports where they were really, you know, they were down. There's no doubt about that, but they weren't down anything like the airports in North America. And they found, among other things, I'll read a couple of notes from this, that air traffic controllers perform best when things aren't either too quiet or too busy. They're like kind of in the middle. So you may want to adjust your working environment

to find the sweet spot for you, whether it's that number of tasks you're taking on all at once, or the amount of background noise you're working in. The air traffic controllers certainly aren't listening to music, as you might be. True. If you're working well before sunrise or past sunset there's another environmental factor consider too we ensure that the temperature lighting and so on is consistent throughout the day so it doesn't matter if it's day or night it feels the same to the controller

this is from one of the scientists and researchers who were studying this. They use LED light that mimics natural light, so controllers aren't able to discern the time of day they're working and can be optimally alert when early flights begin arriving at Heathrow around 5 in the morning or 6 in the morning. Those are usually the times that many of the overnight flights from North America, from Toronto or Calgary or Vancouver or Montreal, that's usually when they're landing at Heathrow. So although there may not be a magic panacea

to staying alert at your desk, there are both quicker fixes as well as bigger goals to work up to. For now, if nothing else, these researchers recommend controllers stretch their legs and have a chat with other controllers perhaps consider having a call with a colleague while you take a stroll maybe you'll even find out that you both snuck in a quick lunch before a nap now it's interesting because

this article is, once again, you can find it on bbc.com. Once again, the research is divided really in two. It's sort of, how are they sleeping? And how are they not sleeping? And how best to prepare yourself for a day where you can easily get stressed out if you're not getting the right mix of rest and work

and one of the ways they talk about is the nap now we talked about napping a couple of weeks ago a lot of you ended up writing talking about how you nap well their recommendations on napping are kind of what we talked about a couple weeks ago short naps not long breaks in the middle of the day short like 20 minutes and i can remember when i used to take naps when I did the national. I'd take a nap in the middle of the afternoon, and it was usually for like 15 minutes, and that was enough. And the days that I didn't take the nap, I could tell when at 9 or 10 o'clock at night when I was on air,

if I hadn't taken the nap, it was a tougher slog than if i had taken the nap even a short nap like that of 15 minutes duration it kind of set me up for the rest of the day so they're saying naps are good keep them short and you can find anywhere to take a nap. And controllers have kind of quiet areas where they can move away from their main workstation to a quiet area where they can have a nap. Now, here's the other thing that this article concludes, and I've heard this before, I'm sure you have too,

but they are adamant about this. And it's about keeping your devices away from you at night. You know, a lot of people, myself included, will find themselves taking the device to bed to go through, could be like, you know, late hockey games or overnight news events. But that's really the wrong thing to do for a lot of different reasons. One, it stimulates the brain, gets you thinking about this, that, or the other thing that you're reading.

But also the light, that kind of blue light that emanates from your device. That's not good for you. It's certainly not good for you if you want to have a sleep, an uninterrupted sleep, a calm sleep.

A sleep which will tick all those boxes of that list I read to you that ring on my finger monitors. So I've been trying to wean myself off doing that. I haven't fully done it yet. But, you know, plugging your phone in near your bed is not the answer. Plug your phone in in a different room keep it away from you don't use your phone as an alarm even though they all have the alarm on them right how many of you have an alarm clock god i used to be fascinated by alarm clocks

when i was a kid my parents had those like kind of travel ones, you know, folded up. But you don't don't much see those anymore. But this article says don't use your phone. Don't use one of those digital clocks.

The number's flipping over. Okay? So look what you've learned today. From this Toronto-centric guy. Tomorrow. Wednesday. monocentric guy tomorrow wednesday the bridge brings smoke mirrors no truth with bruce anderson i've got a couple of ideas to talk about i haven't sprung them on bruce yet but i will later today to give him some time to think about them

and we always have a good chat on smoke mirrors and the truth it is one of the most popular podcasts that we do each week and so we hope you will be with us whether it's on Sirius XM channel 167 or wherever you download your podcast that's tomorrow this was today we had a quarantino of events on this broadcast today. And we hope you've enjoyed it. All right, I'm Peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge. Thanks for listening.

We'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.