680News - Lisa Brandt

This space will be unchanged for a couple of weeks as I take a very rare two-week vacation. Rarer still is the fact that I’m going to Europe, mostly because I’ve never been there!

While the travel bug has been nipping at me for quite some time, I’ve only seen North American destinations and several Caribbean islands. Priorities tended to take my time and finances toward my home(s) so the urge to explore the planet had to be set aside. Now it’s time to get on it!

At this point, the loose plans will take me to England (London, Kent) and then to France (Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Cannes) and wherever else the wind blows us. A travel blog was suggested…and rejected…because I truly want to check out and relax. So you will not hear from me here until about mid-April. Enjoy your April Fool’s! Make sure you register as a 680News Insider Club member because the weather guarantee jackpot was 18-grand when I left. Cheers!

What will we do if the TTC goes on strike?

Cancel that. I should ask, what will YOU do, because I’m about to go on a two week vacation! But I digress….

The last time we were transit-less because of a walkout was the wildcat of May 2006 when the city was virtually paralyzed by surprise. Then, it was to protest a shift change. This time, it’s a legal strike deadline at the coming end of a contract with no deal and today, no talks. They’ll get back to it with the help of a provincial mediator tomorrow and there are signs of hope.

Union head Bob Kinnear has said he’s not optimistic, but if negotiations do go in the right direction, he would be willing to talk past the March 31st midnight deadline if necessary. They’re holding fast on the demand for full pay for injured workers.

You would be wise to consider a contingency plan now. Nearly a million riders depend on the transit system each day and that’s a lot of extra traffic if even a fraction of those folks get into cars and merge onto our already clogged highways. Of course, I have a plan B for every day of my life! I’m just like that. I swear that if I had been boarding the Titanic, I would have been counting the lifeboats and been back down that ramp to solid ground, long before the doomed ship sailed!

Science can’t seem to get its ducks in a row about climate change, although we all can agree that wetlands have been disappearing and that’s not good for those ducks.

This coming Saturday night, you’re encouraged to take part in Earth Hour. It means turning out your lights between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. Several major centres, lots of companies and countless individuals are going to take part. Rogers Centre and the ACC have big events going on so they’ll both turn off their outside lights for Earth Hour.

Plenty of people are skeptical about global warming. Some agree it’s happening, but they attribute it to normal patterns that have gone on for all time. Others think we’re killing the planet. Whatever you believe, it’s not such a bad idea to save a little electricity for an hour, even if only for a break on your bill.

My little sister was staying overnight with me for the first time, during the blackout of 2003. When the lights went out, we had just finished a late lunch/early dinner. We played Scrabble by candlelight and took flashlights to our respective rooms when we retired for the night. It was eerie, but also kind of fun. So I can imagine that a planned hour of in-home darkness could be a good opportunity to teach your kids about conservation, no matter where you stand on the climate change issue.

It’s official now. Being fat is an area of study, not just for scientists and those hoping to cash in on the next Hoodia or grapefruit diet. Health experts keep telling us obesity is out of control in this country and now the education system is making moves to keep up with it.

The University of Guelph has teamed up with Humber College to offer a four-year degree course in obesity, believed to be the first of its kind in this country. Students will learn how to counsel the obese with courses on nutrition, exercise and anatomy, as well as looking into causes of obesity. It’s too simple to say it’s because some people eat more calories than they work off. There are psychological components and in some cases, diseases that come into play.

My advice to broadcasting students today is to specialize. It’s not like when I was getting into radio and television back in the day, when the earth was still cooling! Now you would do well to have a focus or a specialty, and I suppose it’s the same with health care. We know the population is aging, so working with the elderly would be a smart area of study. We also now know the population is fat so this new course, to start in the fall, makes perfect sense.

Statistics Canada says more than five-and-a-half million adults and a half-million children in this country are considered obese. The need is obviously there and these schools are hoping students will want to fill it.

Did you happen to see 60 Minutes last night? Actor Dennis Quaid and his wife, Kimberly, shared the story of their newborn twins and how they nearly died because of a medical mistake.

“It’s bigger than AIDS. It’s bigger than breast cancer,” said Quaid of medical errors that kill thousands of North Americans every year. It’s a problem that’s rarely spoken about because it’s essentially human error. People aren’t perfect and they make mistakes, but those errors can cost lives as it almost did in the case of the Quaid babies.

The infants had been hospitalized for a staph infection. They were accidentally given 1,000-times the recommended dose of the blood thinner Heparin — twice! They essentially started to bleed out.

This does not come as a surprise to me because I am allergic to Heparin, which is the go-to medication for preventing clots after surgery. Try to tell a nurse that you’re allergic to Heparin and you’ll get a wall of disbelief. I have to repeatedly justify my helpless, potentially fatal reaction to one of the safest and most widely used drugs!

The makers of Heparin have made changes to their packaging because the old containers of adult and child doses were too easy to mix up. But, Heparin isn’t the only medication that’s problematic. It just happens to be the one that’s getting a star of Quaid’s celebrity level to call for changes. The Quaids sued the makers of the drug, but they’re not suing Cedars Sinai Hospital.

The babies have recovered and the couple is just grateful and want to make sure no one else has to go through what they went through. They’re pushing Cedars Sinai to take the lead in creating awareness and new policies for health care to reduce mistakes. As Quaid explained last night, “I’m grateful for every day because if the twins had died, there wouldn’t have been another happy day.”

Is there some sort of revenge being meted out on unsuspecting gadget buyers? Is it sabotage or just apathy?

The Associated Press is finding that some very popular gadgets are coming to Best Buy and Target (US) stores preloaded with viruses. This type of cyber warfare used to be the domain of discontented geeks labouring in the darkness of their parents’ basements and attempting to make names for themselves or get some sort of revenge on the public at large - probably for calling them geeks.

Now it seems whoever is doing this to Apple I-Pods, digital picture frames and TomTom navigation gear. Security experts say the problem appears to be lax control in Chinese factories where many of the devices are being manufactured. They malicious software is entering the gadgets near the end of production, during the testing phase. The viruses are sometimes capturing passwords and spewing out spam.

Long before I knew anything about how viruses work or before I was wise enough to install good virus detection software or a firewall, I was an unwitting spam spewer. If it happens to you once, if you lost your dignity and had everyone in your email inbox get barraged with what SEEMED to be useless and repeating emails from you, you’d be very wary in the future. And you’d be extra careful about using these gizmos with their potential infections.

If I’ve learned anything in my time on this planet it’s that life is coloured with a wide range of hues; it’s not just black and white. And I have an inherent mistrust of anyone who takes a really hard line on themselves and others because all too often they’re unable to practise what they preach. Take New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer for example.

When he won in a landslide 14 months ago, Spitzer promised to clean up corruption and offered himself up as a respectable family man with a wife of 21 years and three teenaged daughters. Not all guys like him get caught up as a high-priced call girl customer in a corruption scandal investigation. But it seems that only a guy like him would find himself in such a position.

There’s a good chance you never even heard of Eliot Spitzer before the accusations that he spent as much as $80,000 on hookers and apologized — for nothing specific — with his sad and disappointed looking wife at his side. But that doesn’t really matter. You understand his position of trust and responsibility. You learn about his campaign platform and see how he has betrayed the trust of his constituents. You listen to New Yorkers call out for him to resign. You raise your eyebrows when you find out that a top-notch call girl can bring in more than five-grand for a couple of hours work!

This is a story we call a “talker.” People talk about it at water coolers and in break rooms because it’s just so foolish and reckless of this man to throw away everything he claimed to have stood for. Now we all watch together, to see what happens next.

A new study out today claims to have identified a new disorder — disconnect anxiety – that apparently affects nearly two-thirds of users of wireless devices when the connection goes down. The BlackBerry blackout that happened a couple of weeks back apparently inspired palpitations and sweaty palms among those who can’t even consider being away from email or PINs.

The symptoms include keeping your cellphone or PDA with you at virtually all times. Taking it into the bathroom with you. Visiting Facebook at least once a day. Sending text messages or e-mails on off-work hours, such as evenings and weekends. Guilty! But I - and others like me - think calling this a “disorder” is all in the eye of the beholder.

What if, like me, you only answer an urgent note on a weekend? Or, what if you answer a non-urgent note to a friend you might otherwise have a quick phone conversation with? It’s all rather vague and broad, if you ask me! But, maybe I’m in denial.

We had some good natured fun at the expense of reporter Katie Simpson who apparently dropped her BlackBerry into the bathtub while sending an email. But, had she been talking on the phone, would it have been as funny?

In my world, the BlackBerry substitutes for the telephone a lot. It’s just easier sometimes to send a quick text message, and I for one am not a fan of chatting on a cellphone in public or being near anyone else who is doing so. I will admit to acting urgently to non-urgent messages, sometimes, during working hours. But that’s a bid to get the responsibility for whatever it is “off my plate” and to not procrastinate. Yes, I have a million excuses, but they make sense to me. And as long as a person isn’t infringing or impinging on the lives of others, isn’t that what matters?

They’re calling it “storm fatigue” because everything we’re sick and tired of gets a medical name these days. We’re just tired of shovelling and looking outside at the bleak, wintry landscape, especially after last year’s record lack of snowfall. It just seems a little bit cruel of Ma Nature.

So we’re almost a little bit relieved when something else takes our attention away, although there is no way to make anything positive out of the revelation that Patrick Swayze is battling pancreatic cancer. The 55-year-old actor and dancer has an uphill battle as he takes treatment for one of the deadliest forms of the disease. For now, he is maintaining his work schedule and preparing to star in a new TV series.

City council has a little war of words on the go from the always colourful Rob Ford. It appears that in an attempt to compliment the Asian community for its work ethic, Ford used some archaic language and some are taking offence. This gives his nemesis, Mayor David Miller, the chance to pounce on the controversy and offers Ford the chance to pounce back. Some councillors and constituents are taking sides and it’s a story that’s got - as we say in the business - legs!

Many other stories captured our attention as “talkers” - stories that create a buzz. They include the Sikh man who lost his bid to have the helmet law declared discriminatory. Conrad Black went from his big house to ‘THE’ big house to serve his prison sentence, and he’s apparently hoping for a pardon as President Bush exits the White House for good late this year. And the city’s decision to keep most outdoor rinks closed during March Break had some March Break weary parents families fuming.

Anything to keep our minds off the snow!

There’s a sombre undertone in the 680 newsroom today. It was six years ago, on this date, that we lost our colleague and friend, Jim Morris. Jim was our police reporter, respected and appreciated by all of those who knew him - so much so that police sent a rare honour guard to Jim’s funeral, which was packed and overflowing with mourners.

I didn’t know Jim very well, but I thought the world of his work and talked to him every morning when he was in the field. I was a news anchor on CHFI at that time and provided support to the 680News morning show team, so I did whatever was needed; writing, researching, following up on tips and answering the phone. So when Jim phoned in to be put on the air with his reports, I would usually be the person who picked up. We’d have a brief chat, most often a little laugh, and then I’d pass his line on for business.

Jim was a champion for worthy causes, too. Even though he was very ill with lung cancer, he was still working the phones and getting support for the Big Brothers. I did get the chance to bowl on his team once - many of my co-workers went out for every event and continue to bowl on a team in his memory to this day and raise funds for an organization he believed in.

Jim made a huge impact on the success of 680News at that time. And when Jim told you something, you believed it, because he was a fact-checking demon whose word was as good as gold. He remained positive and energetic the whole time he was sick, for his family and for his friends and colleagues. On behalf of those who did know Jim well, on and off the air, we haven’t forgotten him - not at all. And we’re all thinking of him today.