Behind the Scenes Minis: Danger Doge and Time Zones

Tracy and Holly talk about Falieri's strange shift from respectability to treason, all that slapping, and the city of Venice. They then discuss time zones and Tracy's difficulty with jet lag.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Happy Friday. I'm Tracy d Wilson,
and I'm Holly Fry. One of the things we talked
about on the show this week was Marino Faliero, also
called marine falier also called a pronunciation in Latin that

(00:26):
I've already forgotten the bad Doje Doja Venice, only the
only ones ever be executed for treason. While I was
working on this, I was kind of struggling with it
because I thought the background on the office of DOJ
and how that developed was important context because it may

(00:46):
explain why he took those steps, like maybe he just
wanted a lot more power than the office really had.
But I also felt like the most interesting part of
it was all the slapping in the beheading, which came
along much later. So I was talking through all of
this with my spouse at dinner at a restaurant as
I had gotten to a point where like I had

(01:07):
the whole outline roughed out, but I was still like,
how can I make how can I make this a
little bit more like compelling with the part that I
felt that was more context and less the good part,
and I was like, so he brought all these commoners
together and they started planning a coup, and Patrick said
a coup against who he was the dose, And I

(01:28):
was like, valid point, Wow, But if he was largely figureheady, yeah, yeah,
it is a weird thing, right at that late stage
in his life to be like now is the time? Yeah,
because he was at least in his seventies and depending

(01:50):
on which year of birth is the right one, because
I really did find three different years of birth, Like
he may have been almost or into his eighties and
had how to career that, you know, while seeming to
have a volatile temper, but like beyond that, it seems
like people respected him. So it does seem like, why
suddenly did you decide to murder everyone? Right? I mean

(02:11):
there's part of me that's like and just trying to
logic it out. I'm not saying this is a good
and valid choice. Uh. Is there part of him that
was like, yeah, but no one will remember me for
being a nice guy, one of many many doges. But
if I become the worst doche, I will secure my legacy.

(02:34):
The fact that there were so many people getting slapped
in this episode was fascinating to me. The fact that
he seems to have either tried to take absolute power
in Venice or was manipulated into this weird and terrible
coup plan fascinating to me. The painting over of his portrait.

(02:56):
None of those portraits, or at least as far as
we know, like there was not source artwork to go
on for a lot of those portraits. They're sort of
what imagined of what all the doges look like, except
for his, which is just this banner that's painted onto
the wall, which both of us as we were walking
around with this audio tour, we're like, you know, we're

(03:17):
we're sort of looking at the walls and the ceiling
because it's like the whole room is just covered in artwork.
And then we had the audio tours queued up to
approximately the same point, and both of our heads just
turned to find this banner hanging among all the doge portraits.
See memorable. I love just a little bit at the

(03:40):
end that we talked about Venice's identity being so counter
to the way it was perceived. Yeah, because I don't know,
it's just a great that's like a a municipality wide thing.
But like you can extrapolate that and condense it down,

(04:01):
and like, how many of us, just humans walking around,
have the same situation going on. It's like, yeah, I
think I am this, and if you ask somebody else
will be like, no, you are this fascinating phenomenon. Yeah.
Something that was really striking to me about Venice is
Venice's own mythology about itself, which you know, as we said,

(04:22):
is this idea this is a place that was particularly
blessed by St. Mark and particularly home to ingenuity and
artwork and an independent republic that stood for more than
a thousand years, and it's something that comes up again
and again in the various historical things that we saw
while we were there, And as someone who did not

(04:43):
grow up in Venice or even grow up in Italy,
I was like, wow, this is like just continual historical
pr campaign for yourself that's been going on for centuries.
And I see this also, you know, in a eric
and historical sites, especially things that are related to things

(05:03):
like the founding of the United States and the Revolutionary War. Uh,
and depending where you are, different aspects of the Civil War,
some of which are incredibly troubling, and how they sort
of put forth the myth of how this all happened.
But I I felt like a various places that I
have traveled before, like this was a place where I

(05:25):
I felt like it was so infused with everything that
we saw that I was like, this is really interesting
to me, And it's also very interesting to me how
the perception grew that it was this like mysterious and
romantic and secretive place, because I mean, it's a city
right there on the water with canals instead of roads

(05:47):
for cars to drive on, and in the like cooler
months that can be shrouded in this very thick mist.
And I was like, yeah, I understand why this is,
like why this has been the subject of so much
artwork and so many fictional depictions, Like it is a
place that lends itself to all kinds of storytelling and
myth making. We pretty much went because it is very

(06:11):
threatened by both climate change and by the effects of
the enormous amount of tourism that it gets. So it
was like we were contributing to the problem ourselves by
going there, but also wanted to see it right before
it is underwater, because it is, I mean, it is

(06:32):
absolutely threatened by sea level rise. Um there are times
now already where the tide swells to the point that
it just floods the city and they have to put
little platforms down on the walkways for people to be
able to get around. I vaguely recall a million years ago,
by which I mean maybe eight years ago, when we

(06:55):
were still doing editorial work for house stuff work, and
we had an episode about an episode, an article that
I was working on for some reason about Venice and
sea level rise, and I remember looking at pictures of
the Piazza Saint Mark being flooded and I was just like,
this is messed up. Yeah, it happens. That has happened

(07:19):
actually relatively recently at the waterfront area of Boston, there
have been a couple of tides that have just flooded
everything around for the same reasons. So yeah, yeah, I'm
glad we were able to go to Venice. I really
hope Number one, we as a society are able to

(07:41):
take some more concrete steps to try to slow down
the pace of climate change. And also there are attempts
to do some things to try to protect Venice as
a city, and some of them are controversial. That everything
has a has a downside, but it is a beautiful
and interesting place with all kinds of historical buildings, all
out of which are just gorgeous, that are just right

(08:03):
on the water. It's just right there. There's a wall
and it's the canal. Yeah. I hope people are documenting
every single tiny thing about it before we lose it. Yeah,
that's a downer place to end it. That is a
downer place. Sorry, maybe this will be the Monday episode

(08:25):
and so there will be a second happier thing because
we don't know when we record these. A lot of
the times we're just like, well, we'll record it so
that it could be either the first or the second episode. Yeah,
and we have some control over the calendar, but things
come up that make it necessary to shift things into
one position or another. So Fingers Crossed will try to

(08:46):
make this a Monday episode so that this will be
the first half of behind the Scenes and the next
one will be a laugh riot watch. It's going to
be horrible, Tracy. We talked about the adoption of standard times. Yeah, yeah,

(09:13):
ah time. Yeah, it's one of those things that if
you never travel, if you never uh like, let's say
you live in a remote area and your life is
centered around your home and your family, and uh, not
going to other places. Like none of this really affects
your life that much, probably, but like if you're going

(09:36):
to travel a long way with a fast mode of travel,
especially like trying to adjust your watch twenty seven times
and also missing your train connection or your plane connection
or whatever because the clocks were different, Like it's a
whole different level of necessity. Yeah. I remember once when

(09:58):
I was still living in Atlanta to I had gone
to the Atlanta airport for something. So I mean, obviously
it was to get on an airplane, but I don't
remember what the trip was about. Uh. And I had
gotten there really early for whatever reason. Uh, And I
was like, wow, I have all this time. I'm just
gonna go over to the international terminal because that's like
new and clean, and I can go to the stores

(10:22):
there or whatever. I'm just going to hang out. And
at some point my phone decided that I was in
Central time instead of Eastern Time, and I was like, wow,
why do I feel like I have so much more?
I knew I got here early, but not that early,
And then I realized that my phone didn't match the
departure boards, and I was like, oh, no, that's terrifying.

(10:44):
Going back to the gate right now, I still had
plenty of time. I did not miss my flight. But
since then I've been kind of paranoid about whether my
phone has auto adjusted, it's time zoned to something wrong,
whether it's trying to mess with you. There were a
couple of things is that I did not put in
this episode. One is kind of a charming story about

(11:06):
Sandford Fleming when he was a kid. It comes up
kind of briefly mentioned in some of the biographies of him.
I read about him being a kid and obviously being
kind of like the right child to go into a
surveying career, which is that he invented what he called
a drawing machine when he was a kid, which is

(11:26):
basically this way that projected silhouettes onto things and then
he would kind of draw them out based on it.
But like he had this whole mechanism set up, and
I could never find a really really good description of
it that I understood how it functioned. But I just
loved the idea that as a child he was like,
I'm going to invent machines that makes sense out of

(11:47):
things that I can't do artistically. I loved it. Um,
he sounds fun. The other thing I didn't mention, And
I don't know if we've talked about it on all
behind the scenes before. Have we ever talked about Swatch
Internet time? Oh? I feel like it came up in
the context of something, and I remember you telling me
about it, but I don't remember if then we talked

(12:08):
about it on the behind the scenes or not. I
wanted it to be a thing so bad. There was
a time briefly in the late ninety nineties when Swatch
was trying to institute this idea of instead of using
hours and minutes, we would transition everything to one thousand
beats a day and everybody would be on the same

(12:29):
beat all the time, whether you were in Atlanta, in
Hong Kong, in London, and and they had watches that
worked on beats, and I was like, yes, this is
one you Ninus saw and nobody wanted to do it.
But I think it might have been a conversation and
something like maybe when we were talking about Esperanto and
having an international language the context of that. So I

(12:53):
live in eastern Massachusetts, north of Boston. We are in
the Eastern time zone, and sometimes conversation comes up about
whether we should really be one time zone farther to
the east than we are, because man, the sun comes

(13:13):
up so early. The sun came up this morning at
five am, which means it was getting light at about
four thirty UM. And while we have we have these
like pull down blackout blinds that do make it darker
than other blinds in the house do like they're more opaque,
but there's still a thin line between the blind and

(13:35):
the actual frame. Are like the sill of the window
where a little bit of light can seep through and
it is enough to really brighten up the rooms when
the sun comes up. We haven't put curtains over it
because we think the cats will climb them. And every
year I just I forget that I need a sleep
mask on my face when I go to bed or else.

(13:56):
The rising sun at four thirty in the more ing
is going to start waking me up. And that happened today. Uh.
And it was unfortunate because when I remembered I should
put a sleep mask on, and I fell back asleep.
Then I overslept because I had just messed myself. Fall up. Yeah, ma'am, Yeah,

(14:16):
I think because I naturally shift to vampire hours. If
left to my own devices, daylight savings shifting back and
forth has very little meaning to me. I'm like, Okay, yes,
roll with it, because I'm like, I'm sleeping through daylight,
daylight anyway, no matter what happens. If it's a weekend,
the sun has come up before, I have for sure. Yeah,

(14:38):
I do not enjoy the time changes of daylight saving time.
I also have a hard time traveling crossing time zones
like I haven't. I have a hard time with jet
leg if I'm traveling over a lot of time zones especially,
And the thing I have the hardest time with is
in the winter time. I have a little bit of
just like seasonal difficulty. I've never been diagnosed with anything,

(15:00):
but I'd like it's noticeably more challenging for me in
the darker months, and often I am just starting to
feel like the light is where I wanted to be,
and then the time changes and it resets, and I'm like, no,
I see. I don't have any form of seasonal effective
disorder that I can surmise, but I do have winter

(15:23):
rage disorder, which has nothing to do with light and
everything to do with how much I just hate being cold. Yeah,
it's a very different thing though, But yeah, I have
always thought like, oh, I'm pretty good with time zone changes,
which was put to the test recently and I think
turned out to be correct, because we went to Italy
for a little over a week and then I came
back to Atlanta for three days, and then I went

(15:44):
to California for a little less than a week, and
that all happened right on and I was fine. It
didn't bother me. I, on the other hand, had terrible
jet lag in Italy, especially the first two days we
were there. I felt very bad. And after I had
managed to finally get like my first really good night

(16:06):
of sleep, and I felt like I was acclimating, people
were like, I was worried about you, and I was like,
I'm all right now, I just need to remember if
I'm traveling over that many time zones, I need a
little time built into it. Just I think I just
always stay up until it stops being a thing, and
then that's always my trick, right, Like, Okay, I'll just

(16:29):
stay up and make myself stay awake until it's the
right time to go to bed, and then I'm like golden, No,
But that worked for me mostly coming home. Coming home,
I just stayed up until we were home, and then
I went to bed at normal time home time, and
I got on to Eastern time again pretty easily, but
I still like my body still felt really really tired.

(16:52):
But going to Italy, I wasn't really able to sleep
on the plane because of like our connecting flight interrupted
what would have been sleeping time, and it like didn't
it didn't work out for me. Yeah, I can't sleep
on a plane, So I just stay up like thirty
six hours and then I conk out and then I'm set.
Didn't work for me, and then I'm like, okay, I'll

(17:14):
have two mohitos and I'll go to bed and then yeah,
that's the whole clock. Yeah, it was like I was
too tired to get comfortable, and my brain was also
like the time is incorrect. I don't know what's wrong
with you, and so it was like an addition to
having not slept on the flight, I continued to not
really sleep for the next two nights and then then
it worked out. Then I gotta I got onto the

(17:34):
correct time and it was Okay, this is only a
problem that happens for people thinking afford to travel internationally.
I recognized that it is not something that like world,
but it impacts you even when you're going back and
forth across the US, like if you have a work thing.
When we travel for tours and stuff, yeah, usually when

(17:55):
we if we go to the West Coast for a tour,
a lot of the time I will try to get
there a day early, especially if our show times are later.
I want to not be a wreck for them. Maybe
one day we will tour again. Maybe maybe, But in
any case, I am personally thankful for time. Zon it's
because not just to try. I'm kind of obsessed with time.

(18:19):
I love it, um Like, I like how it makes
order out of chaos, and he is like the one
thing because I tend to be very um I can
get very unfocused very quickly. But as long as I
have like a time in mind, I can kind of
fix my trajectory and be like no, no, no, no, no,
you're not supposed to still be in the sewing room.
Go do some work, Go be a grown up for

(18:40):
a minute. Uh. And I am not particularly inflexible about it,
but time is just like a perfect guideline for my
day to day life. I know that probably sounds wildly obvious,
but like I literally mark out my day of like
I need to be doing X by X, why by Z,
Like then I'm in a shift to this, and then

(19:01):
I book in this, and I do kind of schedule
all my days so that I don't completely, like become
a floopie nightmare that gets nothing done. I have to
because I'm doing too many things at once all the time.
If this is your Friday and you are headed into
a weekend where you don't have things to do, I
hope that your time is spent however you wish, and

(19:23):
that it is enjoyable and delightful, either as structured or
unstructured as works best for you. Uh. We will be
right back here tomorrow with a classic, and then on
Monday there will be brand new episodes coming in. Hot
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of

(19:44):
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.