Web links related to the Back of the Book program of August 20, 2011


It's Saturday morning, August 27, 2011, 02:25, and I've updated this Web page with the news about what's ahppening with WBAI during the Hurricane Irene emergency. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ At the end of this program Back of the Book will have completed 25 years on the air. We're hoping to celebrate on the next program. Pickles of the North is at the North Pole this fortnight fighting that oppressor Santa Claus. She'll be back for the next program. We plan to get to the below stuff and more on this program. Check back for updates.

Hurricane Emergency at WBAI

On Friday afternoon Staff got notice from the new Ops Director regarding what's going to happen with WBAI during the Hurricane Irene emergency.

WBAI is in the Zone A evacuation area and everyone has to leave the 120 Wall St. location as of 5:00 PM Saturday.

As for WBAI's air the new Ops Director says, “At 5 PM we will begin to play 24 hours of prerecorded programming that is being assembled by Tony Bates. Once that ends or is disabled for any reason we will begin to carry programming from KPFK via Comrex or ISDN until programming can be restored.”

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday, August 10, 2011, at a location to be announced.

The LSB met on Wednesday, July 13, 2011, at Alwan for the Arts, 16 Beaver St #501, in Manhattan. The main thing we did was go over the income projections for WBAI's FY12 budget.

At a previous meeting the WBAI LSB voted to hold its meetings on the second Wednesday of every month and/or the last Thursday of that month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:

All of these meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.

WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.

WBAI has an official Web stream of what's on the air at any time! You can go here and pick which type of stream you want! If this stream isn't working let me know. And you can see the status of the streams at any time by clicking here. The stream was working at 3:07 this morning. The station has a Flash stream here, make sure you enable Javascript so it can work for you.

WBAI is archiving the programs! Just go here and you'll be able to listen to this program any time for the next couple of months. You may need to scroll up one line to see the audio archive. Let me know if you find this feature useful.

If you want to listen to any part of the WBAI archive click here to go right to the archives. When you first go to the Web page you'll only see the WBAI programs for the past 7 days. If you want to see older programs you can click on one of the “See ALL Shows” buttons. Or to see only the two shows in this time slot click here.

Back of the Book is again one of the programs that you can download, as well as listen to on line.

In the table on the archive Web page Back of the Book and Saturday Morning With the Radio On are both in the “Show” column. The “Date and Category” column shows the date of the program. After the program I go in and write the details of the program and say which program it is. Of course I'd recommend that you just listen to both programs in this time slot!

In the Summer of 2009, there was a Pacifica National Board meeting held in New York. Here's the Web page I did about this PNB meeting and the amazing things that went on at it.

And the PNB has also met in Houston from Friday October 9th, through Sunday October 11th, 2009. The official audio archive of that meeting is here. It was not disrupted as the New York meeting was, although some of the same miscreants got out there to say stupid things.

The Pacifica National Board (PNB) met in Manhattan the weekend of October 1-3, 2010. The audio has been posted for the first day of the meeting, the second day of the meeting and the third day of the meeting.

WBAI Management has set up this page to let folks know what's happening if you can't hear the broadcast. If there's a problem with the broadcast tonight you should try the stream. We're hoping it all goes well this morning.

I plan to talk about this so-called “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011” on this program. It's really an intrusive piece of legislation that's about letting Big Brother have his Patriot Act powers under cover of protecting children. I always knew that they'd use something like this to try to eradicate civil liberties on the Internet.

Here's a statement from Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith about why this is just such a good bill.

There are those who see this for what it really is. Here's a letter from some organizations that are against it.

Has the LHC detected the Higgs boson?

Summer Streets 2011
The View South on Lafayette Street

After the last radio program Pickles of the North and I went to the city's Summer Streets event. This is where they close off Park Ave. to vehicular traffic for several miles and pedestrians are supposed to be able to walk freely along the fancy boulevard.

Well, you still have to watch out for idiots on bicycles who think that closing off the street to motor vehicles gives them license to speed along at high speeds amid people walking and jogging along the same street.

The southern end of the event is at Foley Square. You can walk up Lafayette St., which becomes 4th Ave for a short while and then that becomes Park Ave.

We only went up to E. 24th St. this year. We'd been up all night getting the radio program ready and one of us, yeah the old guy, was just too pooped to keep going.

At E. 24th St. Pickles got to get some seeds from the New York Botanical Gardens folks who were there, as well as try out some health food stuff.

There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.

One popular list the “NewPacifica” mailing list. Founded October 31, 2000, this list is sometimes lively and as of mid-2011, has 687 subscribers coast to coast.

Being lively, of course, it sometimes also gets a bit nasty. All sorts of things are happening on this list and official announcements are frequently posted there.

You can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too. If you subscribe to the “NewPacifica” mailing list you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list.

There is the option to receive a “digest” version of the list, which means that a bunch of messages are bundled into one E-mail and sent to you at regular intervals, this cuts down on the number of E-mails you get from the list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

This list also has a Web based interface where you can read messages and from which you can post your own messages.

There is also the more WBAI specific “Goodlight” Web based message board. It is sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as “the bleepin' blue board,” owing to the blue background used on its Web pages. This one has many people posting anonymously and there's also an ancillary “WBAI people” board that's just totally out of hand. UPDATE: The bleepin' blue board has had to add a step for folks to get onto it because it's under attack by spambots. When you click on the above link you may be asked for a username and password. Type in Username: poster Password: enternow

When the computer in Master Control is working we sometimes have live interaction with people posting on the “Goodlight Board” during the program.

Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Carrier Wave alternates with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.

My voice mail number at WBAI is 212-209-2996. Leave a message.

You can also send me E-mail.



WBAI related links

WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site


Back to the Back of the Book page

Back to my home page.

The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2011, R. Paul Martin.