Web links related to the Back of the Book program of January 28, 2008


It's Sunday morning, February 10, 2008, 09:30, and this Web page is finished. Oh, this was a difficult program. We did the below stuff and a bunch more. It was all handwritten and from memory.

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

UPDATE as of Friday, January 25, 2008: The elections for the WBAI Local Station Board appear to be going forward, although a judge is still working out some details of the lawsuit brought by some members.

On January 24, the judge granted the plaintiffs in the case the preliminary injunction they'd been seeking. Basically, the plaintiffs want everyone who was eligible to vote to have a chance to do so. Many WBAI subscribers never received ballots and a lot of subscribers didn't receive them even after having asked for them in a timely manner. The percentage of listeners who didn't get ballots is unknown, but there have been quite a number of complaints. It looks like around 25% of WBAI Staff also didn't get ballots.

The judge's order says, “THIS PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION SOUGHT BY THE PLAINTIFFS IS GRANTED, to the extent of the stipulation by defendants of this date:”

“The defendants shall not count the ballots of the WBAI Delegate election until all qualified voters who have not received ballots are given ballots and are provided with a reasonable opportunity to cast them;”

“Accordingly, the defendants shall establish as the final date for submission of ballots in the WBAI election as February 23, 2008.”

So if you still have a ballot the safe thing would be to mail it in immediately.

If you've already asked for a replacement ballot you should be getting one in the mail very soon. But, if you are either a listener member or a Staff member of WBAI and you did not receive a ballot and/or you requested a replacement ballot then you need to immediately contact Frank LeFever Ph.D. and Mitchel Cohen and let them know if you didn't get a ballot and whether or not you got a replacement ballot. If you didn't get a ballot and would like to get a replacement ballot you should immediately contact the National Elections Supervisor Casey Peters. You need to request a replacement ballot by February 15.

There has been a lawsuit filed about the way this election is being handled. The Court case is still ongoing. Here is a posting about the latest details of the case. It's possible that some of the details regarding the election could change so you'll need to keep updated.

We talked a bit about the latest LSB meeting on January 14th. The faction currently in charge still had a majority and they elected 3 of WBAI's 4 Directors on the Pacifica National Board. The usual faction sycophant denounced me and called for me to be taken off the air. Later on this same person commended me for not doing commercials on the air, as he claims many other WBAI producers do. So on this program I did a blatant commercial for Uncle Sidney's Small Mammal Compactor. Oh yeah, after commending me he said that he still wanted me taken off the air.

There's a regular LSB meeting scheduled for February 20th at 7:00 PM, location to be announced.

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. It was working all right at 11:26 PM last night.

WBAI is archiving the programs! Just go here and you'll be able to listen to the program any time for the next couple of months. 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.

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

I'm glad to announce that with a new person doing the archives there have been some positive changes. In the table on that Web page Back of the Book and Carrier Wave are both under “Shared Timeslot Monday 1AM to 3AM” 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!

Well, some days before this program my ailing computer, an 800 MHz Pentium 3 running Windows 98SE, completely stopped working. Upon booting up it just said that there was an error and it was not going to continue. Nothing I could do would get it to work.

I also had 2 large partitions on one of my hard drives that the system couldn't see anymore, probably due to bad sectors on the hard drive. In fact 3 of my partitions had bad sectors on them. This also caused some havoc with my machine.

So I had to decide what to do. I finally decided that I'd try to save my data and see if I could salvage my machine. I initially tried to reinstall Windows 98SE without clobbering everything, but the Windows reinstallation process just scrambled much of my C: drive and I had to try to wipe everything off that partition and do a totally new installation on a blank partition, which included formatting the partition. I had to save data, which took a long time and involved a lot of jumping through hoops, it also involved a last minute rush to a store that was not nearby in an effort to get a USB 2 cable (those things are outrageously expensive). The effort to save the data took a lot longer than I thought and it couldn't be done by late Sunday night. So we had to use handwritten notes and memory for the program.

Eventually, I got the 2 dead partitions fixed, which took a total of 65 hours of computer time, and I've been trying to reload the software on this computer since then. The Hot Dog Pro HTML editor from Sausage Software which I'd been using simply will not connect to its server properly and recognize my registration key so I'm just using a freeware HTML editor called HTML-Kit to do these pages now. It's not bad.

I'll probably be spending about the next 6 weeks trying to reload software onto this computer, I estimate. I'll never get it all back on here. Well, I'll just have to hope that I can keep things working.

We'll be pitching on the February 10/11, program.

We hope that you'll pledge to WBAI while Back of the Book is on at that time.

If you listen to the radio program on tape or via the Internet archives you probably won't be able to pledge during the program, but you can send us a check ahead of time. A regular one year membership is $25. So please send a check made payable to “Pacifica/WBAI” and send it to:

R. Paul Martin
% WBAI
120 Wall St. 10th floor
New York, NY 10005

And we hope that everyone who listens pledges or sends in a check.

I should also point out that we'll need help answering the phones. This aspect of things now requires that you get your name added to a list so you can enter the building. So if you want to volunteer to answer phones for this 'thon you should call the Volunteer Coordinator at 1-212-209-2826. We always need more folks to answer the phones.

We noted the recent death of former World Chess Champion bobby Fischer on this program.

Bobby Fischer was a great chess player, but he was also a nut. He became a rabid anti-Semite later in life. Not that he hadn't been one earlier in life, it just got worse.

I talked about Fischer and chess in general, and I talked about the part of my life where I made chess a very big thing indeed. The best I could do was to be a 5th rate chess player. Oh, the follies of youth.

There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even now that the gag rule has been lifted. 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.

Probably the most popular list that's sprung up is the “NewPacifica” mailing list. This one is very lively and currently includes over 400 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.

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

And then there is the historic “Free Pacifica!” list, which has been used to help organize resistance to Pacifica Management hijackers since the mid-90s. It's become a low volume mailing list because it's been eclipsed by some of the newer, more technologically advanced, lists. Just click on this link and follow the instructions, and you'll be subscribed. This is a mailing list only, it doesn't have a digest option nor does it have a web interface.

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


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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2008, R. Paul Martin.