The job action ongoing by the freelance reporters and stringers for Pacifica Network News has been extended. Look at the Pacifica Theft Menu to find out more.

The Web cast of tonight's program should be working for Back of the Book. Unfortunately, this may not be the case for much longer. WBAI's wacky General Manager, Valerie Van Isler, has not paid Porus dot com the $2,500 she'd promised to upgrade their carriage of WBAI. This feed may cease to exist soon.

Paul Williams of UFO Desk is arranging for this feed. And we thank Porus dot com for providing this feed.

The “Middle Third” of the year has begun! This is the best time of the year, in my opinion. The “Middle Third” consists of the months May, June, July and August. Mid-Spring will occur this Friday, May 5, 2000, at 12:41 PM EDT.

I mentioned on the program that the New York City Parks Department is going to have a nature tour titled “Horseshoe Crab Romance” on Saturday, June 17, at 8:30 PM at Marine Park in Brooklyn. I've gone on about these creatures in the past, and so I may attend this event. Look down this page for June 17, for more details.

Everybody knows about the big rock from space that landed on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, but it was a much deadlier rock that cleared out enough of the terrestrial biota for the dinosaurs to flourish more than 200 million years ago. It's a smoking gun with “trilobite” written all over it!

This was one big rock because it left a crater 75 miles wide in Woodleigh, Australia. This is now the fourth largest crater discovered on Earth. But there is also a 25 mile wide crater in Brazil of something near the same age. This gives rise to speculation that there was really a one-two punch from space that served to kill off 90% of the animals on Earth around a quarter of a billion years ago.

Speaking of dinosaurs, there's the Pacifica National Board. Um, no. This can't be about them. This is about a dinosaur with a heart.

As I said on the program, a scientist has found and examined the remains of a dinosaur that includes the creature's heart. It's on exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Organs and soft tissues are rarely found in dinosaur fossils. They usually rot away long before the mineralization begins to fossilize the bones.

This is a pretty important find because the heart turns out to be more similar to the mammalian or avian four chambered heart than to the reptilian heart. The mammalian heart, which you and I have pumping away in our chests, is a lot more efficient than the reptilian one. This also bolsters the theory that at least some dinosaurs were warm blooded, which would make them very different from the slow, lumbering creatures they were previously thought to be by most scientists.

Forget about a flat Earth, we may be living in a flat universe!

One of the above links tells you pretty much everything about this research into the fine details of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. The BOOMERANG CMB Project actually measured differences of 0.0001° Celsius in the CMB, which reflects the condition of the universe when it was about 300,000 years old. The universe is estimated to be about 13 to 14 billion years old now.

My beef is that they're finding what they wanted to find, and I always cast a hairy eyeball at that sort of thing. But they really are presenting quite a lot of logical sounding evidence for it. Perhaps they've really gotten it. Hey, who am I to argue with a bunch of people who use a micromachined mesh of silicon nitride cooled to 0.3° C. above absolute zero to make their measurements?

They say that their findings are also consistent with the emerging information about dark matter and “quintessence” which seem to dominate the universe and which are making it accelerate its expansion. And they also say that Euclid was right.

This is major, profound research and we're bound to have more information coming out of it, and more conclusions based on it, in the future. Bigger brains than I will poke at these findings. I guess we'll all see what happens as time goes by.

There was a Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender “Millennium March on Washington” on April 30^th. I didn't go. Lots of people didn't go. It was a very top down thing and the event organizers' communication with various communities was pretty poor. I wasn't the only one who didn't think this event was done well.

Regular listener and E-mail writer North American Shirley had something to contribute on gay subjects, so I read her E-mail out of order on the program. Here it is, it's basically an interesting link about a book that debunks this silly idea that some people have that homosexuality is something that only gay men and lesbians do. Sexual orientation is just so much more complex than anyone seems to want to admit.

I did manage to read some of the backlog of mail during this program. You can see that I'm pretty far behind on it, but I'm catching up.

Well, there is no studio audience for Back of the Book. It's just a tiny studio. Besides, it would be boring as all hell. At least with the radio you can turn it off when it gets boring. In the studio you'd just have to sit there and slump over when you passed out.

North American Shirley gave us a couple of more E-mails next.

Actually, this has been a point of debate among paleontologists for decades. Of the ordinary quadrupeds, many would lie down and get up just as an elephant or other large mammal would today. Tyrannosaurus Rex posed a problem though because of those tiny arms. Some suggest that Tyrannosaurus Rex just dug those little arms into the dirt and braced him/herself with them while the huge hind legs got the beast upright; others think that the giant carnivore just used its hind legs in conjunction with its powerful tail to get up.

I don't think I could recommend an ISP at this point in time. I'm certainly still dissatisfied with RCN.

There are a lot of issues that we can't talk about on the air at WBAI. But there is an Internet list called “Free Pacifica!” which you can subscribe to, and these issues are discussed there. If you subscribe to it you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

If you want to subscribe to the “Free Pacifica!” list just click on this link and follow the instructions, and you'll be subscribed. Could open your eyes a little bit.

The above list has occasionally produced a high volume of E-mail because of the attention that these issues have drawn. If you would prefer to subscribe to a low volume list that only provides announcements of events related to these issues then subscribe to the FreePac mailing list.

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