Sleep Deprivation
It's Monday, March 1, 2021, 11:56 and I've put in the link to the archive of this radio program on WBAI.ORG. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We talked about being glad that February is just about over, and that the Vernal Equinox is only three weeks away. We talked about the Covid-19 pandemic, missions to Mars and flying cars. Pickles of the North talked about how vaccines are being distributed in Canada. I plan to update this Web page in the future.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings?
I have also posted a whole lot of the minutes of the Pacifica National Finance Committee on this Web site. I'm a member of that committee because I'm the WBAI LSB Treasurer.
The next WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, it will probably be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 11 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, February 10, 2021.
We welcomed a new member who replaced a member who resigned from the LSB. We had a debate about the legally required report out about the executive session from last month. I maintained that this was a violation of the rules laid down in the Communications Act. Nothing that was actually confidential was discussed. The report out was required to be posted by January 27. So it was quite late no matter what.
Before the meeting I had put out a written Treasurer's Report for all to read.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every 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.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. You can take a look at it and see if I've been able to post anything on it lately. There are still some limitations, but I am assured that I can plug in the archive blurbs that were lost in the latest upgrade.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Yeah, it looks like they'll have some alternating program's name prominently there, but if you have the right date it'll be our program. Good luck.
Since the General Manager has banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. There is another program in the alternate week's time slot.
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Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by General Manager Berthold Reimers. The General Manager will not say why. He won't even tell Sidney why he's banned! This is grossly unfair to Sidney and constitutes abuse of Staff. Why did Berthold ban Sidney?
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R. Paul spent part of this program talking about sleep deprivation. Yeah, he had it while doing this program, and it's pretty much a chronic thing. Many more people have been having to deal with sleep deprivation since the Covid-19 pandemic began to hit us all one year ago. Sometimes when you have to do things you just want to go to sleep.
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We talked about flying cars on this program. Flying cars have been a joke for years. In fact Pickles of the North has asked where her flying car is now that we're in the future! Well, these mythical vehicles may be in our near future.
I've read a prediction about flying cars taking to the skies in Europe in 2022. Bad idea, that. Worse idea: flying cars over Los Angeles, California in 2024!
A company named Archer says that they want to create an Urban Air Mobility network
over Los Angeles by 2024. They're designing and developing an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that can carry passengers for a distance of 60 miles at speeds of up to 150 mph while producing minimal noise.
Morgan Stanley has estimated that sustainable urban air transportation will be a $1.5 trillion industry by the year 2040. I don't know enough details about this Los Angeles deal, but i do know that plane crashes in a city are not a good thing.
People can't handle ordinary cars well enough to avoid accidents. A small error in driving a car can produce a fender bender. A fender bender class collision between two flying cars would invoke gravity, which always wins. Now, the Los Angeles idea is apparently to make the flying cars a form of public transportation. It would probably be a very expensive form of public transportation. I'm sure that they already have helipads around Los Angeles where people who have a lot of money to spend can take a helicopter flight to someplace relatively nearby. I know that in New York City such trips are quite expensive. So why would these flying cars displace the helicopters that are probably already working in Los Angeles?
I guess we're all going to find out if these are just ideas that people have which are never going to be tried out or if there will be actual money, and lives, invested in them. I've read that the Archer company is working with the city of Los Angeles to set this all up. Will flying cars remain a myth? Will they become a terrible disaster? Or will we see the old science fiction graphics of years ago come true?
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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 open list that no longer exists was the WBAI specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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