This program is being broadcast on the day before Halloween. Pickles of the North did a segment on Halloween, Samhain and a CBS radio broadcast on this day in 1938, that got a lot of press. We talked about this shell game with Facebook changing its corporate name to META, just at the time when the bad behavior of the people who've run Facebook is getting heavily documented. I plan to post some more to this Web page too, so check back for the updates.
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? Well, I do, and I've recently updated some of that.
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, November 10, 2021, it will probably be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 28 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic. This will be the last meeting of the Eleventh WBAI LSB. This will be the past meeting of the Eleventh WBAI LSB.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, October 18, 2021.
The LSB meeting featured lots of hijinks with people trying to get a very badly put together motion pushed far up on the agenda. They failed, but they are up a lot of time in the failing. I think that much of it was simply electioneering. And at this time the 2021, WBAI elections are over. That's a good thing. We hope that none of you voted for the so-called Justice & Unity Campaign.
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. That meeting will end the 11th WBAI LSB. The 12th WBAI LSB will be seated on December 8, 2021.
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. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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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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Pickles of the North talked about Halloween and the evolution of the Celtic Samhain festival into today's gleeful dress-up holiday.
She also talked about The Mercury Theatre on the Air radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' 1898 novel on the night of October 30, 1938. She read some of the mail that the Mercury Theatre repertory company, and Orson Welles, who produced, directed and narrated the program, got in the aftermath the broadcast. Our program opened with some excerpts from that broadcast. We talked about the real life scary things that were going on in the Autumn of 1938.
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The company Facebook
is now the company META.
It's still Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook.
I had been hoping they'd rename it Flat Affect Book
or maybe even Assbook
or Buttbook.
But in order to distract from their current difficulties, caused by a whistle-blower who has leaked a lot of internal documents showing that Facebook is officially trying to be bad, and thereby making huge amounts of money, they are now talking about creating something Zuckerberg calls the metaverse.
One person on Twitter tweeted, that META stood for Mark Evading True Accountability.
The documents that have been released show that Facebook officially knew that girls and young women were especially harmed by some of the things posted on Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook, now META, owns. Facebook also knew that hate speech generated anger and made people stay on Facebook for longer periods of time and allowed more advertising to be displayed to them. And that's the main way that Facebook, and now META, makes money. And of course Facebook invades your privacy terribly. That's why I've resisted going on Facebook and will continue to avoid getting sucked in by any of the META products.
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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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