Anti-Gay-Dog Homophobia
So below are some of the topics we covered on this program. We did a poetry segment, which is rare for this program. I don't know how it might be received. We did more than what's below and I am planning on updating this and some other program Web pages over the next week or so. So check back and see if I actually get the updates posted this time.
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 that you can listen to and maybe even participate in will be held on Wednesday April 13, 2022, at 7 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 34 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, March 9, 2022. Some people were still demanding that elections be done over because their candidates lost. I insisted that the results of the election to fill a seat on a committee that rarely if ever meets be revealed to the LSB. And with a little bit of difficulty that was done. The people complaining lost again. This time it was a clear victory, no tie-breaker was needed.
Before the March 9, 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, so we have the following schedule:
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. 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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This is a gay dog story. In Stanly County, North Carolina a 4-year-old, 50-pound dog named Fezco was brought to the local Animal Protective Services facility by its owners. They didn't want the dog anymore. The reason was that they'd decided that the dog was homosexual after they saw it humping another male dog. Yeah, they didn't want to have a gay dog. So they threw him out of the house. What ignorance.
Well, this got some publicity and a gay couple from Indian Trail, North Carolina, Steve Nichols and John Winn, who've been together for over 30 years adopted the dog. They've renamed him Oscar, after Oscar Wilde, a famous Victorian poet and writer who was arrested on charges of sodomy and gross indecency in 1895. At his trial Oscar Wilde was grilled about the phrase The love that dare not speak its name.
He was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labor. Oscar the dog got off a lot better. Nichols and Winn, according to various news sources, said that when they heard the story, We looked at each other and said,
Oscar, the dog had never been to a veterinarian, according to Nichols, and had heartworms. Oscar the dog is now being treated for heartworms. Mr. Nichols said the dog has, We got to do something,
We just thought it would make sense for the gay dog to be adopted by a loving gay family. We've been subject to that kind of bigotry and ignorance throughout our lives together, and we couldn't always do anything about it.been through an awful lot, but we have high hopes, and the vet is very confident that he'll be able to pull through.
Good luck, Oscar!
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 489,131,396 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,145,883. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 80,117,294 and the death toll in America was 980,797, so 4,330 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. This week's death rate is once again lower than last week's, and last week's was a bit of an uptick. The BA.2 sub-variant of the omicron variant is becoming the dominant variant of COVID-19 in America now. The pandemic is not over.
The World Health Organization has said that worldwide COVID-19 deaths increased by 40% last week as overall cases declined. Definitely not over
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Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
We don't usually do poetry on Back of the Book but I thought we'd try some out this time. This is a poem from A.E. Housman's book A Shropshire Lad which was published in 1896. I read the poem and I talked about it on the program. I also related it to a line in the song Darling Be Home Soon by The Lovin' Spoonful which was part of the soundtrack of the movie You're A Big Boy Now (1967). I've looked at the three-score ten concept from both sides now.
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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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