Royal Portrait?
Here's some of what we talked about on this radio program. I am hoping to add a bit more to this Web page, and soon.
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 regular LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday September 14, at 7:00 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 39 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, August 10, 2022. At times it was a bit comical. There was a lot of disagreement over the agenda, and then we did not get to that part of the agenda.
Before the August 10, 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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Radio's Pickles of the North talked about her relationship to the late Queen Elizabeth II. She was, after all, the Queen of Canada, among other places. Pickles talked about her parents seeing the Queen during her reign. The Queen probably helped to stabilize a number of countries, along with the United Kingdom.
Prince Charles, who has set the record for being the Prince of Wales the longest of anyone ever, has ascended the throne, which some people had speculated he would never do. He's chosen to be called King Charles III, or maybe just King Chuckie III. I talked about his predecessors: King Charles I was executed in 1649, after the English Civil War, and then there was Charles II of England who was the eldest surviving child of Charles I. Charles II was known as the Merry Monarch
for the hedonism of his court. But I really remember the leaked recording of a phone call between Prince Charles and his then girlfriend Camilla. He said that he wanted to be her, um, feminine hygiene product. So I'm also considering calling him King Tampon I. I wonder if that title would catch on?
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 607,840,714 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,512,519. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 95,176,686 and the death toll in America was 1,050,222, so 2,842 people have died of COVID-19 in America since our last program one week ago. That's about 800 deaths fewer than for the previous week. People have been saying for months now that the rates are going down, maybe we're finally seeing that happen in America. Still, the pandemic is not over, even though a lot of people are behaving as if it were, including the CDC. Keep your masks on.
We talked about the CDC approving booster shots for omicron variants BA.4 and BA.5. Pickles of the North talked about getting her 2022, flu vaccination and her new COVID-19 omicron variation vaccination which also targets the BA.4 and BA.5 variations, which are the dominant strains of the virus in America these days. She got a shot in each arm. R. Paul is going to see if he can get both shots at once this coming week. Maybe after that he'll try to get out a little bit more.Neither of us has been to WBAI in 2½ years now due to the pandemic.
By the time this program airs on Saturday morning all of those figures we quoted will be higher of course. This was all mostly preventable.
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We talked about astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake. He was an advocate of looking for sentient life elsewhere in the universe. His efforts, along with the efforts of others, eventually led to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He came up with his famous equation as the result of a meeting in 1961, of a group of scientists who seriously started to think about what an extraterrestrial intelligence might be like. Drake's equation sets forth a set of conditions that would affect the ability of any life form to evolve into a creature that could make itself known in the universe, probably through the use of radio waves. SETI is still a topic in he 21st Century and not enough is currently known about a number of the parameters of the equation to really compute the number of extraterrestrial civilizations that might be able to contact us.
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The day after this program airs, Sunday, will be the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Pickles of the North and I are among the people who see the evidence of the attack having been done by foreign nationals under the leadership of Osama bin Laden as conclusive. We figure that with the anniversary coming up the 9/11 conspiracy nut community is getting all geared up to resume spouting their various versions of what happened, all of which are nonsense. They'll probably claim again that steel doesn't lose its strength if it's heated to too high a temperature, and that robot planes were used to destroy the twin towers and damage part of the Pentagon after the passengers were taken away to some secret place. We don't hear the claim that a set of UFOs crashed into the buildings much anymore. Even the 9/11 troofers are a bit embarrassed by that one. It's my observation that a lot of the 9/11 troofers are also anti-vaxxers. And you have them in both right-wing and left-wing flavors. Conspiracy hoaxes are just too satisfying for some people, and so they perpetuate the hoaxes.
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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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