We Told A Fish Story
It's Saturday morning, January 21, 2023, 06:58, and I've updated this Web page with a link to the archive of the program and a piece about it being Mid-Winter. More to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ A big part of this program was a Pickles' Pick,
which is a segment of a past Back of the Book radio program that radio's Pickles of the North thinks would be good to air again. This one involved R. Paul's adventures with fishing in his youth. We also talked about former WBAI producer Bill Farrar passing away at age 82. We talked about the pandemic, of course. We also noted that Donnie Bonespur
Trump got smacked down and fined nearly a million bucks, along with his lawyer, for his attempts to use his money and access to so many lawyers that will do what he tells them to, no matter what, to attack his political enemies. We have some more to add to this Web page, 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 regular LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday February 8, 2023, at 7:00 PM on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 41 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
The WBAI LSB met in open session on Wednesday, January 11, and began to hold elections for Directors of the Pacifica Foundation. We also had a lot of posturing by some people. I gave a Treasurer's Report.
Before the January 11, 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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We aired another Pickles' Pick on this program. This was from long enough ago that we think that most listeners will never have heard it. Pickles thought that it was rather amusing in parts. We hope our current listeners do too. It involves fishing in Prospect Park, Lower New York Bay and on the fringes of the Atlantic Ocean.
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According to the Johns-Hopkins Web site COVID-19 cases in the whole world reached 668,551,701 on Friday, and global deaths reached 6,737,581. In America the number of cases as of Friday was 101,976,141 and the death toll in America reached 1,103,778, so 3,989 people have died of COVID-19 in America in the last week which is hundreds more deaths than had occurred in the previous week. The pandemic is not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We've both gotten our bivalent vaccinations. We are not among those who are saying that getting a COVID-19 infection is like getting a cold.
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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Bill Farrar
1940-2023
Former WBAI producer Bill Farrar passed away this past week, he was 82. Bill did a jazz show here at WBAI. Among other things he taught English at Wingate High School in Brooklyn where my male ex also taught English and reading. They were surprised to see each other in the halls at WBAI in 1979, or '80. Bill was a bit surprised when he found out that my male ex was a member of the WBAI Gay Men's Collective which was producing Gay Rap which was billed as, The weekly program for and about the gay male community.
Bill will be missed by many.
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Donnie Bonespur
Trump dropped his lawsuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James yesterday right after U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks fined Trump and his lawyer just short of $1,000,000 for filing baseless revenge lawsuits
against his perceived enemies. The judge wrote in his opinion that, Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose,
judge Middlebrooks continued, This litigation has all the telltale signs of being both vexatious and frivolous.
And he said that Trump, Misrepresented and cherry-picked portions of public reports and filings to support a false factual narrative. It happened too often to be accidental. Its purpose was political, not legal.
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As of Friday morning January 20th, at 10:52 AM we entered the mid-Winter sub-season, astronomically speaking. The minute of mid-Winter will occur on February 3, 2023, at 06:48 in the morning.
Sunsets are getting later now, and that's good for me. On Saturday when you hear this program sunset will be at 4:59 PM in Brooklyn. The next day, Sunday, the Sun will set at 5:01 PM in Brooklyn. Still too early for me, but better than the even earlier sunsets in early December. I have a chart of the seasons and sub-seasons on this Web site.
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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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