What A Rain Storm!
We talked about the big storm that was flooding parts of Greater New York on this program. We also talked about a prediction of the extinction of mammals in a mere 250 million years. Of course we also discussed the pandemic, which is really showing an increase in the rate of COVID-19 deaths as compared to the Summer. I plan to update this Web page pretty soon, so check back for those updates.
The next WBAI LSB meeting will be on Wednesday October 11, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. That meeting will be held as a teleconference meeting, as the 49 previous public meetings were because of the pandemic.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
We had a LSB meeting on September 13. I gave a Treasurer's Report and the written version is here. There was scheduled a Q&A session with WBAI Management and any listeners who called in to talk to them. This Q&A session started at 6:30, a half hour before the LSB meeting was scheduled to begin. The General Manager took up most of the time and one listener asked a question. Some people go on and on about having the listeners being in on everything. Some people on the LSB make noises about having the listeners in general figure out how to fix WBAI's finances. It's obviously just grandstanding by those LSB members, but they behave as if no one sees through them. And I do not think that having a lot of people who are not aware of the realities of WBAI's finances hear some speeches will result in realistic actions.
The WBAI/Pacifica elections are going on. The election is scheduled to end tonight, at 11:59 PM (ET) so you don't have any time left, please vote! Apparently WBAI is lagging behind on the number of listeners casting votes. Pacifica and WBAI Management wants us to tell you to vote, if you're eligible. If not enough listeners vote in this election the election will have to be extended at all stations, at a cost of thousands of dollars.So vote already. They're sending out ballots every Tuesday. If you haven't gotten one yet go here to apply for a ballot or write to the National Elections Supervisor, get your ballot and then vote.
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. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
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 recorded this program during a deluge. As I type this the big, multi-day rain storm appears to have ended.
We had a big rain event last weekend which gave us more than two inches of rain, and this big rain we're having now started on Thursday at about 5 PM. The ground is soaked from the previous heavy rain and can't absorb more, so we've got severe flooding. Last weekend we got hit by a heavy rain storm, the remains of Tropical Storm Ophelia. It dropped something like two to four inches of rain in the area, and totally soaked the ground. This weekend we're getting hit with the remains of Tropical Storm Ophelia again! It came around for a second shot! This second time was even worse than the first. New York City has been hit by full blown hurricanes in the past that haven't dumped this much rain on us. From what the TV weather people are saying this is already New York City's second wettest September on record.
Predictions had said that New York City was going to get two to four inches of rain, maybe 3 inches. But there was another forecast, an outlyer, that said we might get six inches. Well, that outlying prediction seems to have come true.
When I looked a little while before we began to record this program on Friday afternoon/evening Brooklyn had already gotten more than seen inches of rain in less than 24 hours. Everything was flooded. And the sewers were overflowing by noon. And it's not just rain water that ends up in the sewers. I read a short piece from the June 2023, issue of Scientific American on the stuff that sewers are made to collect getting airborne at the beach when the wind blows after storm water has inundated the sewer system, as happened in Brooklyn on Friday. I think that Coney Island is not that great a place to go to right now, and maybe for a few days. Not only would it be unhealthy to go in the water there, but just standing near the beach when the sea breeze blows some spray at you could result in problems. Yuck!
I talked about a long drought we had in the mid-'50s when I was a kid living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The drought broke one night with a huge thunderstorm. Park Slope really is a slope. The land slopes down from Prospect Park and on that night I was amazed to see how torrential the flooding stream was at 1st St. & 7th Ave. It really looked as if a river were flowing in Brooklyn. I suspect that a similar scene has been observed at that same spot on Friday, except it was probably occurring in the daytime.
Mayor Adams finally went on the air on Friday and declared a state of emergency. People are asking why he didn't close the schools since it was known that this big rain storm was coming. Some schools were flooded, one school had to be evacuated due to the flooding. A lot of the subway lines were disrupted and we even saw video showing that some buses were even getting flooded! We're hoping that WBAI didn't get flooded out. We were hoping that the Ops person on duty would be able to get to the station! If you're hearing this radio program early on the morning of September 30, 2023, he did.
Could this be the future for New York City? This is all happening because of the warmer ocean waters of the Atlantic Ocean providing more energy and water vapor to the storms that kick up late in the Summer. Some water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean have been at record highs this Summer. Luckily some of the bigger storms that got quite powerful took off to the east after they got into higher latitudes and just stayed in the Atlantic Ocean. On this program I wondered aloud when will this September's rain totals not be high enough to be in the top ten wettest Septembers? Will enormous rain storms eventually become the norm in Greater New York?
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Estimation and approximation of Pangea Ultima
A group of scientists is predicting that mammals may have only another 250 million years left to exist. They found that a brighter Sun, a change in the geography of the continents and increases in carbon dioxide will warm the planet to the point that mammals could not survive on Earth.
Dr. Alexander Farnsworth, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Bristol who led the team, said, It's a triple whammy that becomes unsurvivable.
A lot of this study was sparked by another study published in 2020, that predicted that a new supercontinent, which scientists who worked on the study are calling Pangea Ultima
will form along the equator about 250 million years from now. The huge land mass will greatly help to heat things up all over the Earth. There have been supercontinents in the past and there is evidence that they also heated up the atmosphere. I talked about humans not having to worry about that eventuality because 250 million years from now there won't be any humans! Species do not last forever. And humans are still evolving. Will there be human around anymore even one million years from now? We talked about the Sun getting warmer over time and blowing away the Earth's atmosphere some time between 500 million and one billion years from now. Without the atmosphere the oceans will boil away into space. The heat from the hotter Sun will really bake everything. Long before the Sun becomes a red giant star and possibly engulfs the Earth about five billion yeas from now this planet we're on will just be a lifeless rock.
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The CDC Web site isn't giving us all that much information about COVID-19 in America, although they're saying that Total Deaths in Americas are at 1,144,539 which means that 2,757 people have died of COVID-19 since our last program two weeks ago, That's more than 1,378 a week, which is even more than the rates for the previous few weeks, and is more than three times the COVID-10 death rate of early July.
The pandemic is not over. Pickles of the North has gotten the latest vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 and I am looking to get my vaccination, along with a flu shot, maybe as soon as next week. We want to get our vaccinations in time to avoid getting sick. We've both gotten our bivalent vaccinations, and our bivalent booster shots. Getting our SARS-CoV-2 and flu shots together has become a ritual we've gone though for the past couple of years.
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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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