Back of the Book links for the December 9, 2023, program

It's Saturday morning, December 9, 2023, 06:18, and I've updated this Web page with a little bit about our small tribute to John Lennon and the link to the official WBAI archive of this program. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Donnie Bonespur Trump is getting our attention again. He's asserting that he was immune from any laws at all while he was president. It's a wacky legal assertion and the courts have shot down this idea in his civil trials, but he and his lawyers are trying it again. I guess he's spending the money from his campaign donations on all of these lawyers. All of his appeals are grinding through the courts. Radio's Pickles of the North regaled us with tales of superstitions from long ago, including one about mandrake root that was not something that made it into any of the Harry Potter movies. We also did a small tribute to John Lennon; Thursday was the 43^rd anniversary of his assassination. We talked about personal connections to that event and we actually played some music on this radio program. I plan to update this Web page soon so check back for the updates.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday December 13, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. This will be the first meeting of the 13^th WBAI LSB. It might be a wild time, given some of the things that people are saying on the LSB mailing list.

We had a LSB meeting on Wednesday November 8, 2023. It was the last meeting of the 12^th WBAI LSB. For the second LSB meeting in a row I did not get to give an oral Treasurer's Report but the written version of the report is here. We had an objection about the phrasing of an agenda item, and then we were supposed to have had a report from the station's General Manager, but his phone didn't work right and after some time was spent on trying to get it to work we went on to the next agenda item which involved going into executive session. And as we tried to do that we were told that the General Manager was trying to get on the call. And then the discussion turned to the General Manager needing 15 minutes to get on and another member got on the call. A motion to go into executive session was mentioned but not made and then we went to another agenda item, but then the General Manager got on the call and delivered his report instead. We never did get to that executive session. The LSB is supposed to do an annual Management evaluation but we seem to have lost that in the agenda mess.

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:

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.

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.

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!

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?

I guess that the CDC has given up. Their Web site isn't putting out any information on the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic anymore. We know that people are still dying from COVID-19.

The pandemic is clearly not over. Pickles of the North and I are still keeping our masks on. We're getting or have gotten our new shots, we don't want to get this disease.

Donnie Bonespur Trump is in the news some more. He's claiming that his federal election interference case should be automatically put on hold for as long as it takes him to appeal a judge's rejection of his claim of blanket immunity. He just has the strategy of delaying everything. One of Trump's lawyers, a guy named Todd Blanche, asserts in a filing that The appeal has deprived this court of jurisdiction over this case in its entirety pending resolution of the appeal, and that, Therefore, a stay of all further proceedings is mandatory and automatic. And the lawyer says that, Trump will proceed based on that understanding - absent further order of the court. This sounds like a four year old having a tantrum to get his way. Judge Chutkan, ruled last week that Trump can't claim blanket immunity for crimes committed while he was president, and she pointing out that a president is not A king. She has ruled that the trial will start on March 3. Trump tried to claim this same thing in his civil trials, and the federal appeals courts have all rejected the claim.

And a three-judge panel of the Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals backed Judge Tanya Chutkan's order barring Trump from making statements about witnesses in the upcoming trial. The unanimous ruling said, Trump's public statements pose a significant and imminent threat to the fair and orderly adjudication of the ongoing criminal proceeding. They did, however say that Trump could continue his attacks on special counsel Jack Smith. Trump says he's going to appeal this ruling up to the Supreme Court too.

Meanwhile a group of New York state senators has sent a letter to the state Board of Elections demanding that Trump be removed from the ballots for the Republican primary election and the presidential election because of his violation of the Constitution's Insurrectionist Disqualification Clause. The Daily News reports that the letter says, The January 6 insurrection was a violent uprising against the United States that tragically resulted in loss of multiple lives. That dark day in our nation's history was led, facilitated, and encouraged by Trump. The Board must not allow those who participated to run again for office against the mandate of the Constitution. Therefore, with the urgency of an approaching primary election, we urge the Board to address this critical issue now and to ensure Trump's name does not appear on the New York ballot. Yeah, he probably did violate that clause of the Constitution. But I wonder if it's a good idea to try this. There are people in other states who might try to remove Biden from the ballot there. And if this works you can count on it happening to future candidates as well.

Pickles here! I read a couple of exerts from A Dictionary of Superstitions by Sophie Lasne and Andre Pascal Gaultier, translated from the French by Amy Reynolds. It's a book from the mid-eighties that lists a lot of stuff Gallic and other peoples believed in from the Middle Ages and earlier that helped them make sense of the world they were living in, especially with all the calamities that could befall them, like the Plague and other pestilence they were certain had been sent by the deity to punish them. We also talked about superstitious gardening with the Mandrake Root: kids, don't try this at home! Involves way too many bodily fluids and possible death by violence! We'll explore some seasonal superstitions on the next program.

We talked about John Lennon on this program. He was assassinated by some jackass on December 8, 1980, in front of The Dakota, a famous apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he lived. He was famous as a musician, of course, as one of The Beatles. He became famous as a peace activist as well over the years along with Yoko Ono.

On the night of John Lennon's assassination I was in a class not far from The Dakota. Another person in that class was a guy who was the producer of Channel 7 Eyewitness News here in New York. He had been in a small motorcycle accident and was in the local emergency room when the ambulance brought in John Lennon. Of course the producer immediately called in and got the TV reporters from Channel 7 on the story. As a result they got the story out before anyone else did.

Pickles of the North told about our friend Lulu of the Far South who was working as an au pair in 1980, and was taking care of a very small child that night. Lulu was pushing a baby carriage along W. 72^nd St. and was blocked by the wooden sawhorses that the police had thrown up around the area. Yoko Ono saw her there with the kid and had the cops move the sawhorses so she could get through.

I once said hello to John Lennon. The Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) had had a tiny street fair, or rummage sale or some such event right in front of the GAA Firehouse at 99 Wooster St. in Manhattan. The whole thing had lasted for hours but eventually everything was put away and the street was cleared. I was sitting on one of the loading docks across the street from the Firehouse and I suddenly saw some people walking north on Wooster St. whom I'd only seen before in photographs. It was John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I said, Hello John, and he said hello back. I nodded to Yoko Ono, and that was it. The type of New York encounter that you can have in the city. They did have a guy walking right in back of them. I suspect that the guy was security.

We played a couple of songs that featured John Lennon as a part of our little remembrance of him. The world might well have been a better place if he had not been assassinated.

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.

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.

We like to stay interactive with our listeners. Here are the various options for you to get in touch with us.

You can also send me E-mail.

And now you can even reach me on Twitter

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WBAI related links

A WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site

Back of the Book — December 9, 2023,

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!