Steamboat Willie Free At Last
It's Saturday morning, January 6, 2024, 07:45, and I have slightly updated this Web page with some text and link additions and a graphic change. There's more updating to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Well, this is starting out as a very lean Web page, I fell asleep and then had other problems this morning. I'll update this Web page later on. I'm hoping that the problems that had plagued the previous program's Web page are fixed at this point. Check back for the updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday January 10, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
We held the first meeting of the 13th WBAI LSB on December 10. It didn't go that badly but it did feature one bad actor who disrupted the meeting by complaining about how the agenda was being handled, even though it's been handled that way for just short of 17 years. That LSB member and her faction had voted to make the process happen this way at the LSB meeting held on February 7, 2007. In the course of the LSB setting the agenda she got to make a small change in the agenda without that even getting voted on.
We held officer elections at this meeting and that same person complained about the LSB using an on-line service to count the votes for LSB officers. She's still complaining about it after the meeting. We then had the nominations for LSB officers. Some very unqualified people, including one person who used to stalk Staff at WBAI, got nominated for some positions. I was nominated for Treasurer again. Someone from that same faction as the person who was trying to stall the agenda nominated someone else, but that person was not at the meeting just at that moment. Two days later when he found out that he'd been nominated he declined the nomination. So I'm Treasurer again as the only candidate. Now that faction is complaining that there's no provision for write-in candidates on the service that's handling the voting. Some of them claim that the Pacifica bylaws require write-in votes. But they can't say where you can find that in the bylaws; I don't think there is a provision requiring write-in ballots in the Pacifica bylaws. Some of those faction operatives are always making claims about the bylaws that aren't true. This 13th WBAI LSB is going to be quite, um, interesting.
The LSB officer election results are in.
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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Steamboat Willie has gotten fully into the public domain at last! We talked briefly about the history of copyright in the United States of America on this program. For a long time there have been interested parties trying to make copyrights permanent, even while the companies they're in charge of are using public domain stories, images and other things which are free for the public to make huge amounts of money. As of January 1, 2024, the images of the Steamboat Willie
character, which turned out to be the first time the public saw what would become Disney's Mickey Mouse®, would show up in an animated cartoon. On the first of this month almost everything that had been published in 1928, and before, became public domain material in the United States of America, and therefore free to use. That does not count fixed recordings
of music. It's complicated.
I have been told that it's possible that the Walt Disney Company may try to claw back the rights to this image I've posted on this Web page, so maybe it won't be so permanently in the public domain after all. I hope it gets to stay in the public domain, but the Walt Disney Company has a lot of lawyers and a lot of money to pay those lawyers and it has a history of litigious actions. Someone has speculated that mentioning the trademarked name of what that image became might even be a dangerous thing to do. IANAL so I can't be sure. In fact Intellectual Property lawyers often can't be sure either. It does make for a lucrative business model to have something that is often ambiguous to those of us who are not lawyers be the subject of litigation. You always need a lawyer to deal with copyright claims and the outcome of some litigation in the field does not seem to make sense. For now, at least, this mouse cartoon is in the public domain.
Here's something that's been in the public domain for a very long time. Thanks to the folks at Project Gutenberg you can nerd out on The calculating engine
by Charles Babbage in The Edinburgh Review of July, 1834. Read about logarithms and about that new calculating engine that Mr. Babbage had dreamed up. Yeah, some say that computers began here.
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The CDC is putting out information on the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic again. They say that as of their last reading, the death toll in America from COVID-19 was 1,165,118. Which is 2,078 people dying from COVID-19 over this past week. So the death rate is increasing. We're seeing that some hospitals are now reinstituting mandatory mask wearing. It's Winter now and this disease is going through the population. It will be helped a lot by the attitude some people have developed that the pandemic is over.
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.
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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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