Back of the Book links for the February 3, 2024, program

It's Saturday morning, February 3, 2024, 07:44 and I've updated this Web page with the piece about the new R211T subway trains, and I've put in the link to the official WBAI archive of the radio program we did. I figure that there's a little more to add to this page. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We covered the below topics on this program and more. I plan to get another topic or two posted up here soon. So do check back for those updates.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday February 14, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had a LSB meeting this past Wednesday night. We had a minute of silence for Ralph Poynter who died in late December. We also determined who was going to run for seats on the Pacifica National Board from WBAI. This is actually very important stuff. I ended up giving a very fast Treasurer's Report which one operative of the so-called Justice & Unity Campaign tried to talk over as I began.

The Final results of all of the LSB officer elections we held last month are in.

At the January 10, 2024, LSB meeting the election was begun for Directors from WBAI who will sit on the Pacifica National Board (PNB) for the next year. That election has been concluded. The results of those elections are below.

Listeners: Paul DeRienzo, Jim Dingeman, Cerene Roberts
Staff: Shawn Rhodes

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?

Some people cut a Jackie Robinson bronze statue off at the ankles and stole it in the middle of the night from a Wichita, Kansas park on Thursday morning, January 25^th. The statue had been installed in the park with a big ceremony in April 2021.

Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball when he put on a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform and took the field on April 15, 1947. After getting honorably discharged from the army after World War II, where he had been court martialed for refusing to sit at the back of a segregated Army bus, Robinson had played as a star infielder for two years for the Negro league's Kansas City Monarchs. He won Rookie of the Year for 1947, as a Dodger and led the Major Leagues in stolen bases during his rookie season.

Rewards were offered for information about the thieves who stole the statue, and another reward was posted for anyone who could provide information leading to the return of the statue. When we first heard of this crime we'd thought that it was a theft by people who'd wanted to melt down the statue to recover the bronze so they could sell the metal. This sort of thing has been happening. Quite a number of bronze plaques commemorating people, events or other things that are noteworthy have been ripped off walls and pedestals over the years by thieves who were after the expensive metal. There was an incident in Brooklyn years ago where some thieving creeps had chisled an entire bronze monument dedicated to the American dead of World War Ⅽ away from its concrete anchors in a park. They had carted it off to some scrap yeard where they were paid for the value of the metal.

Unfortunately the Jackie Robinson statue can never be returned now. Pieces of the statue were discovered when the Wichita Fire Department responded to a call this past Tuesday about a trash can on fire in another park. There they found some pieces of the broken up Jackie Robinson statue amid the various things that had been burning. So now it's widely believed that this wasn't a theft by thieves who wanted to make money from selling the raw bronze; it looks to have been a hate crime.

Meanwhile a new statue is going to be made and placed in that park. Donations have been pouring in to a fund to replace the statue and the people of Wichita, Kansas should easily get enough to do that. Major League Baseball is contributing to the fund as well as a lot of ordinary people who are outraged by this hateful act.

Donnie Bonespur Trump should be heading for his New York State criminal trial soon over the cooking of his books to cover-up hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. I don't think you can play the games with a criminal court case that you can with a civil case. Can you just not bother to show up for a criminal case? Also, court disruptions of the sort that Trump has become infamous for over the years could get him contempt of court citations that wouldn't just cost him money but might also get him some jail time. If he disrupts and a judge finds him in contempt of court would the judge have the guts to treat that maniac the same as other people found in contempt of court are treated? Would Trump be sent off to jail for a little while? I suspect Trump will be disruptive and be clearly in contempt of court. Will he be sent a cell with the Secret Service detail? If he's sentenced to a few days in jail will he have to wear a jail uniform? This could be really wild stuff. I look forward to the photographs of Trump in an orange jumpsuit of whatever New York jail short term prisoners are forced to wear. This would, of course, be another first for an ex-president of the United States.

In the past fortnight Trump has issued an order to the House Republicans to to compromise and pass a bill from the Senate to pass a new law with regard to immigration. So the plan is to campaign against Biden over the mess that immigration has been in this country for more than 30 years and blame it all on Biden to get votes. But this bill would fix at least some of that mess. Trump really is a flawed politician. An intelligent politician would maybe try something this outrageous but he's find ways to hide that he as doing it, not flagrantly bellow that he will be the source of the problem.

Trump and other Republicans also want the economy to tank before the election so that Trump can blame that on Biden. The economy isn't going along with that, however. The economy is booming. Trump is a traitor.

The CDC Web site says that as of their last reading, the death toll in America from COVID-19 was 1,174,626. Which means that 4,960 people have died from COVID-19 since our last program two weeks ago. So the weekly death rate averages out to 2,480 which is slightly higher than the previous weekly death rate. It's Winter and infectious diseases usually spread more rapidly and efficiently at this time. The fact that some people are oblivious to COVID-19 because they think that the pandemic is over is probably also contributing to that death rate.

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

The R211T gangway subway trains have rolled into the system this week. One ran on the C line the other day and a second one is scheduled to join it on that line soon. Politicians were naturally all over it.

Governor Hochul showed that she doesn't ride the New York City subways by her remarks. She was talking about people getting up and going over to talk to some other interesting looking stranger in the long train. Yeah, that kind of behavior will be mostly from horny men who want to make unwanted advances on others. The New York City subway system is not some sort of genteel social gathering place where people are interested in meeting the strangers on the train. More likely violent nutcases will be able to enjoy a wider range of a subway train in which to roam and bother people who are just trying to use public transportation.

When people start smoking stinky grass on the subway in one of these gangway trains there will be no escaping the stench of whatever the hell they're smoking. It will go through the entire train. And stinky people won't just stink up one car they'll stink up an entire train now. I recall one time back in the late '80s or early '90s when I was in a crowded train coming home during rush hour. I was in the end of one car but I saw that in the next car there were a lot of seats. I'd thought that maybe that car had been taken out of service, but I also saw two people in it. These two guys weren't sitting in the car they were laying down on the bench seats. But the rest of the car was empty. I went into that car and got only a few feet past the door when I smelled the stench. The two guys smelled really awful. They clearly hadn't bathed in quite a while and they may have used the clothing they were wearing as portable bathrooms, but it was impossible to stay in that car. I retreated back to the crowded, which provided the riders with only the more mundane odors.

Also, gangs and just kids will make a point of riding in that articulated part of the train between cars, so people won't be able to go from car to car anyway. And of course these cars can exacerbate dangerous conditions. Not only can't you run to another car to escape danger but when there's a shooting the bullets can travel through the entire length of the train and therefore have a bigger chance of hitting someone. Usually the bulkhead doors would absorb some gunfire and confine the field of fire to one car. In the '70s and a bit into the '80s I recall not infrequently seeing bullet holes in IRT #2 and #3 redbird train doors, or bulkhead doors as they seem to be officially called. Shootings are not an unknown phenomenon on the IRT even in the 21^st Century.

Pickles of the North noted that some media outlets are claiming that this is the first roll-out of these gangway cars in North America, but she noted that this is not true. They're been in Canada for years.

Governor Hochul's faked familiarity with how subways work is not going to help the people who end up trapped in them.

Note: On the air I called the trains the R111T, the name is really the R211T. Sometimes typos get on the air.

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 — February 3, 2024

Bring Back Uncle Sidney!