DST Returns!
We talked about the Odysseus lunar lander some more. On the last program two weeks ago they hadn't said that although it had landed on the Moon that it had tipped over. It's in the deep freeze now. We also talked about Daylight Saving Time starting again tomorrow morning. Pickles of the North talked about the climate crisis and the prediction that parts of New York will be under a foot of water within the next decade. We also talked about the pandemic and more. I plan to update this Web page, so check back for the updates.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday March 13, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
We had a LSB meeting on Wednesday night February 14, 2024. We had a minute of silence for James Irsay and Jazz Hayden who died this month. We also had to elect people to committees of the PNB. One of the usual suspects from the so-called Justice & Unity Campaign disrupted the meeting, she was alleging that things were being done wrong, in a parliamentary sense, and that we'd have to do the start of the meeting differently, even though when her faction had a majority they did it the way we did it on Wednesday and we've been doing it this way for 17 years. Doing it differently would also allow more disruption. Basically this person and her faction were trying to impress the newer members of the LSB with their tactics and disparage those of us who are not in their faction. We got most of the committees populated.
The Final results of all of the LSB officer elections we held last month are in.
At the February 14, 2024, LSB meeting the election were announced for who from WBAI will sit on the Pacifica National Board (PNB) for the next year.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:
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're in the last fortnight of late-Winter. The Vernal Equinox will occur on Tuesday March 19, at 11:06 PM (ET). Daylight Saving Time begins again tomorrow morning March 10, at 2 AM (ET) when the time leaps forward becomes 3 AM. So tomorrow the Sun will set at about three minutes before seven o'clock in the evening! I like it when the sunset is seven o'clock or later.
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The CDC Web site says that as of their last reading, the death toll in America from COVID-19 was 1,183,143, which means that 3,101 people have died from COVID-19 since our last program two weeks ago. That's a weekly average of about 1,550 people a week which is pretty much what we'd seen as a weekly death toll the last time we were on the air. I still think that the weather is having a good effect on slowing the spread of COVID-19. The people who are oblivious to COVID-19 because they think that the pandemic is over can be having the opposite effect.
The pandemic is clearly not over. Pickles of the North and I are mostly still keeping our masks on. We've gotten our new shots, we may get the newer booster shots in the sporing, we don't want to get this disease.
And as a part of this little report on the pandemic I'll note that as of two days ago, March 7, 2024, we have not been to WBAI's studios in four full years. Will we ever get to go on the air live again?
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On our last program two weeks ago we talked about the Odysseus lunar lander successfully landing on the Moon. Well, it landed, all right, but it tipped over. This didn't come out until after we'd sent the program in to WBAI.
They shut the lander off this past week, hoping that they'll be able to revive it when the Sun shines on that part of the Moon again. I think that it's very unlikely that the Odysseus lander will ever function again. Even if they can get the solar panels to generate electricity the batteries that are necessary for the functioning of the lander are probably not going to survive the two weeks of lunar night when the temperature will drop to about -250° F (about -157° C. or about 116° K). The active components of the Odysseus lander are also liable to be damaged by the prolonged deep freeze.
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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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