Spring Is Here!
It's Saturday morning, March 30, 2024, 02:29 and I just realized that I had not posted this update which has been sitting on my hard drive for days! It's not a big ujpdate, but it's an update. More to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We're really hoping that this program gets on the air, as opposed to last week's program whicvh didn't. We have incorporated a couple of pieces from the program that didn't air in this program. We talked about Spring being here, and about the Republicans in Washington, D. C. trying to wreck the economy for Trump. We also talked about Trump's money problems. I'll be updating this Web page with more stuff, so check back for those updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday April 10, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
We had a Local Station Board meeting on March 13, and people from a certain faction made sure that WBAI will not have representatives in some PNB committees for at least another month. Yeah, the Republicans in Congress are not the only people who do counter productive things.
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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Program Note: Back of the Book did not air last week. It was posted and ready to go, as far as we know, but it did not air. Management has not given us official information about this that makes sense. We did get some unofficial information and it raises a lot of questions. We had done a short remembrance of producer Malachy McCourt for last week's program, and we also talked about the St. Patrick's Day Parade that was scheduled to happen after last week's program had aired. We talked about our interactions with past St. Patrick's Day parades. So we are airing those parts of last week's program this week. It'll be the first time anyone hears that stuff.
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Malachy McCourt
1931 - 2024
We talked about WBAI producer Malachy McCourt on this program. He'd died on March 11, 2024. He did more than produce radio programs on WBAI, but that's what we mostly knew him for. This was a part of the program we had recorded for last week, before the St. Patrick's Day parade. Since that program never aired, and partly because we meant for the part of the program where we talked about our personal experiences with various St. Patrick's Day Parades to be a sort of tribute to Malachy McCourt, we're aired it for the first time a week later than it had been scheduled. Malachy will be missed.
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The House has passed a $1.2 trillion spending bill to prevent a government shutdown. We're reading that it's possible that some Republican Senators may try to prevent the bill from passing in the Senate, thus shutting down the government.
Meanwhile that awful Congress-critter Republican from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene has filed a motion to vacate the seat of the still pretty new House Speaker Mike Johnson. Yeah, those people are just trying to make a mess of everything.
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The CDC Web site says that as of their last reading, the death toll in America from COVID-19 was 1,185,413. Which means that 1,037 people have died from COVID-19 since our last program a weeks ago. That's about 200 fewer than the past week. 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.
Pickles of the North talked about the death toll from COVID-19 actually being much higher than people are saying.
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Donnie Bonespur
Trump secured the $91.6 million bond he needed to cough up in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. He had a deadline of Monday to do it. He owes Ms. Carroll $5 million because he was found guilty of defaming her and an additional $83.3 million for doing it again. Trump is appealing the cases but he has to post the bond as he appeals to make sure that Ms. Carroll gets paid eventually if he doesn't win that appeal. The bond comes from something called the Federal Insurance Co. Which is a member of the Chubb Group, the property and casualty insurance corporation whose CEO, Evan Greenberg, Trump had on his presidential trade policy advisory committee in 2018. Trump had tried to get the payment deadline put off but Judge Lewis Kaplan said that Trump's, Current situation is a result of his own dilatory actions.
Trump also has to come up with about $454,000,000 by this coming Monday to pay the fines levied against him in the civil fraud case that he recently lost. That particular fine is growing by about $112,000 in interest every day. New York Attorney General Letitia James has said that she won't hesitate to seize Trump-owned assets if he doesn't pay that fine. Oh boy.
Bonespur
has had six of 16 charges against him in one of his criminal cases dismissed, but they could be reinstated. So far he hasn't been able to get any of the criminal cases against him dismissed.
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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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