An Easter Miracle!
It's Friday, June 14, 2024, 13:49 and this Web page is finished. I added, at long last, the recommendation about a book on Project Gutenberg. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We talked about Easter on this program. Pickles of the North read from a book about superstitions. Oh, there are a lot of superstitions around Easter, all right. We talked about the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of a few weeks it's been holding steady in terms of deaths from the disease in the United States of America. We also talked about an incident at a technology show in Dubai, which got some press because of the growing fears some people have about artificial intelligence, A.I. This story also related to something from my youth.
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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Radio's Pickles of the North read about some superstitions related to Easter. We talked about how it's actually an ancient ritual related to Spring and not the property of any of the currently operating organized superstitions, including the Abrahamic superstitions that have exploited it for thousands of years.
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At an event called DeepFest
in Dubai a robot named Muhammad in the shape of a man is reported to have groped a female reporter during an interview last month. I strongly suspect that the robot was just flailing around,keeping the mechanical arms coordinated can be quite a chore, and it just bumped into her. Either that or some jerk who was operating the robot was messing around on purpose. We all know that a collection of steel, plastic, semiconductors and copper wiring can't have any sort of sexual desires, right?
This incident did remind me of a science fiction TV show in the '50s that had a robot getting all hot and bothered about a woman. She was the Quarry Girl
and the robots were being trained to track people, maybe people who'd escaped from a worker's paradise or something similar. The first robot to find her develops libidinous feelings for her. The show being on network TV in the 1950s, they took some pains to communicate that with languages that would not offend anyone while getting the point across. Well, I was young enough that I just couldn't figure out what was going on in the little story. I had started out being thrilled that I was able to see some sort of new science fiction story, and on some big deal dramatic series. My parents were there watching with me. They usually considered science fiction to just be silliness. They watched this show, however. I had initially been very glad to see the rare science fiction story on TV. As it unfolded, however, it became a talk fest which did not seem to promise any kind of robot mayhem or cybernetic feats of unusual prowess. The robots were just guys, sort of dumb ones. Being too young to have a sexual interest in anyone yet I just could not understand what was going on in that story. Maybe one day it'll get rerun on one of those TV channels that have proliferated on higher DTV channels. I'd be able to follow the story now, I'm sure. But the bottom line is that robots are not going to get all horny for humans, of any gender.
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The CDC Web site says that as of their last reading, the death toll in America from COVID-19 was 1,186,671. Which means that 1,258 people have died from COVID-19 since our last program a weeks ago. That's about 200 more than the previous 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.
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WBAI has always been behind in its bills, but the station has gotten very far behind at this time. The General Manager says that WBAI owes 4 Times Square, where WBAI's transmitter is and where we use that building's antenna, about eight months rent. He says that amounts to a dollar figure in the low six figures. He says we also owe the call center, where they take your calls to pledge money and donate to the station, a lot of money. If the people at 4 Times Square shut off the electricity to the transmitter we're off the air, if the call center refuses to answer the pledge line phone we'll lose most of our ability to raise any money at all. I hope you'll call 1-212-209-2950 during this program and become a BAI Buddy, our name for sustaining members, or just make a one time donation. If we can't pay these bills WBAI could end up going off the air permanently.
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On this program we talked about a book I'd read on Project Gutenberg. The book is titled STEAM-SHIPS with the sub-title THE STORY OF THEIR DEVELOPMENT TO THE PRESENT DAY
with the present day being in the year 1910. It has a lot of interesting things in it. For one, I hadn't known that when they first started using steam propulsion for ships that they had to figure out how the bow of the ship should be shaped. The old sailing ships had a bow that made them inefficient when sailing using steam. This makes sense when you realize that with sails the entire force that's moving the ship is way above the deck and the bow needs to be shaped so that it's not buried in the waves. The sharper bows of ships that we're all used to in the 21st Century take advantage of the force that's driving the ship being well below the deck. And, yes, Robert Fulton played an important role in the development of the steamship, but he did not invent it. There are many details about the early development of the steamship in this book.
A really good part of this recommendation is that the book is free for you to read or copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties,
as the Project Gutenberg license says. The reason you can do that is because this book, like almost all books on Project Gutenberg, is in the public domain.
So here's the link to STEAM-SHIPS THE STORY OF THEIR DEVELOPMENT TO THE PRESENT DAY. I hope you enjoy reading this book.
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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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