It's Saturday morning, June 29, 2024, 06:41 and I have updated this Web page with the piece about Asteroid 2024 MK passing us by and the usual bit about COVID-19. I think I have a little more to post here. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ This was our annual Christopher Street Liberation Day program. We aired a piece we did last year about gay veterans who got bad discharges from the military for either having sex with someone of the same gender or just for seeming to be not all that butch to some higher ranking person in the military. We talked about 2024 MK which will pass relatively close to the Earth today. We also talked about that debate on Thursday night. I plan to add more to this Web page later today, and I may even get the whole thing done in the next few days. It might be worth checking in to see if I get any of that done.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday July 10, 2024, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We did not have a meeting this past Wednesday night. There was an illegally called meeting of the WBAI LSB posted on-line. The Chair of the Pacifica National Board posted it. This is in violation of the Pacifica bylaws. It was supposed to have been in executive session. No one told us what this was supposed to be about other than that its purpose was, Discussing personnel matters of a confidential nature.
We only found out about it from when we got a from the meeting system that Pacifica has sent us a surprise E-mail. No information on how to even access this illegally called meeting was ever posted so the illegal meeting ended up never happening.
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.
•
Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
•
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.
•
Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by former 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?
•
Tomorrow is the culmination of what is now officially called LGBT+∞ Pride Month; it ends with the annual Christopher Street Liberation Day March — I'm obviously not marching again this year. I couldn't walk that far and I certainly couldn't stand around waiting for my contingent to march. I'd be in among the movement groups and they apparently do not step off in to the march route until hours after the entire event begins. I'd need to improve my health in order to participate in the march.
We mentioned the PBS documentary on disco Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution part one which is named is Rock the Boat. I'm in it for about two seconds. Oh, those sideburns!
President Biden visited Christopher St. on Friday ahead of the Christopher Street Liberation Day march on Sunday. He has announced that he's pardoning what probably amounts to thousands of former service members who were convicted under the UCMJ, which is a military law that had made it a crime to engage in sodomy, which was really just a way to punish service members for being gay. Straight service members didn't get dishonorable discharges for sex with women. And quite a few people got various forms of bad discharges because they were just perceived as being gay.
The Daily News had a piece on this topic that said, Take the case of Army Col. Edward Thomas Ryan, whose obituary was published in the Albany Times Union this month when he died at age 85. At the end of a description about his life and family and military service in Vietnam and after, he wrote:
He was lucky not to have been caught. And you didn't really need to be caught to have action taken against you. I remember sneaking around with other gay G.I.s in the Republic of Viet Nam 55 years ago.I must tell you one more thing, I was Gay all my life: thru grade school, thru High School, thru College, thru Life.
We ran a piece that directly relates to this issue last year, and we aired it again on this program.
•
Wave hello to Asteroid 2024 MK today. It will come within about 181,000 miles of the Earth. It's somewhere between 400 feet to 850 feet in length. It was only found 10 or 12 days ago! Scientists are saying that 2024 MK would have an equivalent impact energy approaching a gigaton if it hit the Earth! In that sad case it could wipe out not just a city but an entire area, although it would not destroy the world as the asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs did when it slammed into the Earth about 66 million years ago. By contrast the object that blew up over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, caused a great deal of damage and injured something like 1,500 people was only about 60 feet across.
Once again, we were lucky, very lucky. If it had been on a collision course with the Earth a 10 to 12 day warning would probably not have given us enough time to try and deflect, destroy or otherwise deal with it before it hit. And there are those in Congress who want to deny funding for the program that searches the Solar System for rocks that are capable of hitting the Earth.
Ironically tomorrow, June 30, is Asteroid Day an event that's been observed for the past several years.
•
If I'm reading it right the CDC Web site seems to be saying that the death toll in America for the past week was 187, which is a bit of an uptick from the previous week although it's still much lower than it had been. Summertime weather tends to keep most viruses from proliferating through the air. Pickles of the North and I are not wearing our masks as much at this point, we are thinking about getting our booster shots soon. You can't get the new ones they'll have in the Fall if you've had one of these boosters less than a few months earlier. Or we may wait for the new booster vaccinations to come out in the Fall to get one and just hope that the Summer weather, and our previous booster shots, keep us safe from the virus.
•
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.
•
Back to the Back of the Book page
Back to my home page.
The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2024, R. Paul Martin.
