British Omnibus 1829
It's Saturday morning, August 24, 2024, 01:50, and I think that this Web page is finished. I put in Pickles of the North's report about COVID-19, Mpox and particulate matter from wild fires. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ I'm rushing to get this Web page finished before the program begins to air. Another sad occurrence to report, and a book recommendation. This book is totally free. I plan to update this Web page, so please consider checking back to see if and when that gets done.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday September 11, 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 week. Lots of attempts to delay the meeting were made, and attempts were made by some to just Bogart the meeting. We had minutes of silence for two former WBAI Dept. Heads who've passed away recently. We were looking forward to a report from the new interim General Manager, but he sent an E-mail saying that he had to catch a train and wasn't there to give his report.
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. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager 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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Andrea Sears
1951-2024
We talked about Andrea Sears who had passed away this past week. Andrea was formerly the News Dept. Director at WBAI. Before becoming Director of the News Dept. Andrea had been a reporter in that dept. Andrea was a hard worker who had produced the news every weekday on WBAI for years. R. Paul talked about Andrea's becoming trans-gendered early in the 21st Century. We have now lost both Andrea and Matthew Finch in the past two weeks.
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Pickles and I have been taking buses more than we used to, now that I'm getting out of the apartment a little bit more. I used to walk everywhere. I even took Pickles on a walk all the way to Coney Island once. I'd made the walk a number of times, but it was her first and only one. Gone are those days. Now we take a bus.
The word bus
comes from the word omnibus.
And that leads me into recommending a book titled Omnibuses And Cabs Their Origin And History on the Project Gutenberg Web site.
A quote from the book on the Project Gutenberg Web site, Omnibuses, under the name of carrosses a cinq sous, were started in Paris in 1662.
They began as an idea that the famous French mathematician, physicist, inventor and philosopher Blaise Pascal came up with. He got some rich French aristocrats to go along with the idea and they got King Louis XIV to authorize the enterprise. Seven vehicles that could carry eight passengers each, all inside, were built, and on March 18th, 1662, they began running. They were very popular for a short while, and they were crowded by more aristocrats arriving in their elaborately decorated private coaches to get out and get into the public omnibus. After some months the new enterprise became less popular and was abandoned. It wasn't until 1819, that a Monsieur Jacques Laffitte tried again, and this time they were successful for a while longer.
The book continues, Monsieur Laffitte must not, however, be given the credit of applying the name
omnibus
to the vehicles which he introduced, for it belongs to Monsieur Baudry, a retired military officer. In 1827 Baudry was the proprietor of some hot-water baths in the suburbs of Nantes, and for the convenience of his patrons [he] ran a vehicle at fixed hours to and from the town. This coach, which was similar in build to the Parisian ones, he named the Voiture des Bains de Richebourg,
but quickly came to the conclusion that the title was too long, and therefore endeavoured to think of a more suitable one.
It happened that just at that time a local grocer named Omnés caused considerable amusement in the town by painting over his shop
Omnés Omnibus.
No sooner did Baudry see this than he declared that he had found the very word which he required, and straightway renamed his vehicle L'Omnibus.
The book continues, The severe winter of 1829, which made forage very dear and the streets almost impassable, ruined him completely and drove him to commit suicide. But before he died he had made the word
It's interesting to remember that all of those original buses, to call them what we'd call them today, were horse drawn ones. So if forage became too expensive you couldn't feed the horses, sort of like a gasoline or diesel fuel shortage today. This is an interesting book, and I think people might agree with me on that assessment.omnibus
familiar to Parisians.
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Pickles here, looking at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.) web page regarding Waste Water Viral Activity Level for the Covid virus and reporting back to you! We shed viruses in our bodily waste, so testing our waste water is a very accurate way of determining how much of the virus is circulating in a population. The map shows that levels of the COVID-19 virus for the past week were low in New Jersey, Michigan and West Virginia but viral activity was high or very high in every other state except for North Dakota, which if it does test the waste water, does not report its findings. The state of New York has high viral activity. Why is there more viral activity right now? Protection from prior vaccinations or previously having Covid has waned due to the new variants of the virus that have been circulating this Summer. New vaccines should be available in the Fall.
Another virus on the rise is Mpox. On August 14, 2024, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) declared the current outbreak of Mpox to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Sound familiar? Think back to March 2020, regarding COVID-19. Mpox is a virus that has mutated into two strains, one of which is spreading out from the Democratic Republic of Congo to neighboring countries and beyond. Strain 1 makes people sicker and causes more fatalities, so the WHO is hoping that countries that have Mpox vaccine will donate it to the places that need it to stop the spread. It is pretty easy to catch, like chickenpox pre- vaccine; the blisters full of virus can appear on any part of a human body and close contact with broken blisters or even clothing or bedding of the sick person can spread the disease. The only good thing you can say about it that it doesn't spread through aerosol droplets like COVID-19. It's very painful and anyone living in an area where it is spreading can be at risk.
Finally, we talked about the tiny particles in wildfire smoke called PM2.5 which can lodge deep in your lungs if you breath them in. Local reports of distant wildfire smoke spreading to our airspace tend to down play how bad this is for everybody, not just those at higher risk
with asthma or other lung and heart conditions (I guess they don't want to deal with this current new normal). Fortunately, the same N95 and KN95 masks that can cut your odds of getting Covid work to prevent you from breathing in these particles.
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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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