Web links related to the Back of the Book program of April 25, 2005

Okay, it's Sunday evening 5/8/2005 19:23:20 and this Web page is finished. The Middle Third is coming! We covered the below topics and some more on the program. As usual just ignore the fact that different parts of this page were written at different times.

A regularly scheduled WBAI Local Station Board meeting will be held on Thursday, May 5^th, 6:30 PM, at the Neighborhood Legal Office of the Legal Aid Society, 111 Livingston St., 7^th floor, in Brooklyn. Take the 2, 3, 4, 5, to Borough Hall, or A, C, E, to J St./Borough Hall in Brooklyn. The location is wheelchair-accessible and public comment is welcome.

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of almost every WBAI LSB meeting so far? Well, I do. And I'll be updating it soon.

At the April 13^th WBAI LSB meeting the General Manager told us about the listener survey that was sent out in early 2004, and which has just been released.

I have written a statement about the constructive removal of a LSB member and sent it to the PNB, the WBAI LSB and various public mailing lists and bulletin boards.

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.

•

Our colleagues from Off the Hook now have both a RealAudio streaming web cast operating, and a new MP3 stream. The MP3 feed is now the preferred feed. Both were operating at 11:23 PM last night.

•

The Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI, has revamped its Web site and now has something called the Pacifica Lounge where you can post messages about Pacifica, WBAI and other Pacifica radio stations. This may be a good thing, and of course there are other, long term fora in which to participate.

WBAI also has a forum on its Web site now. You have to register to post messages, but anyone may read the messages.

•

Rat Zinger is Pope! Well, we're going to talk about that, and the fact that he's done some nasty things in his life, and I don't even mean that Hitler Youth thing. Interestingly, a poll by Der Spiegel found that 39% of Germans polled opposed Ratzinger becoming Pope while 29% were in favor of him, 17% did not give a rat's zinger.

•

Pickles of the North and I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this past week.Yes, we saw lots of flowers, and a host of golden daffodils, as William Wordsworth and Bullwinkle J. Moose would say.

And then after we saw all of that floral stuff we saw something faunal. There was a crowd standing around one of the lily pools. When we came up to it was saw what had drawn them. A large bird had caught one of the bigger goldfish in the pool and was in the process of trying to swallow it! Quite a sight.

The bird was perched on one of the signs which stick up out of the pool to identify the nearby plants. Of course there were no plants in the water just then because it needed to get a bit warmer before they could flourish. I guess that made the goldfish a pretty easy target. It took the bird, which was of a sort I've never seen before, something close to half an hour to completely swallow that large goldfish.

Other than that, we found that the cherry trees has not really blossomed yet, we'll try again for that experience.

•

In Connecticut they're having something of a revolt by some Episcopalian sky pilots. They've stopped paying dues to the Episcopalian bishop of Connecticut because he's not anti-gay enough for them. The bishop has been supportive of the ordination of a gay bishop in New Hampshire.

Speaking of sky pilots, one has apparently had a big influence on the Microsoft Corporation. Enough of an influence to get that corporate giant to withdraw support for a gay & lesbian civil rights bill in the Washington state legislature. The bill, which had the endorsement of Nike, Boeing, Coors and Hewlett-Packard, failed by only one vote.

This withdrawal of support is odd because Microsoft has been quite decent in the past in terms of extending benefits to its gay and lesbian employees. The reason why it withdrew support at the crucial moment appears to have been because of the threats from some creep named Ken Hutcherson who runs a church a couple of blocks from the Microsoft Corporation's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

This Hutcherson creep apparently threatened Microsoft with boycotts and similar things if they didn't withdraw support. And his full set of demands reportedly included firing the Microsoft Corporation employees who had publicly supported the bill! I guess Ken Hutcherson only wants some parts of the First Amendment to be enforced.

The idea that some American sky pilot from a rinky dink little church was somehow going to cause problems for the gigantic, multinational Microsoft Corporation just doesn't sound realistic. Although Microsoft is officially denying that they caved into this hate monger Hutcherson, Washington State Representative Ed Murray, who's openly gay, says that Microsoft's senior vice president and general counsel told him that this was in fact the case.

Something extra dirty must be going on here, I think.

•

Pickles of the North covered most of the science stuff for this program.

•

We were finally able to, sort of, get in our experiment of putting some call-in comments from our voice mail on the air. Unfortunately, we couldn't get it all to work! There are a number of issues with the equipment we have to work with at WBAI and we ran into those issues again. But at least we got some of the comments onto the air during this radio program.

We also got to some of the mail. We read some of that mail that people send to each other on paper, which we always welcome, and we got to one E-mail. It was from from regular listener, correspondent and contributor Susan from Brooklyn, we reproduce it here.

We sure did play Ding Dong the Witch is Dead! Of course we do that whenever some bad person kicks the bucket. And we talked about his really nasty successor on this program. Well, we'll see what Ratz... , oh I mean Pope Benedict XVI, does.

•

There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even now that the gag rule has been lifted. 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.

Probably the most popular list that's sprung up is the “NewPacifica” mailing list. This one is very lively and currently includes over 400 subscribers coast to coast.

Being lively, of course, it sometimes also gets a bit nasty. All sorts of things are happening on this list and official announcements are frequently posted there.

You can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too. If you subscribe to the “NewPacifica” mailing list you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list.

There is the option to receive a “digest” version of the list, which means that a bunch of messages are bundled into one E-mail and sent to you at regular intervals, this cuts down on the number of E-mails you get from the list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.

This list also has a Web based interface where you can read messages and from which you can post your own messages.

There is also the more WBAI specific “Goodlight” Web based message board. It is sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as “the bleepin' blue board,” owing to the blue background used on its Web pages. This one has many people posting anonymously and there's also an ancillary “WBAI people” board that's just totally out of hand.

When the computer in Master Control is working we sometimes have live interaction with people posting on the “Goodlight Board” during the program.

And then there is the historic “Free Pacifica!” list, which has been used to help organize resistance to Pacifica Management hijackers since the mid-90s. It's become a low volume mailing list because it's been eclipsed by some of the newer, more technologically advanced, lists. Just click on this link and follow the instructions, and you'll be subscribed. This is a mailing list only, it doesn't have a digest option nor does it have a web interface.

•

Back to the Back of the Book page

Back to my home page.