Back of the Book links for the July 19, 2004 program

It's Sunday night 8/1/2004 20:08:00 and this Web page is finished. Oh, this is an odd Summer for me. We'll talk about several things tonight, some of which are below. We've included one big E-mail we read on the program as well.

The WBAI LSB will meet next on Tuesday, July 27^th, at 6:30 PM, but I don't yet know where it will meet.

WBAI's mandated Committee of Inclusion (COI) is currently looking for candidates. The members elected to the COI by the LSB will be electing other members to this committee. If you'd like to be a candidate for inclusion in the important work of the WBAI COI click here and fill out the form. There has been talk of pushing back the deadline for applying for membership in this committee.

WBAI now 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 feeds were working at 11:28 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.

“Whoa! gnarly, dude! We're going to a nudist camp for teens? What's that? We gotta bring our grandmas? Oh, Dude!”

We're going to talk a little bit about some surgery tonight. Yeah, I had some. It was certainly less than fun, and the recovery is worse than the surgery.

This is the guy who put chess on the map for Americans with his famous World Championship match with then World Champion Boris Spassky of what was then the Soviet Union in 1972.

On the program I spoke of how very one dimensional Bobby always was. He could talk brilliantly about chess, and of course he could play brilliantly. Any other topic of conversation tended to find Bobby completely ignorant or filled with rather bizarre, and usually quite rigid, ideas handed to him by someone else.

After he won the World Championship in 1972, Bobby didn't play chess competitively anymore. He spent a lot of time with one of the right wing Christian churches on the west coast, handing them a lot of his winnings from the match. After that he started wandering around the world.

In 1992, he ran afoul of the U.S. government by defying U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions against what was then left of Yugoslavia by playing another match against Spassky. Bobby won again and collected $3.3 million, which was a lot more than he'd made twenty years earlier. After that Bobby became extremely anti-American and said that America should be “wiped out,” and after the 9/11 attacks he started saying “Death to the U.S.A.” anywhere this would get publicity, including frequent radio programs he did in the Philippines.

It has been reported that Bobby was sheltered from the law by various chess players over the years, most recently by folks associated with a chess club in Tokyo. U.S. embassy officials are quoted as saying that he'll be deported to the U.S.

Bobby Fischer faces a fine and maybe even jail time if he's convicted of violating the sanctions. He will probably also face prosecution for not paying income taxes.

On the program I talked about Fischer and the chess world a little bit. I used to be the librarian of the Manhattan Chess Club back in the '70s. I played a lot of chess and eventually discovered I was never going to be at all good at it. I've met Fischer, and even have his autograph on a book I won for winning my section of a tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club back in the old days.

One of the things that came out during Fischer's decades in near obscurity was his rabid anti-Semitism. Fischer, one of whose parents is Jewish, had always been an anti-Semite, even while hanging out with lots of Jewish people in the chess world, but in recent decades he got really worse about it.

It's sad that he came to this. Maybe his life serves as a bad example of what can happen if you're too focused.

We only got to one piece of mail on this program. It's from Susan Not From Long Island. It's a test. We took it on the air. Pickles of the North scored 12 and I got 16. You can take it and see how well you do.

Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 19:09:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Susan From VA
To: rpm@glib.com

This is one of the more interesting Net pass around things I've seen in a while. And you can actually read this on the air!

My ankle fracture is healing. I can walk moderate distances with the aid of a walker. I now have permanent status at my job which I still love. My house is slowly becoming a home. Most of the time I'm too tired and in too much pain to know I'm going through my reverse SAD phase. My personal life continually surprises and confuses me.

All of my love to you and Pickles pf the North - Maybe on some Holiday weekend I'll catch the streaming audio,

Susan From VA

This is based on U.S. & CDN info, so use both sides of your brain. This can be more difficult than it looks - it just shows how little most of us really see!

There are 27 questions about things we see every day or have known about all our lives. How many can you get right? These little simple questions are harder than you think-- it just shows you how little we pay attention to the commonplace things of life.

Put your thinking caps on. No cheating! No looking around! No getting out of your chair! No using anything on or in your desk or computer!

Can you beat 20?? (The average is 7) Write down your answers and check answers (on the bottom) AFTER completing all the questions.

REMEMBER - NO CHEATING!!!

Then, before you pass this on to your friends, change the number on the subject line to show how many you got correct.
Forward to your friends and also back to the one who sent it to you. LET'S JUST SEE HOW OBSERVANT YOU REALLY ARE. Here we go!

1. On a standard traffic light, is the green on the top or bottom?

2. How many states are there? (Don't laugh, some people don't know)

3. In which hand is the Statue of Liberty's torch?

4. What six colours are on the classic Campbell's soup label?

5. What two numbers on the telephone dial don't have letters by them?

6. When you walk does your left arm swing with your right or left leg?

7. How many matches are in a standard pack?

8. On the United States flag is the top stripe red or white?

9. What is the lowest number on the FM dial?

10. Which way does water go down the drain, counter or clockwise?

11. Which way does a "no smoking" sign's slash run?

12. How many channels on a VHF TV dial?

13 On which side of a women's blouse are the buttons?

14. Which way do fans rotate?

15. What is on the back of a Canadian dime?

16. How many sides does a stop sign have?

17. Do books have even-numbered pages on the right or left side?

18. How many lug nuts are on a standard car wheel?

19. How many sides are there on a standard pencil?

20. Sleepy, Happy, Sneezy, Grumpy,Dopey, Doc. Who's missing?

21. How many hot dog buns are in a standard package?

22. On which playing card is the card maker's trademark?

23. On which side of a Venetian blind is the cord that adjusts the opening between the slats?

24. On the back of a Canadian $1 coin, what is in the centre?

25. There are 12 buttons on a touch tone phone. What 2 symbols bear no digits?

26. How many curves are there in the standard paper clip?

27. Does a merry-go-round turn counter or clockwise?

**********************************************************************
Don't look at answers below until you complete all the questions.

1. Bottom
2. 50 (please tell me you got this one!)
3. Right
4. Blue, red, white, yellow, black, &gold
5. 1, 0
6. Right
7. 20
8. Red
9. 87.7
10. Clockwise (north of the equator)
11. Towards bottom right
12. 12 (no #1)
13. Left
14. Clockwise as you look at it
15. The Bluenose
16. 8
17. Left
18. 5
19. 6
20. Bashful
21. 8
22. Ace of spades
23. Left
24. Loon
25. *, #
26. 3
27. Counter

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.