It's Sunday evening, July 25, 2010, 19:05, and this Web page is done. I've put up some photographs from our celebration of Uncle Sidney's birthday, and I've put in more about the topics we covered. Previously I'd added the information for Sunday's nomination signing party at WBAI, which is over now. I hope some of you who listen to the program will run in this election. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We plan to get into a bunch of topics tonight, and we also plan to put a big dent in our mail backlog.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on ~~Wednesday, July 14, 2010~~ right now I'm no longer sure of the date, at 7:00 PM at a location to be announced.

The June 9, 2010, LSB meeting once again saw faction operatives being disruptive during the meeting. Here's a little bit about what happened at that meeting. One of the low lights of the meeting happened at the end when faction operatives slandered a woman who is active in WBAI governance. When that woman got up during the Public comment segment of the meeting to refute the lies Sara Flounders, a member of the “Secretariat” for the so-called Workers World Party, disrupted the meeting and shouted so that the woman couldn't be heard. The faction can't handle the truth.

At its January 21, 2009, meeting the LSB voted to hold its meetings on the second Wednesday of every month and/or the last Thursday of that month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:

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.

WBAI has an official Web stream of what's on the air at any time! You can go here and pick which type of stream you want! If this stream isn't working let me know. And you can see the status of the streams at any time by clicking here. The stream was working at 9:39 PM last night. They have switched the server from Virginia to Texas, so that may have something to do with various problems. They have a new Flash stream here, make sure you enable Javascript so it can work for you.

WBAI is archiving the programs! Just go here and you'll be able to listen to this program any time for the next couple of months. You may need to scroll up one line to see the audio archive. Let me know if you find this feature useful.

If you want to listen to any part of the WBAI archive click here to go right to the archives. When you first go to the Web page you'll only see the WBAI programs for the past 7 days. If you want to see older programs you can click on one of the “See ALL Shows” buttons.

Back of the Book is now one of the programs that you can download, as well as listen to on line.

I'm glad to announce that the archives have seen some positive changes. In the table on that Web page Back of the Book and Carrier Wave are both in the Show column. The “Date and Category” column shows the date of the program. After the program I go in and write the details of the program and say which program it is. Of course I'd recommend that you just listen to both programs in this time slot!

The Pacifica National Board (PNB) met in New York City from Friday July 23, to Sunday July 26, 2009.

The meeting was held at the Beekman Towers Hotel, 3 Mitchell Place, in Manhattan, a couple of blocks north of the United Nations.

There was an election going on in Pacifica, so there were a few candidates attending and speaking during the public comment sessions. Some disrupted the meeting.

And the PNB has also met in Houston from Friday October 9^th, through Sunday October 11^th. The official audio archive of that meeting is here. It was not disrupted as the New York meeting was, although some of the same miscreants got out there to say stupid things.

The Executive Director of Pacifica, Arlene Engleheart, appointed another new interim General Manager of WBAI on June 24. So far there's been a Staff meeting to introduce Berthold Reimers as the new iGM, but Pacifica Management has not issued anything in writing yet. When they do I'll post a link to it.

The 2010 Local Station Board Elections Have Begun!

The Local Station Board (LSB) is the primary governance body for WBAI. When meeting as delegates the LSB members elect the Directors of the Pacifica National Board, which is the governance body for the entire Pacifica Foundation. The Pacifica Foundation owns WBAI.

Here is the official time table for this crucial election.

June 1^st, to ~~midnight June 30^th~~ UPDATE: The nomination phase has been extended to 6:00 PM on July 19^th. The official announcement is here.
UPDATE: There will be a nomination petition signing event at WBAI, 120 Wall Street, 10^th floor on Sunday, July 18^th, from 2:00 to 5:00 PM, complete with food and drink for all. Please call 212-209-2800 to have your name added to the building guest list and be sure to bring proper ID for entry to the building.
July 19^th - All Nomination package materials should be complete and returned to the Local Election Supervisor by 6:00 PM (ET).
July 1^st - Campaign Phase begins. Candidates are given equal airtime with respect to candidate cart rotation and on-air forums. In person forums are also an integral piece of the campaign.
August 16^th - All ballots are mailed. If you do not receive a ballot, please contact local election supervisor Nichole Justice Hylton.
September 30^th - Ballots are due by midnight. All stations will hold special hours to receive last minute ballots.
October 1^st - The local election supervisors will make the final P.O. Box pick up.
October - specific days TBA Ballots are Counted. The final ballot count will take place in a secure, public location TBA.

This election is crucial for the survival of WBAI and Pacifica. The Sixth WBAI LSB, which will be created by this election, will last for two full years. WBAI and Pacifica are in a precarious position right now as current interim Management attempts to reverse the death spiral that the station and the network have been in for years. If some bunch of chuckleheads gets a majority on the WBAI LSB they'll be able to change the composition of the Pacifica National Board and revert to corrupt, incompetent and malfeasant Management, they might even sell WBAI.

We need decent people on the WBAI LSB who will be interested in preserving the station, not in selling it or running it into the ground. I hope that the listeners will educate themselves about the candidates and vote for good ones.

The official Web page where you register to get a nomination package is here.

Is it at all possible that there could be some form of life on Titan, a satellite of the planet Saturn? After all, it's so cold that the methane gas that we use in our stoves to cook with is a liquid there. Well, some scientists think that there just may be life on Titan.

Any life there would be very different from what we have on Earth, and how to definitively detect such life is something that no one knows for sure. The current speculation is fueled by the observed flow of some molecular gases from the upper atmosphere of Titan to its surface.

And we talked about the spy scandal on this program. It was really something deserving of Boris Badinov and Natsha Fatale versus Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose. Luckily they don't seem to have gotten anything that will hurt people, and in exchange for deporting them to their ~~Soviet~~ Russian masters some political prisoners were released from Vladimir Putin's 21^st Century version of the gulag.

Our own Uncle Sidney Smith, who shares the time slot with us and who is also our pal, had already announced that he'd turned 60 over the past fortnight. So we gave him a little party on the air.

Here you can see Uncle Sidney getting ready to blow out the candle on the collection of mini cheesecakes that we got him for a birthday cake. And shortly after this photograph was taken Sidney and Pickles of the North gobbled them up with great glee.

This was the scene in Alcove #1 after the program. We'd brought Sidney some little presents, and someone else had given him some as well. One of the things we'd gotten him was a bubble blowing thing.

Being adults it took the three of us a few minutes to figure out how it actually worked. And then we found that, after taking the cap off, you had to squeeze the bottle and a little loop that been soaking in the bubble-making solution came up out of the bottle. We quickly found that this could be quite an amusement in and of itself. The instructions were something like “Squeeze the bottle and blow!”

Squeezing that bottle in a certain rhythm and watching the bubble blowing loop rise in response brought back memories for Sidney and me of the lonesome eroticism of our youths.

Here you can see Uncle Sidney mastering the device and blowing lots of bubbles all over the place.

Uncle Sidney took the bubble thing to the streets. Here he is on the corner of Wall St. and Water St. casting more bubbles to the wind.

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. UPDATE: The bleepin' blue board has had to add a step for folks to get onto it because it's under attack by spambots. When you click on the above link you may be asked for a username and password. Type in Username: poster Password: enternow

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

Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Carrier Wave alternates with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.