Web links related to the Back of the Book program of November 15, 2010


It's Saturday morning, November 27, 2010, 01:06, and this Web page is finished. I've updated this Web page with some more information about the topics we covered and a link to the latest page about Coney Island, previously I'd updated it with more on the program changes, and with the information about my late male ex. We're very sad right now. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ This is our last program in this time slot! We'll do what we can and we'll give you a radio program. We hope people will listen to us in our next time slot. We'll get to what we can, including at least some of the mail backlog, and then we'll be leaving the deep night. We'd really prefer to stay here, but we can't. For those who can't follow us to the new time slot, thanks a hell of lot for listening over the years.

This is our last program in this time slot.

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of many of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday, December 8, 2010, at 7:00 PM at a location to be announced.

There was a regular LSB meeting on Wednesday, November 10, 2010, the LSB finally passed its FY11 budget. After that people were agitating for stopping all program changes until lots of process happened. That opportunistic motion got postponed.

At a previous meeting the WBAI 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:

All of 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.

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 10:08 PM last night. The station has a 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. Or to see only the two shows in this time slot click here.

For legal reasons, WBAI stopped making podcasts available as of June 28, 2010.

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

In the table on the archive 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!

Last year there was a Pacifica National Board meeting held in New York. Here's the Web page I did about this PNB meeting and the amazing things that went on at it.

And the PNB has also met in Houston from Friday October 9th, through Sunday October 11th, 2009. 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 Pacifica National Board (PNB) met in Manhattan the weekend of October 1-3, 2010. I guess those of us who didn't attend will hear about what happened at it some day.

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 Are Over!

And the results are in!

Here is the list of those elected in order of their finish:

Listeners

Staff

Here's the full list of who finished in what place in the listener election.

Here's the full list of who finished in what place in the Staff election.

Thanks to all who voted for independent candidates. The Sixth WBAI LSB is almost evenly split the independents and the former Program Director's faction operatives.

UPDATE: Voting in the WBAI listener election is officially over. The WBAI Staff election failed to meet quorum. It turns out that this was not true. The WBAI Staff election met quorum on September 30th. Why, then did the Election Supervisors extend the WBAI Staff election by two weeks? This is an unanswered question. Also, the National Election Supervisor, Renee Asteria,, wrote to me that “Approximately 200 staff ballots have been cast.” by September 30th. But the voting tally shows a total of only 89 ballots counted. We still don't know if the screwup of sending many of the ballots to the wrong ZIP code has resulted in a lot of those ballots not getting to the proper P.O. Box.

The official Web site of this election was here.

There are a lot of questions about this election. Some of those questions are: who didn't bother to proof read the ZIP codes on the return envelopes? What was the real reason why the Staff election was extended? Why were the so-called Justice and Unity Campaign listener candidates given such preferential treatment, especially when it came to on-air campaign time? There also may have been people who weren't eligible to vote as Staff who were allowed to vote in this election.

Here is a reproduction of the official E-mail from the Election Supervisors as issued on October 4, 2010.

Here is a reproduction of the official E-mail from the Election Supervisors as issued on October 13, 2010.

The 2010, election campaign has officially ended. Pickles of the North only got her ballot as of the middle of September. The ballot arrived with no booklet about the elections. And the return envelope had no stamp on it. The lack of a stamp on the envelope will affect both the Staff and listener elections, but it will potentially really affect the listener election. This, I think, favors the former Program Director's faction on the listener side a lot.

Many listeners may not even realize that they've gotten a ballot! And then they will not know who the candidates are at all, but there will be at least two names that they'd have heard on the air. And those are faction candidates.

The lack of a stamp on the envelope probably got a lot of people to NOT bother voting at all.

Okay, this election is now thoroughly screwed up like the others were.

We're Sort of Moving

As noted at the top of this page, this is our last program in this time slot. When we got to WBAI before the previous show we were shown this posting on the bleepin' blue board. Well, that was a bit of a shock.

The interim Program Director has issued notice of program changes that are to take effect starting at 6:00 AM today. The relevant documents are below. We are hearing from other producers who have been told they are being moved to other time slots and having their time cut in half. One producer has been told he's off the air entirely and another producer has decided that he would rather resign than be treated in a way that he can't abide.

Some producers are lobbying heavily to retain their current time slots, and some have lobbied to get better time slots amid the chaos of this sudden program shakeup. One producer got moved, accepted it, and then got pushed out of the new time slot by another producer who had publicly quit and then successfully lobbied the interim Program Director for a better time slot. The producer who got pushed out has quit WBAI.

We got a call on our answering machine from WBAI interim Program Director Tony Bates at 5:17 in the afternoon on November 1st. He said that the grid was changing and that Back of the Book would be affected. When I called back at 7:15 that evening I got his voice mail and the voice mail was full so I couldn't leave a message.

I called the interim Program Director about this again the next day. He told me that he's moving Back of the Book to 5:00 AM on Saturdays! And in that new time slot the program will only be one hour long. Let's just say that we are not jumping for joy about this change in the program. That's going to be quite the change for us, and for our listeners. And, yes, Uncle Sidney will be moving his program Carrier Wave to that same time slot and will continue alternating with us.

Here are the latest documents from Management about the programming shakeup:

Management's Original FormatsWeb Friendly Formats
First letter from WBAI ManagementFirst letter from WBAI Management
Second letter from WBAI ManagementSecond letter from WBAI Management
The new WBAI program gridThe new WBAI program grid
 The new WBAI program grid in HTML format
 Updated schedule as of 11/15/10

In the grid I do not know whose picture that is to the right of the data. Even now I don't know that these program changes are fully settled.

Of course I've had something to say about all of this. I sent this out as an E-mail on November 11th. If we don't get more listeners soon WBAI will cease to exist.

Astronomers have found something new and huge surrounding the center of our galaxy.

There are these enormous spheres of no one knows what extending perpendicularly to the plane of the Milky Way's disk, and these spheres are about 25,000 light years in diameter each!

The spheres are emitting gamma rays and why they're doing that is a mystery. It all may be related to the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy, or it may be something else. The one thing that seems pretty certain is that these gigantic spheres are not something being caused by dark matter. Previously there had been speculation that the gamma ray flux near the center of our galaxy was the result of dark matter particles annihilating each other. That possibility is out now.

Wow, that was some election, wasn't it? We talked about it on this program. Especially fascinating is the mindset that wants to be so free of government so that their lives will be better economically, and then they go and give more political power to the Republicans who are the ones who actually made the economy collapse in the first place! On the air I talked about my opposition to the late Walter Cronkite's assertion that there is such a thing as “The genius of the electorate.”

We also talked about the fate of the campaign to repeal the infamous anti-gay law that institutionalizes the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy of the American armed forces. Unless it gets repealed before the end of the year it's not going to get repealed. The Republicans will have control of the House of Representatives for the next two years. And the Obama Administration has been harping on waiting till the end of the year for a study to be completed. Well, there's one hell of a screw up. If it doesn't get repealed before the end of 2010, it's going to have to grind through the courts to an uncertain fate, and that will probably take years. It could have been repealed earlier this year, but the Democrats dragged their feet and had better things to do.

The Roman Catholic church is looking for a few good exorcists. The American Bishops' Conference had some long presentation on this, endorsed by Pope Benedict XV, who really gives a rat's zinger about this silliness. Meanwhile they used their time for this nonsense instead of dealing with the sex scandals and other real life problems their church has. Well, it's one more human institution being mismanaged by humans.

We talked about my male ex and his struggle with liver cancer on this program. He was diagnosed in the Spring. He'd been HIV+ for 26 years. We'd spent the past couple of weeks worrying about his declining health. He'd gone into the hospital in what was called “grave condition” right after our November 1st, program. He then fought his way back to being healthy enough to go home. We've been visiting him and fretting over his condition for the entire fortnight.

On the afternoon after this program my male ex passed away.

We again talked about Coney Island and what's going on there a bit. Here's a Web page I did about a walk pickles of the North and I took through Coney Island in mid-October.

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.

My voice mail number at WBAI is 212-209-2996. Leave a message.

You can also send me E-mail.



WBAI related links

WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site


Back to the Back of the Book page

Back to my home page.

The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2010, R. Paul Martin.