Web links related to the Back of the Book program of April 2, 2011


All right, it's Friday afternoon, June 8, 2012, 14:29, and this Web page is finished at long last. I've added some things, mostly about our intrepid expedition to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in the days before this radio program. I had to go through a lot of photographs to put the page about that expedition together. I'll be updating that page over time. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ Oh, Spring is here! Of course it's full of snow and cold and gloomy days so far, but this weather can't last forever, can it? Can it? We plan to get to the below topics and more on this program. Pickles of the North is back from her trip and she'll talk about that as well as doing a book review.

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, April 13, 2011, at Alwan for the Arts at 16 Beaver St. #501, New York, NY.

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 2:35 this morning. 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.

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 Saturday Morning With the Radio On 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!

In the Summer of 2009, 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. The audio has been posted for the first day of the meeting, the second day of the meeting and the third day of the meeting.

Subject: [WBAI-LSB-PUBLIC] Announcement: Berthold Reimers appointed GM of WBAI

Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:43:09 -0500

From: Mitchel Cohen

To: wbai-lsb-public@yahoogroups.com


I've just received word from Arlene Engleheart, Executive Director of Pacifica, that she's appointed Berthold Reimers as the General Manager of WBAI.

Mitchel Cohen
Chair, WBAI Local Station Board

We've Sort of Moved

Back of the Book has been moved to this time slot. We'll see how this move works.

The interim Program Director has issued notice of program changes. The evolving, 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, with the aid of four supporters, 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 was moving Back of the Book to 5:00 AM on Saturdays! And in this new time slot the program is only one hour long. Let's just say that we are not jumping for joy about this change in the program. It's quite a change for us, and for our listeners. And, yes, Uncle Sidney has moved his program Carrier Wave, or whatever he's calling it lately, to this 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
 Updated schedule as of 1/5/11

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.

If you want to get a good look at the planet Saturn, now's the time!

We played the traditional Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles on this program to welcome Spring. Yeah, we have more daylight than nightdark now. And I like it that way.

axis_sally-mildred_gillars (10K)
Axis Sally

On this program Pickles of the North reviewed the book Axis Sally, The American Voice of Nazi Germany by Richard Lucas. We also featured some short clips of what Axis Sally did during World War II.

Pickles' view on the way up
Pickles of the North's View on the Way North

Pickles of the North talked about her adventures going north a fortnight ago. She took time out from protesting that oppressor Santa Claus to visit her parents and other relatives while she was up there.

The St. Patrick's Day Parade, up north
The St. Patrick's Day Parade

Pickles' father marched as an honored guest in the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade up by the North Pole. In one of the previous marches he was “Irishman of the Year” so they have a special place for him in the march every year now. Here he is waving to the crowd.

The first day of Spring
The First Day of Spring

Yeah, Pickles was on the train heading home at the exact minute when the Vernal Equinox occurred and Spring began. Here you can see how bright and cheerful it is up north at this time of year. And you can see why I prefer not to live up there!

We talked about the dangers from that Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor that got flooded out and melted down in Japan.

I think a lot of people owe a great deal to the guys who are staying on the job trying to keep that thing from getting worse. Brave people.

Sidney photographing some yellow pansies
Uncle Sidney Getting a Good Shot of Yellow Pansies

On March 29th, we took a little sojourn to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with Uncle Sidney. We all met up at the Eastern Parkway entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in the late morning. I took a huge number of digital photographs during this outing. Sidney took quite a few photographs too, I believe.

Here you can see Uncle Sidney just outside the Brooklyn Botanic Garden getting one of his first photographs of the day. This large pot of little flowers is labeled “Pansy ‘Delta Pure Yellow.’”

So we really wandered around the entire place for about six hours, including lunch time in their tiny cafeteria in the basement of the main building. We saw lots of new, Spring growth just starting to come up, and we got some shots of each other too.

There are so many photographs from that day that I've decided to make a separate Web page for them. Click here for the fully illustrated story of this expedition we three took that day.

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


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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2012, R. Paul Martin.