Back of the Book — March 31, 2012


It's Wednesday morning, April 4, 2012, 10:01, and I've updated this Web page with more about the segment of the program where I talked about all of those tests I've been going through for the previous three weeks. More to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We are planning to have a rather informative program this time around. We'll do our best to deal with a difficult topic. We'll also have our traditional welcome to the Spring season, and we'll see if we can get to the mail tonight, we don't know about that at this time. We're really going to be cramming stuff into this time slot this morning. This Web page will be updated, so check back for those updates. This may be a memorable program, folks.

Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings? Well, I do, and I've recently updated all of that.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 11th, 2012, at a location to be announced.

There was an LSB meeting held this past Thursday, March 29th, 2012, at the “Brooklyn Commons” 388 Atlantic Avenue, between Hoyt & Bond Streets in Brooklyn. This was our second LSB meeting this month. We again mostly heard from Management about how swimmingly things are going. We also elected members to the various PNB committees. Some “Occupy Wall Street” folks were at the meeting and left some rather revealing posters for us to see as we left the meeting at about quarter to one in the morning. The public session had ended at 9:46 PM. After the public session we'd had an executive session.

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 01:47 this morning. The station has a Flash stream here, make sure you enable Javascript so it can work for you.

New WBAI stream! WBAI has just put up an experimental stream for the Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. This is a brand new, experimental stream. So if you have one of those devices you might try the link out. And let us know how it works for you one way or the other. That way the folks implementing it can iron out any kinks in the system.

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 again 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.

Spring is here! Yeah, and I'm glad about it. We plan to play our traditional welcome to the season, now that the days are longer than the nights.

On this program I went on, for a while, about the wanderings of Pickles of the North and me over the past three weeks in an attempt to find out about what's been poking my gizzard.

Yeah, my gizzard has felt like it's been getting poked for the past nine months now. What with all sorts of delays, and the pace that things sometimes move at with the V.A. Hospital, it took a while. So far all we know is that the various scans have revealed what one doctor told us is a soft tissue mass that's two centimeters by four centimeters in size.

So this thing has been poking my gizzard for a while. It's possible that it's actually been in there for a very long time, but I've lost weight, on purpose, over the past 22 months or so, and having significantly less fat insulating my gut may have finally brought this thing into contact with the old gizzard. We have spent those three weeks getting all sorts of tests and scans done. I've been injected with a bunch of radioactive concoctions, and some non-radioactive ones, over those weeks.

Well, we should find out pretty soon if they can tell me exactly what the hell this thing is that's been poking my poor gizzard. I hope that I don't get a diagnosis of gizzarditis.

Maybe I should think about starting a foundation to fight gizzarditis. Yeah, I could start doing public service announcements about the scourge of gizzarditis.

Well, I'm sure that we'll have more to report on this in the near future.

Occupy Wall Street poster daring WBAI to call the cops
An “Or Else” From Occupy Wall Street

So we had the second WBAI LSB meeting of the month on Thursday night. To the right is a piece of commentary they had on one of their posters, which they left on the ground outside. So they're telling us that either we “concede” or we're just a bunch of phony liberals. Wow, I guess this is what passes for progressive activism from some of the Occupy Wall Street crowd, at least the bunch that seems to think they are owed air time at WBAI.

They also have demands about how the WBAI Local Station Board must add 12 more seats that will be reserved just for “youth,” which they claim to all be. Of course this isn't something the LSB can do. The composition of the LSB is set by the Pacifica bylaws. Apparently some folks are just not interested in learning about WBAI.

Occupy Wall Street threat of war
Occupy Wall Street poster threatening war against WBAI

This poster is kind of disturbing. Of course the Occupy Wall Street crowd just lets anyone identify with them. But someone who threatens to go to WBAI with war if they don't get their way is really not the sort of person who should be at WBAI in the first place.

I hope that some other Occupy Wall Street people will distance themselves from this sort of threatening language.

I don't know if we'll have time to get to it, but if we do we'll talk a little bit about the discovery of hypervelocity planets.

dandelions in the early early spring
Dandelions in Bloom

So sometimes we like to end a Web page with a little something from the past fortnight. And in the proper seasons the Web page ending image is frequently flowers.

Jeez, I have to say that I never imagined that at some point I'd be posting images of flowers from people's gardens on line. Well, in my old age I am. There's some old saying about it being a good idea to remember to stop and smell the flowers. You can't smell these over the Web, but you can appreciate the photograph. So enjoy the dandelions.

There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. 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.

One popular list the “NewPacifica” mailing list. Founded October 31, 2000, this list is sometimes lively and as of mid-2011, has 687 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 Saturday Morning With the Radio On 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.