Back of the Book — May 12, 2012


It's Thursday night, June 7, 2012, 22:42, and I've updated this page with the location of the next LSB meeting. Previously I'd posted information about where to see the transit of Venus on the web. I also gave an update on the dismal results of our efforts to raise money for the station on this program. More to come. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We're pitching tonight. Ugh! But we need to. The station needs the dough. We are planning to get to the below stuff and more on this program. We hope that folks will contribute while we're on the air. Do check back for the updates

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 is scheduled to be held on Wednesday, June 13th, 2012, at Alwan-for-the-arts, 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor, in downtown Manhattan.

The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012, at the Local 1199 MLK Center, 310 West 43rd St. between 8th & 9th Aves. in Manhattan. I actually got to make a Treasurer's Report for the first time since July. Of course some faction operative disrupted it.

There was an LSB meeting held on Thursday, March 29th, 2012, at the “Brooklyn Commons” 388 Atlantic Avenue, between Hoyt & Bond Streets in Brooklyn. This was our second LSB meeting this March. 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 02:53 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 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 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.

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We are pitching on this radio program! If you can please call 1-212-209-2950 during the radio program and pledge some amount of money to help keep Back of the Book on WBAI and help keep WBAI on the air.

If you want to pledge to the program via the Web it's best to do so while we're on the air, you need to go here and be sure to pick Back of the Book as the favorite show. Otherwise your pledge won't be counted towards the program.

I should also point out that WBAI always needs help answering the phones. In order to answer the phones you'll have to get into the building. The building Management requires that you get your name added to a list so you can enter 120 Wall St. So if you want to volunteer to answer phones for this 'thon you should call the WBAI switchboard at 1-212-209-2800 during business hours and let the folks in charge know you want to volunteer so they can put your name on the list. We always need more folks to answer the phones so if you want to volunteer to answer the phones for another program during this 'thon the above procedure is the way to do it.

UPDATE: Well, we did very badly in terms of fund raising on this program. We raised $170, which is the lowest we've raised in many years. We don't know why we ended up raising so little. We have to hope that we can do better next time, if we have a next time.

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Transit of Venus 1882
Photograph of the Transit of Venus December 6, 1882

On this program we talked about the transit of Venus that's going to happen on June 5th.

Well, right now it's not looking so great in terms of weather for late Tuesday afternoon. We'll be seeing if we can watch the beginning of the event live, but this transit of Venus will be starting quite late in the day for the east coast. If the horizon is cloudy it's just not going to be visible.

So here are some Web sites where you should at least be able to see a camera's view of this rare event.

Pickles of the North and I were able to watch the 2004, transit of Venus from our east facing bedroom window. Damned convenient, that. This year no one in greater New York will be able to see this event from an east facing window. It will occur before and during sunset, and in fact from our area we will not be able to see the entire thing.

Try to get a glimpse of it, even if it has to be via a stream Web video, because the next one isn't going to happen until 2117.

mayday 2012 graffiti
May Day Graffiti

Well, here's something else that some young folks appear to think that they've invented. And of course lots of sorry, old leftoids were hoping for a lot more than the usual this May Day.

It was not the spectacular event some had been hyping. There was no general strike. Some people, young and old, are just not in touch with reality.

the so-called freedom tower
The “Freedom Tower”

The pile to the left surpassed the Empire State Building as the tallest building in Greater New York City this past fortnight. Yeah, we may have more to say about that, if we can get to it tonight.

purple flowers
Some purple flowers we saw at Battery Park after the last radio program

Especially in the spring I like to post some photographs of the flowers that we see and photograph in our peregrinations. Here we have some sort of cluster of small, purple flowers that were planted by the Parks Dept. at Battery Park this Spring. I don't know the name of this flower, I'm not a botanist, I just take snapshots of things I find interesting.

And long after these flowers have faded away this photograph will be carousing around the Internet.

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.