Back of the Book links for the December 28, 2024, program

We talked rather a bit about Donnie Bonespur Trump again on this program. There seems to be no way around that. We also did a small science segment, which I'll tell a little bit about when I update this Web page. I recommended a rather esoteric, vintage book from Project Gutenberg. I plan to update this Web page soon, so it might be worth checking back to see what I the update to this Web page looks like.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday January 8, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.

We had the first meeting of the 14^th WBAI LSB this past week. I've termed out, so I couldn't fully participate in the meeting. In fact I was supposed to have given an oral Treasurer's Report but we never got to it.

This is not all that much of a new WBAI LSB. In fact of the 24 members of the 14^th WBAI LSB only one is actually new.

So the usual suspects did their usual stuff again. The former Chair of the LSB had termed out, as I have. The Vice Chair was chairing for the first time. The disruptors are well practiced at what they do. We spent time arguing about adding a minute of silence, and also on someone who wanted to add that minute to the end of the meeting. And later on that person claimed that her motion was to add all of the time spent talking about her motion to the end of the meeting, which she said was 14 minutes. This is the underhanded way some people do things.

Anyway, the people who wanted to make a mess of the meeting largely succeeded. I didn't get to give an oral Treasurer's Report, the interim General Manager and interim Program Director did not get to give a report, the WBAI Directors on the PNB did not get to give a report. We sure did hear a lot about the nonsense one faction pushes, however. I suspect that the one new person on the LSB was left puzzled about it all. We'll have two years of this LSB, if we're lucky and Trump doesn't destroy the entire thing.

Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have 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 is archiving the programs! WBAI has ~~permanently~~ switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.

This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display, and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.

For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display, and find Specify Date, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.

Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.

Donnie Bonespur Trump's been saying in the past couple of weeks that he wants to expand the United States of America by annexing Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, because he says that China is running it now, and he wants to make Canada the 51^st State. Trump is clearly ignorant, but maybe this is just him messing with people. Or maybe he thinks that he's sending a signal to China that he's noticed that they are trying to make inroads into the western hemisphere. Maybe it's just the con man in Trump trying to see if he can hustle something. He is a crook, after all. What he's been saying is just all so stupid.

I made another book recommendation from the Project Gutenberg Web site. This book is titled Time and Time-Tellers by James W. Benson. This book was first published in 1875. The author starts out with the fairly ambitious task of talking about time itself writing, Time cannot be thoroughly defined, nor even properly comprehended by mankind, for our personal acquaintance with it is so brief that our longest term is compared to a span, and to the grass which in the morning is green and groweth up, and in the evening is cut down and withered. The ordinary thinker can scarcely carry his idea of Time beyond that small portion of it which he has known, under the name of life-time. The metaphysician classes Time with those other mysteries, - Space, Matter, Motion, Force, Consciousness, which are the Gordian knots of Mental Science. Outside of these 19^th Century philosophical points the book is mostly about how people have kept time through the ages and about how clocks are made to keep time. The timing mechanisms of clocks and watches are gone into pretty deeply. One use for a 21^st Century reader would be to understand just how the old mechanical clocks were able to keep time. There are plenty of details about that in this book. The author wasn't just some one who wrote about time pieces he also made them. He is clearly proud of the advances in time keeping that the people of 1875, could avail themselves of. A lot of people these days only know clocks that are driven by electricity one way or another. This book could probably clear up some questions that may have occurred to them about these mechanical clocks that were so important not all that long ago.

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 open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board, owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people board that was just totally out of hand.

In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.

Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board during the program.

There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.

We like to stay interactive with our listeners. Here are the various options for you to get in touch with us.

You can also send me E-mail.

And now you can even reach me on Twitter

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WBAI related links

A WBAI Listeners' Web page

WBAI Management's official Web site

Back of the Book — December 28, 2024