Come Out!
It's Monday morning, October 13, 2025, 11:49, and I've updated this Web page with as little piece from Pickles of the North about what she did on the air. Previously I'd added the link to the archive of this program, and a change in how a fraction got rendered. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ So I'm rushing to get a Web page up here before the program starts again. This is what I have so far, I think I'll be adding a little bit more pretty soon, so you might check back in for any updates.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday November 12, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security. We had a LSB meeting this past week on Wednesday, October 8. Members of the LSB had a long back and forth with the WBAI interim General Manager and interim Program Director about some issues. That back and forth took up most of the meeting. I got only three minutes to give a Treasurer's Report, but then there wasn't all that much to report since we haven't been having the usual number of meetings and we haven't been getting much in the way of financial information we can share.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
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.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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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.
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It's National Coming Out Day!
I came out to myself as queer in 8th Grade, when I was 13. Maybe I came out to the world when I went to the Gay Activists Alliance meeting on March 26, 1970, certainly soon thereafter I was out to more people when I carried the Greitzer petition in Greenwich Village. And then I came out the other way in November 1981, when I had surprising thoughts about one of my lesbian colleagues. In the Spring of 1982, I came out to her and told her about those feelings. That's as far as things went there. In May 1984, I told my male ex that I was becoming interested in women. It wasn't until the next year that I let people at WBAI know that I was interested in women as well as men. So I've come out quite a number of times.
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I've been on line for 40 years.
I was given an Atari 800 XL computer at the end of 1984. It was an 8-bit computer. It had 64KB of RAM and used 5¼ inch floppy disks for storage. A colleague at WBAI talked up going on line, which meant going to local Computer Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). So I met a guy who appeared to work for the government and he sold me an Atari 1030 modem in October 1985. It was a 300 baud modem. In those days everything on the BBSs I went to was text and local BBSs. And then one guy hooked his BBS into the Internet. After a couple of years there was a lot of hullabaloo about Multimedia,
which I in initially did not like the sound of. But Multimedia swept the BBSs and we got images, mostly porn. In the late '80s a colleague and I had talked about making a big BBS. But we decided that we couldn't do such a thing because we were just not knowledgeable enough of the technical side of things. Meanwhile a woman we knew, who knew nothing about the technology, bought ten or so modems, hooked them up to phone lines, put them on her dining room table and started her own, big BBS. She charged a subscription and made quite a big of money.
I had a job in cyberspace from 1991, to 1996, doing sysop work and I was Customer Service, all of it, for a major on-line operation.
Around the early to mid-1990s, I was also skeptical of this new World Wide Web thing that Tim Berners-Lee had come up with. It was okay for academic papers, which it had originally been devised for, but what would people do with it? I think uses have been found for it.
In late 1995, I subscribed to my first ISP and I got a free Web page along with my subscription to that service. In January 1998, I got the domain name GLIB.COM. I still have it.
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Pickles here, and I am very glad we reached the month of October, because October to me means Halloween! And one of the things I think of during this month is the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds, first published in 1898. It's influence on the science fiction genre is huge and well documented. But sometimes it's nice to go back to the original source, which I first read around the age of eleven or twelve. I think it was one of the books I took with me when my family went on its annual two week vacation in the Laurentians. Nothing better than reading about the destruction of the world by invaders from Mars while sitting in a sunny cabin by a lake on the edge of the dark boreal forest full of spruce, balsam fir and birch trees. Wait, is that a Martian war machine towering over the pines?!
Here is the opening paragraph of War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
R. Paul here — The cover above is from the current Project Gutenberg version of H.G. Wells' book. That cover is actually an amalgam of the artwork from the 1906, French translation of the book, named La Guerre des Mondes, and English text put on by folks at Project Gutenberg. The French version is here. It has quite a few illustrations.
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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.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
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.
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