Artemis II Crew Decal
I'm rushing to get this Web page done before the program airs. We have two of the segments we'd done on the program below. I think that I'll be posting more soon. So it might be worthwhile to check back for that update.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday May 13, 2026, 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 Wednesday night. The LSB had to spend about half an hour on trying to deal with an assertion by one of the members who always finds a way to insert herself into the workings of the meeting. She was going on about how Roberts' Rules of Order said votes should be taken. She never did state an actual citation and it was unclear about exactly what she wanted, other than that she wanted the Secretary to go back three years and change things in every set of minutes. The LSB voted that nonsense down. A motion that was not fully stated but seemed to say that the LSB would do roll call votes as per RONR 12 passed. None of this should have taken more than a couple of minutes to deal with.
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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We delayed production of this program while we watched the Artemis II splashdown. I was a bit impressed by the statement on TV that most people had not been around for the Apollo splashdowns. They said that people were hearing about it from their grandparents. I remember the Soviet Cosmonaut and the American Mercury astronaut programs. I recall seeing the film of Gus Griscom just getting out of the Mercury 7 capsule after it had splashed down and as it sank. Yeah, I'm old enough to be someone's grandfather, but I don't have any grandkids, or kids.
The six minute communications blackout is something that always happens. It's caused by plasma streaming from the heat shield and forming an electromagnetic barrier around the spacecraft as it burns into the atmosphere. Plasma is the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids and gases. Plasma is a gas that's composed of ions, which are ordinary atoms that have been stripped of at least some of their electrons. An ion has a net electric charge and that's what blocks radio communications.
Pickles and I were glad to see their splashdown occur safely, although one of the final parachutes took a bit of a while to fill with air, and then we heard that the four Artemis II crew members were green, which means that they were all okay.
I suspect that Donnie Bonespur
Trump will now inject himself into all of this because he can't have something else taking up air time.
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I'm reading in Entertainment Weekly that a documentary showed up at SXSW last month that has some people questioning their faith. The documentary is titled Capturing Bigfoot and it's produced by a guy named Marq Evans. The film thoroughly debunks the rather silly and somewhat infamous 1967, film clip of Bigfoot walking through some woods. That 1967, film was made by two guys named Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin and it was offered as absolute proof of the existence of Bigfoot.
There have always been people who were convinced that Bigfoot was a real creature that haunted the back woods of America. And when this short piece of film got publicized in 1967, those people just bonded to it and cited it over and over as proof of the reality of their belief.
I know that I just dismissed it instantly as a hoax. But now the true believers are having to deal with proof that it was a hoax.
What happened was that Marq Evans found a previously unseen piece of 16mm film that showed a man in a Bigfoot costume and this guy Gimlin riding on a horse. It's being described as the rehearsal for the Bigfoot film clip that became world famous. The 1967, clip that purported to show Bigfoot was 53 seconds long.
Mr. Evans says that he got the piece of film that shows the rehearsal for the 1967, hoax from the son of a man who had connections to Gimlin and Patterson.
While Mr. Evans was preparing his film debunking the Bigfoot claim he spoke to Patterson's son Clint. Evens told People magazine that Clint Patterson had, Learned the film was a fake from his mother years earlier and had been wanting to come out and tell this story.
Which is understandable, Evans continued, The lie had been really hard on him, and he was ready and wanting to get out from under it.
Evans said that, Clint told me that he actually saw his dad burn the suit out behind the family house one night in a big barrel,
spending about 30 minutes tossing it into the fire, piece by piece.
As with any sort of faith-based craziness people really made the 1967, film a part of their lives. There is an on-line Bigfoot community and some members of it are expressing deep sadness that this discovered film footage has blown a big hole in their faith. Many had believed in the Bigfoot myth before 1967, but that film cemented their belief as an indisputable fact. Still, some true believers refuse to believe the veracity of Evans' documentary. Similar to what happened when the so-called Shroud of Turin was proven to have been made about 1,600 years after Jesus H. Christ is alleged to have become famous.
On Reddit one poster on the Bigfoot thread lamented that, The empire this film conjured and it's seemingly all going to go up in smoke,
That poster continued, The thousands of hours of Bigfoot videos and stories I've watched/heard are all now pretty much not believable to me. I was on the fence about the patty film, but thought it was the best one out there. If that's made to be a hoax, idk what I can stand on that'd make me want to believe anymore.
Another Reddit denizen wrote, It's like losing a friend … but the truth is the truth. I have to accept that.
Well, this is good that some people are re-orienting their lives with regard to this obviously silly hoax. Too bad other, older myths persist and keep getting perpetuated.
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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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