The Mighty Sparrow returns Sunday, November the 26th at Columbia University's Ferris Booth Hall. Stay tuned for details.
It's 8pm, this is WBAI New York time for Off The Hook.
The Mighty Sparrow returns Sunday, November the 26th at Columbia University's Ferris Booth Hall.
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We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
We don't know what we're going to get.
Yeah.
I don't know.
They just want to talk to them.
Because I live in a house and there's no people upstairs.
Yeah.
I don't know.
They just bug out like they go all crazy.
Well, you know what?
You can always get their phone number and have the people upstairs call them back when they get in.
And that way at least you know who you're dealing with.
I don't know.
This is not a common problem.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Good luck with that.
I don't know.
What do you think?
People upstairs.
Yeah.
Sounds like he's living out a horror movie or something.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I'm sure we'll be reading about that in the paper.
Good evening.
Yes.
Tell that guy it's a prank call.
You know, that never crossed my mind.
It must be a prank call.
Let me ask you something.
Yeah, that could be it.
Right?
Yeah, that could be it.
What's the number if you call up, they give you your home address?
There's a number you call to get your home address.
Right.
If you dial in, let's say 279-3400, they would give you an address?
Well, there is that service in New Jersey.
Right.
Which is being offered for a fee where you can give them information.
They give you the address.
Or you give them a number and they give you a name, things like that.
It's nothing new.
It's just a question of people actually getting access to this information.
You can get a CD-ROM that has everybody in the country that's listed.
That's about $50 a CD-ROM.
Yeah, it's getting cheaper, in fact.
And it's a little bit out of date.
It's usually about a year out of date, I find.
But sometimes that's handy to have because, you know,
people's numbers go unlisted sometimes,
but they never go unlisted if they ever had them unlisted at one time or another.
About a year ago, I used to be able to call 2-0-1-9-7-6-2-1-2-1, the lottery information.
And it worked in 2-0-1?
And it worked with my 7-1-8.
And now, for some reason, it says,
Dude, the number you have called cannot be reached this way.
Please try again.
Well, yeah, probably you're dialing this as a local number or are you dialing it from?
1-2-0-1.
So you're dialing it from out of state?
Yeah, from New York City.
Okay, what's your long distance carrier?
Excuse me?
What's your long distance carrier?
AT&T.
Okay, so that's probably AT&T giving you that recording.
You might want to try 10-N-J-B.
No, 10-N-Y-T.
Oh, is it?
Okay, I'm sorry.
10-N-J-B comes the other way.
10-N-Y-T to get over there.
And maybe it'll route the call, though I doubt it
because they generally don't let people do that with 9-7-6s.
It's just an information number.
It's nothing special.
Yeah, it really is nothing special.
I mean, I think that's it.
These 9-7-6 numbers are not worth what people pay for them,
and certainly the other 9-7-0s and 5-4-0s
and all those kind of things, they're not worth it either.
Right, right, right.
A person who came home from overseas and told me
they have call waiting in another country.
The tone, the beep is different than it is over here?
It's kind of funny you should say that
because just yesterday my call waiting tone changed.
I was telling Fiber about this before.
All of a sudden I get double call waiting beeps.
It goes beep-beep instead of beep.
And, you know, for most people I guess that wouldn't mean much,
but for me that's like something to focus an entire day's activities around.
I'm trying to figure out how that happened.
But what's it like in Europe?
What kind of call waiting?
I didn't even know they had call waiting over there, to be honest.
It's a Middle Eastern country.
Uh-huh.
A type of, like a double beep or something.
A double beep too, huh?
A different type of busy signal
indicating to the party that you're home
and you're on call waiting.
Call back later.
Oh, okay.
Well, what if the person wants to pick up the phone?
Can you do that?
I don't know.
Interesting.
Okay.
Well, that's something I've always liked to...
I always wanted to see happen,
you know, where you could know the person is on call waiting.
Anyway, that's a suggestion for the future.
212-279-3400.
Good evening.
You're on.
Hi, yes.
I just wanted to ask a couple of questions.
First of all, I have this real problem with Bill Atlantic.
Right now we're trying to get a PRI connected to do some services,
provide Internet services,
and they just pushed our date back from November 2nd to December 8th.
Wow.
Yes.
I mean, there's just no way we can, you know.
It's kind of like, can you stay in business that long?
Yeah, really.
That's unreasonable.
Yeah, I don't know if there's any way.
I mean, is there anything we can do to get them to move that back up or something?
Firey, you went through similar things with NYNEX.
Well, originally, but it's not that way anymore.
Yeah, things have gotten a lot better.
Are many people doing what you're doing right now in your area?
Well, pretty much the only people besides us is UUNet, and they're in Newark, actually.
Well, where in Bill Atlantic are we talking?
New Jersey Bill?
Yeah, we're talking.
Former New Jersey Bill?
Yeah, that's where it is.
Hmm.
Basically, I mean, you need to play hardball with them
and, you know, call the PSC or whatever they call it over there
and get them to answer some pretty hard questions
as to why it's going to take them two months to, you know.
They gave us an indication that it was because the AT&T equipment on our switch,
it wasn't up to date, and it can't handle a PRI,
and they're not willing to forward exchanges on a PRI.
So you're saying that the 5ESS that you serve by does not provide ISDN service yet?
That's what they're saying, that it won't do a PRI.
It'll do a BRI, I guess, or something, but it won't do a PRI.
That's rather peculiar.
Yeah, it is.
Where are you located? In Newark?
In Fairfield, actually.
Yeah. Huh.
Well, again, I think the best thing to do is to put pressure on the phone company.
Call, I don't know what the equivalent of the president's helpline is over in Jersey,
but there has to be one, and you can at least get them to pay more attention.
Yeah, I know they do have a similar 800 hotline for Bell Atlantic, as they do in New York,
the GetISDN number, which is of limited use,
but it does say whether or not ISDN is available based on a certain area code and exchange,
although it's not updated.
It's not always right.
No, it's not always as up-to-date as possible.
They update it in little spurts, but I think there's something similar for Bell Atlantic.
The other thing is you might want to bring it to the attention of the executives at Bell Atlantic.
I mean, I've been in touch with some executives at NYNEX in the recent past, and you'd be surprised.
They might actually want to help you and actually be shocked that you were turned away.
You could actually help them, because they've never really done this before.
Anyway, best of luck to you, and keep us updated on that.
Is Bernie S. on the line?
Hello.
Bernie S. is on the line.
How did I know you were there?
You just suddenly popped in in cyberspace.
Isn't that cool?
I'm sure you're psychic.
Are you part of the Psychic Friends Network?
I don't want to talk about that.
Him and Dionne Warwick.
But we can't help but notice you're not calling us collect.
You're calling us direct.
This is not Locktel.
I wish they were calling earlier in the show, but I couldn't get a phone until just now.
In the real world, you couldn't get a phone?
That's right, believe it or not.
It's kind of funny, isn't it?
It's ironic.
When I was telling the folks how we're happy that you're out and all that,
but how it kind of sucks that we're actually thinking you might be going back to prison.
There's a possibility.
Update us on that.
I want to say hi to Pfeiffer.
Hello there.
Hey, how are you?
It's good to talk to you now that you're on the other side of the fence.
Isn't it weird?
I imagine you can still remember how it felt when you got out.
It was like looking at everything, and everything appeared brand new.
I kind of felt like a 2-year-old who was seeing everything for the first time.
What was your first real food?
That new Pizza Hut pizza that has pepperoni and cheese in the crust.
You went to Pizza Hut?
All the things in the world you could have eaten, and you eat Pizza Hut.
It goes to a franchise.
Yeah, the past couple of weeks I've been.
I mean, prisons are franchises.
You realize that.
The next day someone took me to Old Original Bookbinders in Philadelphia,
and I had lobster tail.
That's a bit better.
We had cheesesteaks over the weekend down there on South Street,
so that was kind of neat.
Just like old times when we were taking you to prison.
That's right.
For some reason, cheesesteaks remind me of prison.
I don't know why.
Yeah, I'll never eat them again.
There is a possibility I may be reincarcerated.
The federal case, the federal conviction,
was a violation of a county probation.
Right.
I had been on from a 1993 incident
in which I was alleged to have removed batteries from a tone dialer
that was in my possession.
And the law enforcement officials in that case,
which were local law enforcement, just local, rural town,
claimed that the removal of these batteries
constituted a tampering with evidence
in that they believed that there might have been numbers
stored in that touch-tone dialer that they could have used against me.
And since they could no longer do that,
that they were going to charge me with tampering with evidence.
So, I mean, there's a long story
getting into how they realized I had a touch-tone dialer
and why the batteries were removed.
But the bottom line is I ended up pleading no contest to it.
They wanted me to plead guilty,
but because I was not the person who removed the batteries,
I was with two individuals who I refused to implicate.
Well, now, that's a revelation I don't think has been made before.
Ah.
You did not actually remove the batteries in the first place.
Oh.
But it doesn't matter,
because I am not the kind of person who is going to implicate others in anything.
And so I was with two other people,
one of whom Fiber knows and is not particularly fond of,
so this person probably didn't deserve the refusal of me to implicate him,
but I still did that.
Well, this is going to make for some interesting conversation after the show
as we try to figure this one out.
You can imagine who it is.
We're imagining. We're thinking.
But the important thing is where does this leave you?
This leaves me with a date has not yet been sent for this.
My probation has been revoked.
And although the only reason I'm not in jail now
is because this county, Northampton County in Pennsylvania,
was unable to find a sheriff to send down to the federal marshals
on October 13th when I was released to pick me up.
There was a detainer issued to prevent my release from federal custody
so that the sheriff from this county could pick me up
and do what they wanted to do to me.
But they were on it since it was a Friday.
Actually, it was Friday the 13th.
It was Friday the 13th.
You went in on the Ides of March.
I left on Friday the 13th.
It's just one of many bizarre aspects to my case.
I spent all morning.
In the morning, like 6 o'clock in the morning,
I was taken by the federal marshals up to Philadelphia, the federal building,
and put in a holding cell waiting for the sheriff from Northampton County
to pick me up.
And I waited and waited.
And 1 o'clock in the afternoon came along,
and some federal marshal walked to the front of my cell
and said, okay, you can go now.
And for once in my life, I just didn't ask any questions about something.
All I said was, where's the door?
They showed me the door, and I went down the escalator
and stepped out onto the street.
It was a beautiful, sunny day, Friday the 13th,
and there were things I hadn't seen for months and months, like women.
Yeah, they're out there.
It was quite an experience, I'll tell you.
So women and cars and birds singing, and it was like being reborn.
So even though it was seven months, it still seemed like a lifetime.
But a subsequent visit to this county probation officer
led me to believe that it's very likely I will be reincarcerated
in county or state custody.
The Secret Service evidently called this particular county probation officer
and told him what a dangerous person I was.
I have information on things that concern them so much,
such as a few books, like the Anarchist Cookbook,
things like that that explain how to make explosives and things like that.
And I had frequencies that the Secret Service uses in their communications.
Things that are easy to get, things that are legal to possess.
I buy a book at RadioShack called Police Call that has these same frequencies listed in it.
Exactly.
Well, Bernie, we're down to our last minute,
so in that minute can you tell people what they can do to help?
Good question.
I really don't know.
I can tell you that these are not reasonable people that I'm up against,
and it's almost impossible to reason with unreasonable people.
They simply don't want to hear anything, frankly.
So anything that I say or anyone else says in my defense,
it seems to me as if they're just going to disregard it.
So I don't know.
Maybe I have to talk with you in more detail about this offline,
but what I don't want to do is raise their ire.
I feel like I'm on the edge here.
I don't want to raise their ire with them being deluged by people who are incensed by this.
On the other hand, I feel like I could use some support.
Well, let me give out the email addresses.
That way people can write to us, at least, if they have something to contribute.
Right.
And I wish you the best of luck.
We can reach Bernie S, B-E-R-N-I-E-S, at 2600.com,
or you can reach me, Emanuel, at 2600.com.
You can also reach Fiber at 2600.com.
Sure.
Hopefully it will be ISDN by the end of the day.
We'll see about that.
Bernie, we'll probably talk to you again next week.
Great.
And we'll update the folks on your situation then,
but if anyone has any suggestions or ideas or ways of helping, please write to us.
You can also write to us here at the radio station,
WBAI 505 8th Avenue, New York, NY 10018,
and make that attention off the hook.
Final thank you to all those who wrote me and sent me things while I was in the federal prison.
It really made the difference between...
That always does make a difference, and, again, we want to thank people for doing that.
Thanks, Bernie, for checking in, and we'll be back again next week from 8 to 9 p.m.
And you're up next?
Housing Notebook.
Okay, Housing Notebook is up now.
Are you doing Housing Notebook?
I'm engineering it.
Oh, Jim Freund will be here engineering Housing Notebook, so look forward to that.
Go to my webpage, anyway.
Okay, yeah, you'll get his webpage.
We'll be back again next week.
This is WBAI, New York.
Good night.
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Now for Housing Notebook.
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