ABC Wednesday Archives - Page 33 of 91

U is for Uber-less Albany

Uber, and Lyft, can operate in New York City, but in upstate New York cities such as Albany, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, insurance laws make it difficult to get coverage for drivers.

An article in March 2016 appeared in the local business journal: Schenectady sauce maker, frustrated with ‘apologizing’ for Albany’s cabs, calls for Uber upstate.

“Adine Viscusi [co-owner of Casa Visco] easily takes planes, trains and Ubers to get from the airport to hotels and bodegas when she attends national trade shows. In Albany, she can barely catch a cab… Viscusi said she doesn’t normally take cabs in Albany, but a recent trip from the Amtrak station in Rensselaer has made her a vocal critic.

“‘The cab was a 25-year-old minivan with ripped seats. There was a pack of Newports and Axe in the console. The door on one side didn’t open,’ Viscusi said. ‘It was so embarrassing. To travel so seamlessly from planes, trains, Uber, and rental car. You get to Albany and it’s grinding to a halt. It’s like welcome to the 80s.'”

Another article in the same periodical: “‘It’s so embarrassing to have important people come here and have them get into a beaten-up taxi cab,'” CommerceHub CEO Frank Poore said.

“‘Not all taxi cabs are bad, but many times I have had people show up with drivers who are smoking, or who have to wait for a cab for 30 minutes, or are picking up other people along the ride.'”

Reportedly, Uber, and Lyft, can operate in New York City, but in upstate New York cities such as Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, insurance laws make it difficult to get coverage for drivers.

“Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last year that ride-sharing companies should be regulated with a ‘statewide license.’ Legislation has yet to make it to his desk and… there’s been little to no visible progress on the issue this year.” Still, it’s believed that Legalizing Uber would save upstate lives by getting drunk drivers off the road.

There is such a pent-up demand for these services that, when blogger Chuck Miller wrote an April 1 story about Uber reaching an agreement to come to Albany, it was believed by more than a few.

While I don’t have a real need for Uber myself – I don’t have the app – I do have feelings about Albany cabs. I HATE them, for the reasons the businesspeople stated. In fact, I haven’t ridden an Albany cab in well over a decade and was surprised to discover the conditions are no better than they were last century.

I missed a wedding within Albany in 1986; I called 1.5 hours before the event, and an hour later, the cab still had not arrived. We walked – it was 87F – and got there on time for the recessional.

Of course, not everyone loves ride-sharing services. Blogger Dustbury notes the pushback by a taxicab association. And for good reason: Uber and Lyft have devastated L.A.’s taxi industry as trips plummet. “Since the ride-hailing services began operating in Southern California three years ago, the number of L.A. taxi trips arranged in advance has fallen by 42%, according to city data, and the total number of trips has plummeted by nearly a third.”

And Uber has its issues. From the Boston Globe:

“On April 21, [2016] the ride-hailing company agreed to pay up to $100 million to drivers in Massachusetts and California who’d sued over being classified as independent contractors. The settlement didn’t resolve the underlying issue, but it did include another provision that could significantly alter the experience of Uber drivers and passengers alike: The company stopped telling passengers that a tip is included with its fees.

“Instead, it’s now telling them that no tip is included or required. In practice, this means that some drivers may post signs seeking tips — but Uber is declining to build a tipping function into its app.” Uber says tipping is unfair because riders are biased.

Austin, TX no longer has Uber.

And Tucson Weekly reports, Say Goodbye to Creepy Uber Drivers, Ladies.

Chariot, the ride-sharing service, set to go live on April 19, is “driven by women, exclusively for women,” according to the app’s website. “It operates similarly to Uber or Lyft, but only women, girls and boys under 13 can request a Chariot, and all drivers are, unsurprisingly, women… This is meant to make us ride-sharing ladies feel less at risk of being violated by male Uber or Lyft drivers. Nice.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

T is for Traveling Wilburys

The two Traveling Wilburys albums were out of print for about a decade.

Everything about the creation of the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, I love. From the website comes a story I already knew.

George Harrison was asked by the folks at Warner Brothers Records to put together a non-album B-side for a single from the ex-Beatles’ album Cloud Nine.

Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison had shared dinner, then went to Bob Dylan’s home studio in Malibu, California. George had left a guitar at Tom Petty’s house, and when he went to retrieve it, he invited Petty to join in the fun.

Harrison played the resulting track, Handle with Care, to the WB brass, who thought the song was too good to bury on the flip side of George’s single. Maybe it could become part of an album?

The five frontmen took on the persona of the Traveling Wilburys from this: “Referring to recording errors created by some faulty equipment, Harrison jokingly remarked to Lynne, ‘We’ll bury ’em in the mix’ Thereafter, they used the term for any small error in performance… Harrison suggested ‘The Trembling Wilburys’ as the group’s name; instead, Lynne suggested ‘Traveling’, with which the group agreed.”

The album was very well received and won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group in 1989. Unfortunately, “Roy Orbison died of a heart attack on December 6, 1988… Despite Orbison’s death, the remaining group members recorded a second and final studio album, which they intentionally misnumbered Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3. It was released on October 30, 1990, and met with less success than the previous one.”

I had thought Volume 3 was a function of all the collaborations among them, but it was an acknowledgment of bootlegs of the original sessions featuring songs not on that first album.

The group talked about touring, but it never happened. I had heard rumors of Del Shannon replacing Orbison, but he died on February 8, 1990.

The two albums were out of print for about a decade, until they were re-released, with added tracks, in 2007, including Nobody’s Child, the title track for a benefit album. “The project was organized by Olivia Harrison, who created the Romanian Angel Appeal Foundation with the other wives of The Beatles (Barbara Bach, Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney) in April 1990.”

The singles

1988 “Handle with Care” (US 45, AUS 3, NZ 4, UK 21)
1989 “End of the Line” (US 63, AUS 12, NZ 11, UK 52)
1990 “Nobody’s Child” (NZ 9, UK 44)
1990 “She’s My Baby” (AUS 45, CAN 30, UK 79)
1991 “Wilbury Twist” (CAN 86)

You can find Nobody’s Child HERE. The remaining songs above, plus Inside Out, you can listen to HERE, and Margarita HERE.

For good measure, I Call Your Name – Ringo Starr, backed by Harrison, Lynne, Petty, and Traveling Wilburys drummer Jim Keltner on cowbell.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

S is for Pete Seeger

Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger talk about the origins of the Cherokee written language.

I was, and am, a big fan of the late folk singer Pete Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014). I wrote about him on his 90th birthday in 2009 HERE, though I am surprised that I didn’t mention the fact that I had the opportunity to actually talk with Pete at the Springboks demonstration.

My affection for the We Shall Overcome album I have documented.

I remember watching him singing Waist Deep in the Big Muddy on The Smothers Brothers Show after it had previously been yanked by CBS.

The documentary Wasn’t That A Time, about the reunion of the Weavers- Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, and Lee Hays – came out in 1982. I saw it at least a decade later. You should watch it.

Still, I keep learning things about the singer. Earlier this year, I wrote about the song Black and White, popularized by Three Dog Night but performed a decade and a half earlier by Seeger.

Then there was this: Rainbow Quest (1965–66) was a U.S. television series devoted to folk music. It was on public television, but not in any market I was in. There were 39 episodes. Here’s a description of the last one:

“Way back in the halcyon days of black and white TV, Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger talk about the origins of the Cherokee written language, and sing a Peter La Farge song of the Seneca trust broken in treaties with the U.S. government.” June Carter also appeared on that episode.

You can watch a sample of it HERE.

“Starting in the early 1980s 38 of the shows were made available on VHS, Betamax, and 3/4″ (U-Matic) tapes… The 39th show, featuring Johnny Cash and June Carter, was withheld at the request of Pete Seeger because Johnny Cash was heavily on drugs during his appearance. However, in the late ’90s, this show was released to the public.”

Here are some other episodes, along with the last episode in full.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

R is for Red

Modern surveys show red is the color most commonly associated with heat, activity, passion, sexuality, anger, love and joy.

Red, as Wikipedia notes, is “the color at the end of the spectrum of visible light next to orange and opposite violet.”

It’s also both one of the “additive primary colors of visible light, along with green and blue”… AND “one of the subtractive primary colors, along with yellow and blue, of the.. traditional color wheel used by painters and artists.

“Since red is the color of blood, it has historically been associated with sacrifice, danger, and courage.

“Modern surveys in the United States and Europe show red is also the color most commonly associated with heat, activity, passion, sexuality, anger, love, and joy.

“In China and many other Asian countries, it is the color of happiness.”

Of course, most STOP lights and stop signs are red. This means that RED is a contradiction. Action and stopping. Anger and joy.

I thought I’d list some RED songs. The links to the titles are descriptions of the songs; the links to the artists are the recordings. The chart action refers to the Billboard (US) pop charts.

Red and Blue
Dave Clark Five (#89 in 1967)

Red Red Wine
Neil Diamond (#62 in 1968)
UB40 (#34 in 1984, #1 in 1988)

Red Roses for a Blue Lady
Vic Dana (#10 in 1965)
Dean Martin

Red Rubber Ball
Cyrkle (#2 in 1966)
Seekers

Red Sails in the Sunset
Bing Crosby (1935)
Nat King Cole (#24 in 1951)
Tab Hunter (#57 in 1957)
Platters (#36 in 1960)
Fats Domino (#35 – and #24 soul – in 1963)

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

Q is for queue

The difficulties at my polling place were replicated all over the city.

The word queue has several meanings. The first I learned is “a braid of hair worn hanging down behind,” which I swear I learned in an episode of the TV western Bonanza, when someone cut off the queue of a Chinese man, bringing the victim dishonor. When I was growing up, my great aunt Deana and I used the word frequently when we played the board game SCRABBLE.

But the meaning I think of usually is “a file or line, especially of people waiting their turn.” Specifically, I think that line that feeds to several cashiers at the drug store, or clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or tellers at a banker. Though it doesn’t seem to be in the definition, I’ve always distinguished it from “line”, such as what one finds at the grocery store, where I’m always in the longest one.

Generally, I prefer the queue to the line. But when the queue breaks down, I remember.

One time was in 1999 when my new bride and I were flying back from our honeymoon in Barbados (thanks, JEOPARDY!), we stopped at New York City’s JFK airport to go through customs. The queue somehow got turned into a figure eight, and we spent an inordinately long time stuck on the bottom part of the number, even as others passed us.

Another time was in 2011, at Niagara Falls when the elevators broke down while we were at the base of a boating area. Some staff tried to create a queue, but it failed miserably.

Since I’m kvetching, the worst voting line I ever experienced was on February 9 of this year. It was a revote of a proposition to renovate Albany High School, which was rejected by a few hundred votes in November. The $179.9 million request in February trimmed over $10 million from the original budget.

I got to the school, where there were three lines, one, I was told by someone in line, to check in, and two to get the ballots. This didn’t make any sense and was incorrect.

In fact, as one of the guys involved with the school district eventually explained, one line was A-G, another H-R, and a third, S-Z. Or something like that, since he said two different lines contained H. In any case, I was in the WRONG line, and had to switch to the end of another.

Halfway through this second line, they run out of ballots. So one of the workers, who worked in the school as a secretary in that school, made copies of a blank ballot. Unfortunately, the copied ballots wouldn’t run through the scanning machine, so the workers had to reconfigure the machine to take the paper ballots to be counted later.

As I was leaving, people became even testier in the queue. The guy who had made an announcement 20 minutes early got all indignant, yelling at the crowd, “I TOLD you what line to be in!” Except that about half of them would not have HEARD the announcement, since they arrived afterward. He managed to take a bad situation and make it worse.

I spent 40 minutes in the process, which should have taken less than a quarter of that. The problem of the lines would have been EASILY remedied if someone had made SIGNS indicating which queue to be in.

The difficulties at my polling place were replicated all over the city, leading to petitions to State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia to throw out the results, when the referendum passed by 189 votes. However, she upheld the February vote to rebuild and renovate Albany High School, denying claims that the vote should be invalidated.

“I cannot conclude that petitioners have established that the fundamental fairness of the … bond vote was compromised and I find no basis upon which to overturn the results of the vote,” the commissioner wrote.

Now, this wasn’t nearly as bad as the fiasco that was the 2016 Arizona primary election, which involved people standing in line FIVE HOURS to exercise their franchise.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18