Tag: miscellaneous

Amtrak’s customer disservice

You can’t make this stuff up. This coming Monday I’m traveling to New York City on business. I’m returning Tuesday. I had planned to take the Acela Express from Westwood.

Well. This afternoon, I received a call from Amtrak telling me that, due to bridge work, I would not be able to return to Westwood on Tuesday; South Station was my only option. No option at all, really, since overnight parking options in that neighborhood are poor. I said I had to think about what I wanted to do, and hung up.

I decided to drive to Providence and pick up the train there, so I called back. After waiting for 15 minutes, I found myself talking with an agent who told me that (1) trains were going no farther north than New Haven on Tuesday; (2) Amtrak was running buses from New Haven to Providence; and (3) all the buses were booked, so in fact I would not be able to get home.

I was incredulous, and kept repeating what I had just been told to make sure I’d heard it properly. I had. I canceled my reservation and pondered my next move.

Finally, I decided to drive to New Haven (two hours and 40 minutes) on Monday morning and take the train for the last stretch to New York. Now that I think of it, though, I’d better call the New Haven train station and make sure it’s got decent overnight parking.

I want to stress what Amtrak did right. They called me, and they didn’t wait until the last possible minute. Both agents I spoke with were exceedingly polite and sympathetic. Nevertheless, it is absolutely ludicrous that I couldn’t catch a bus from New Haven to Providence. Or, for that matter, to Westwood.

I like trains because they don’t fall out of the sky. But this is why Amtrak is in such trouble. It’s a shame.

Pivoting away from a cliché

The cliché of the 2008 campaign is “pivot,” as in: When will Hillary Clinton drop out so that Barack Obama can pivot to the race against John McCain? Of course, Clinton has now pivoted back to her Senate seat, allowing the media to pivot on to the next story.

According to a LexisNexis search of U.S. newspapers and wire services, the word “pivot” appeared 370 times between Jan. 1 and today in stories that also included the words “Obama” or “McCain.” In the same period during 2004, “pivot” popped up only 147 times alongside “Kerry” or “Bush.” Granted, there’s much more interest this time around, and much more pivoting to be done. But that’s still a lot of pivots.

The New York Times strikes me as a particularly egregious offender. In just the past week, Jodi Kantor has asked whether Clinton would “pivot millions of supporters in the direction of Mr. Obama”; Frank Rich has written of Clinton and McCain’s alleged “inability to pivot even briefly from partisan self-interest”; Maureen Dowd has snickered that Obama had “been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now”; and David Brooks has opined that neither Obama nor McCain “is planning a major pivot for the fall.”

A quick search of Google News shows that the Times is hardly alone.

Enough.

Duxbury’s Afghan connection

Here’s something you don’t see every day. The weekly Duxbury Clipper recently sent columnist Bruce Barrett to Afghanistan to cover the opening of a girls school funded by the Duxbury Rotary Club. Barrett did his reporting in the form of a blog, complete with photos, video, a map of the area, even a real-time weather report from the Afghan capital of Kabul.

An excerpt from Barrett’s final dispatch:

Kalashnikovs. In Duxbury, a band of men armed with assault rifles attending the opening of an elementary school would make the national news. But the Zabuli School for Girls isn’t in Duxbury. It’s in Deh Sabz, Afghanistan, a gritty town of 1,000 families on the outskirts of the capital city Kabul. Out here, standing among men armed to the teeth is calming, not frightening. It means that security is strong. Fear comes when standing among men who have turned their attention toward you, and you can’t see their weapons. More unsettling, perhaps, are the moments when you can see their weapons and the barrels are pointed up. That’s when they’re ready for action.

Not only is the series evidence of some terrific enterprise on the part of Barrett and the Clipper, but the online implementation is state-of-the-art.

Springtime on the North Shore

Click on photo for a Flickr slideshow

I took a camera this afternoon to one of my favorite stomping grounds, the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Topsfield. There was a little bit of snow and lots of mud on the ground, as well as many people who’d had enough of winter and couldn’t take it anymore.

No leaves and not an awful lot of wildlife. But it was in the mid-40s, sunny, with no wind, and so it was a perfect day to take a walk. Hope you enjoy the results.

Cast your vote for Media Nation

The Phoenix‘s “Best ’08” survey continues, and I want to mention again that if you’re inclined to give Media Nation the nod, I hope you’ll do so today. Just click here or on the box in the upper-right corner of this blog. Once you do that, you may find it’s a little confusing — I’m listed as “Dan Kennedy” rather than “Media Nation,” and you’ll need to hit “submit” after you’ve selected my name.

Sex and the prosecution thereof

Given former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s reckless behavior, it was probably inevitable that he was going to get caught at some point. But the New York Times today reports that the federal investigation into his assignations with prostitutes was wildly disproportionate. David Johnston and Philip Shenon write:

The scale and intensity of the investigation of Mr. Spitzer, then the governor of New York, seemed on its face to be a departure for the Justice Department, which aggressively investigates allegations of wrongdoing by public officials, but almost never investigates people who pay prostitutes for sex.

You were surprised?

And while I’m at it, where does Charles Carl [Globe correction TK] McGee go to get his reputation back? McGee, a high-ranking Patrick administration official, was arrested in Florida recently and charged with having sex with a 15-year-old boy. Now prosecutors are saying, oh, never mind.