Maybe He Didn’t Press The Right Button But She Sure Did

Cab drivers’ refusal to accept credit cards has finally gone too far:

There have been a number of reports of cab drivers balking at customers who try to pay with credit cards, but a woman is accusing a cabbie of actually punching her after she tried to charge a ride.

Tamara Perez tells CBS 2 HD she still can’t believe it happened.

The incident happened Tuesday after Perez ran to her East Village home to pick up some papers. Once in the cab, the 35-year-old realized she had no cash the pay the $10 fare. Instead, she pulled out a credit card, but the cabbie wasn’t having it.

“He wouldn’t let me use the card, he wouldn’t press the button,” she tells CBS 2. “I said, ‘You have to press the button,’ and he’s like, ‘No, no I don’t know, I don’t know how to use it.'”

Perez says the driver got out of the cab and told her to go get cash. She refused, said she wanted to use the machine and would tip well.

“I tried to walk past him and he pushed me back into the cab. I got up and told him I was calling my husband who is a professional boxer,” she says. “I started dialing the phone and he said, ‘I give you a punch in the mouth’ and he turned around and he socked me in the mouth.”

RF(U)P!

After initially indicating that the Red Hook Ballfield vendors would get priority with a new formalized RFP process, the city seems to go back on its word:

Despite significant hurdles to overcome, the vendors decided unanimously at a closed-door meeting on Wednesday night to submit a proposal under the city’s new open-bidding process for vending permits at the Red Hook ballfields, which are on Bay Street, between Clinton and Henry streets.

“They decided to stick on, which is good news,” said Cesar Fuentes, who acts as spokesman and advocate for the 13 vendors.

One of the food vendors, Rafael Soler, added: “This is a very important decision. We tried to keep it together because when everyone is together, we’re stronger.”

The decision to dig in culminates months of hand wringing that began after the city decided to put the vending sites, where the food hawkers have been operating for decades, up for open bid.

At the time, the Parks Department said its “request for proposals” would be written to give the existing vendors a leg up. But the RFP unveiled last month would bar the purveyors from setting up folding tables, tarps and grills as they have been doing.

Instead, vendors must get mobile units, licensed by the Health Department, which cost $15,000–$30,000.

“For a corporation, that’s pocket change,” said Fuentes. “But for hardworking people holding down two other jobs, it’s a lot.”

The city says it wants a lively marketplace at the ballfields, but a spokesman recently suggested that the city is less concerned with who actually runs it — the longtime vendors or a new corporation.

Location Scout: Red Hook Ballfields.

Gay-Acting, Straight-Acting, They Hate Them All

Name of group redacted because they’re total douchebags who don’t deserve any more press than they already get:

A fundamentalist group known for its virulent anti-gay stance is planning to picket the upcoming funeral of actor Heath Ledger, who played a gay cowboy in the 2005 film “Brokeback Mountain.”

Members of the [media-whoring Kansas church] said they would protest the funeral at the Frank F. Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan. A date has not yet been set.

In a message posted on the group’s Web log, members promised to bring signs reading “Brokeback in Hell.” The message said Ledger was in hell because of his role in a film that taught the world “it’s OK to be gay.”

. . .

The ADL, which monitors anti-Semitism as well as the activities of hate groups, said the church gained notoriety when followers picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard with signs reading “No Fags in Heaven.”

Since 2005, church members have picketed funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to demonstrate their opposition to America’s tolerance of homosexuality.

Yeah, That’s The Ticket

What they meant to say was, now that they met the productivity goals for 2007 they can stop being such assholes about those stupid little sandwich-board signs:

The city, in an abrupt about-face, is now allowing storeowners to put A-frame signs on the sidewalk again after cracking down this fall on the alleged sidewalk obstruction.

A new memo from the Department of Sanitation instructs enforcement officers not to issue tickets “as long as [the sign] does not impede pedestrian traffic.”

The rules were not as lenient in the fall when shopkeepers on commercial strips in Cobble Hill and Park Slope were penalized en masse with fines up to $300 for putting their signs on the sidewalk.

Back then, the Sanitation Department told The Brooklyn Paper that businesses were on the wrong side of the law if their signs protruded more than three feet from the front of a store.

The department confirmed the existence of the memo, first reported on brownstoner.com, but did not explain why it had adopted the new policy. But the businesses that got ticketed a few months ago were happy to speak up.

“It’s funny that they would send out citations as if it was important and then drop it so suddenly,” said Berlin Reed, who works in Cobblestone Foods on Smith Street.

New Jersey As Sin Tax

First they take our football teams, then they want to gouge us on tolls when we want to go root for the Giants:

This one will make you think twice about heading to New Jersey to shop, gamble, visit friends or sun on your favorite beach.

Do some quick math on New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s proposed toll hikes on Garden State roads, and it gets ugly really fast. By 2022, just 14 years away, football fans could end up paying $27.92 roundtrip to take the New Jersey Turnpike to Exit 16W at Giants Stadium — and that’s not counting the toll on the Goethals Bridge.

Already slammed with recently passed toll increases on the Goethals and Bayonne bridges and the Outerbridge Crossing, Island motorists who regularly travel to New Jersey may find it a much harder pill to swallow if Corzine’s proposal to hike tolls on some of the state’s busiest roads every four years is passed into law.

Corzine announced last week a proposal to increase tolls 50 percent in 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 on the Garden State Parkway, New Jersey Turnpike and Atlantic City Expressway. Those increases, which would also affect a new toll on Route 440, would include inflation adjustments. Tolls would be increased every four years between 2022 and 2085 to reflect inflation.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Bernardo Mendez of New Springville, clad in a New York Giants jacket. Mendez makes regular trips to New Jersey to go bowling, shop and go to Giants games, but will reconsider doing so if the tolls spike as much as proposed. “For people with a lot of money, they don’t care, but for people working very hard just to survive, it’ll make it very hard. It will definitely have an impact on going to New Jersey as often as I used to.”

Other examples of 2022 tolls are even more egregious: A roundtrip on the Garden State Parkway to Point Pleasant Beach and back would be $15.60 and a trip to Atlantic City would be $28.74. Even the short jaunt on the Turnpike to IKEA or the Jersey Gardens mall — a destination for many Island shoppers — would cost $7.38.