Comments on: Leave the driving to us?

Leave the driving to us?

fixedgear — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:09:13 -0800

The rise and fall of the bus plunge story. [via slate] Bus plunge from Wikipedia. Bus Plunge the web site.

By: randomination

randomination — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:13:04 -0800

I am being dogged by journalese. Now I will have to crash out of Metafilter and spend time on my luxury yacht.

By: mr_crash_davis

mr_crash_davis — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:17:16 -0800

Bus plunges are my favorite cliched news item. And they're everywhere.

By: psmealey

psmealey — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:20:47 -0800

Can't believe the great Seattle Aurora Bridge Bus Plunge of 1998 (due to deranged gun toting maniac) wasn't mentioned. That was my only personal brush with bus plunge, my girlfriend lived right around the corner from there at the time.

By: fixedgear

fixedgear — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:23:49 -0800

What struck me when reading it was the simple nuts and bolts of it. My dad set type by hand, so I understand the process pretty well. The author seems to be claiming that the need to fill space with these short (and tragic) stories gave rise to this cliche, but it's going away or gone due to digital technology.

By: The Radish

The Radish — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:25:46 -0800

Just for fun

By: CynicalKnight

CynicalKnight — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:38:16 -0800

Don't brake for animals tonight Got to keep the passengers safe No help can be found in this part of the world Don't brake for animals tonight Don't let the night slow you down Got to get the passengers home The road is empty, your lights are bright Don't let the night slow you down B-b-bus plunge (One more cup of coffee and I'll be alright) The driver says bus plunge (pop a bennie, another bennie) The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge Stay to the right of the line Don't get the passengers scared The curves in the road are not really there Stay to the right of the line B-b-bus plunge (One more cup of coffee and I'll be alright) The driver says bus plunge (pop a bennie, another bennie) The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge Don't brake for animals tonight (Never mind the creatures in the road ahead) The driver says don't brake for animals tonight (Run the stoplight, run the stoplight) The driver says don't brake for animals tonight (Don't think about the lady in the Chevy turning left) The driver says don't brake for animals tonight (Almost home, you're almost home) The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge "Bus Plunge", by The Bobs, 1983

By: AJaffe

AJaffe — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 08:59:17 -0800

Years ago, National Lampoon ran a photo montage of bus-plunge headlines on its True Facts pages.

By: pracowity

pracowity — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:11:29 -0800

Oh! When I used to read the NY Times in print, I would turn first to the obits and then look for the bus plunge (or train wreck or African ferry rollover). I think it was the third page, right column, minor international incidents. A ravine somewhere. Rescuers being hampered. An estimated "death toll." Real people, in Times terms, would have been given a full article, but distant Indians or Ugandans were interchangeable: filler for the filler.

By: phirleh

phirleh — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:19:49 -0800

Bus Plunge - The movie

By: snofoam

snofoam — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:37:38 -0800

it isn't really via slate if it actually is a link to slate. /nitpicking

By: 2sheets

2sheets — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:48:28 -0800

I just want to know how many americans died.

By: mr_crash_davis

mr_crash_davis — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:55:52 -0800

"Bus Plunge - The movie" I thought that would be this movie.

By: webnrrd2k

webnrrd2k — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:08:37 -0800

Here's another one: when the media wants to say someone is a bad guy then they live in a compound. For some reason the good guys never live in a compound. It must be some sort of building code or city ordinance or something...

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:24:33 -0800

I got your bus plunge movie right here!

By: Kirth Gerson

Kirth Gerson — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:28:01 -0800

Hey, A-Z's movie has Odo in it - and J.R.!

By: grahamwell

grahamwell — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:29:41 -0800

Why do I immediately think of Michael Moorcock? Google fails me. I thought he had immortalised the "bus plunge" meme in the Jerry Cornelius chronicles.

By: ubi

ubi — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:34:59 -0800

Killer band name, right there. I'm partial to Brazilian Bus Plunge. Dibs!!

By: QuietDesperation

QuietDesperation — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:48:08 -0800

Can't believe the great Seattle Aurora Bridge Bus Plunge of 1998 (due to deranged gun toting maniac) wasn't mentioned. It's not officially a Bus Plunge story unless it happens in Colombia, India, Pakistan, or a place you've never heard of.

By: etaoin

etaoin — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:00:16 -0800

Missing from this piece is the chart that explains the play based on relative value of the people involved. If there's a bus plunge every other day in, say, Bangladesh, it gets fewer words than rarer one in Albania.

By: Mayor West

Mayor West — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:01:50 -0800

How have I managed to never hear about such a bizarre phenomenon? Oh, right, relying on The Tubes for news instead of papers. Still, this is a very cool meme. And, inexplicably, when I see the words 'bus plunge,' I hear them being pronounced like Al Gore intoning 'lock box' on SNL six years ago.

By: etaoin

etaoin — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:01:53 -0800

Another 45 were wounded This is another thing I've noticed AP doing lately--using "wounded" for "injured" when referring to non-hostile events or accidents.

By: arcticwoman

arcticwoman — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:21:09 -0800

I have never heard of this phenomenon either. What are other wierd journalistic conventions?

By: Gungho

Gungho — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:26:06 -0800

QuietDesperation is only half right. A good bus plunge can involve a church group (preferably a choir), a classroom of "bright" pupils, (for some reason theshort bus never plunges), a high school football team, and my personal favorite a "group of unsuspecting tourists".

By: Kirth Gerson

Kirth Gerson — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:40:31 -0800

The lesson is clear: When riding a bus, make sure all your fellow passengers are suspicious of something. Throw all the unsuspecting tourists off.

By: brundlefly

brundlefly — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:50:09 -0800

I got your bus plunge movie right here! "Engage 'flags-of-all-nations!'" *hundreds of flags pop up from roof of bus* *pause* "IT'S NOT WORKING!!!"

By: Danf

Danf — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:50:52 -0800

I loved the Bobs. This sing was back when they were interesting and I was planning on posting it, Cynical Knight, if you hadn't.

By: Secret Life of Gravy

Secret Life of Gravy — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 11:57:46 -0800

group of unsuspecting tourists". My husband and I looked into that Columbian Bus Plunge Cruise offered by Travelocity a few years back, but we decided to go for the Zambian Swamped Ferry Adventure instead. It was great!

By: BaxterG4

BaxterG4 — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 12:04:12 -0800

I really felt the impactfulness of this.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 12:35:17 -0800

Great post—thanks! Missing from this piece is the chart that explains the play based on relative value of the people involved. Not sure if you're serious; your reference to "the chart" implies that there is such a thing, but I suspect you're just riffing. In any case, the piece does address the issue: Miller quotes foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum's equation: "A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames." By and large, if an American plunged on a bus, the news was always more likely to run as a free-standing story in a U.S. newspaper than as filler. And I loved this bit: Not all bus plunges were judged equal by the foreign desk, according to Siegal. "It was better when buses plunged in countries with short names," he says. "A bus plunge in Peru was infinitely easier to deal with than a bus plunge in Argentina or Paraguay." I miss the old layouts with the K-heds...

By: cenoxo

cenoxo — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 12:56:59 -0800

You'd think amusement parks would have Bus Plunge thrill rides by now. OTOH, The Sweet Hereafter is the saddest film I've ever seen.

By: designbot

designbot — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:22:34 -0800

Let me tell you something. If I was gonna do a kamikaze, you know, off a bridge with a bus full of kids and stuff, a convenience store would not be the site of my last meal. I'd want to eat something on the brink of extinction, you know, like the last emu. Or a meerkat. I bet they'd go down smooth.

By: potsmokinghippieoverlord

potsmokinghippieoverlord — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:54:53 -0800

Two or three times a month, the San Francisco Chronicle used to have an "Elephant(s) on Rampage" story. I haven't seen one in a while (but I also stopped reading the print edition). Maybe a representative from the Elephant Anti-Defamation Herd had words with Phil Bronstein. Now, if those elephants were packed onto a bus careening on a slippery road through the Andes....

By: grouse

grouse — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:56:05 -0800

I love how someone changed the {{unsourced}} message on this Wikipedia article to read "This article or section reads like some guy pulling facts out of his ass."

By: cholly

cholly — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 14:57:43 -0800

I love how someone changed the {{unsourced}} message on this Wikipedia article to read "This article or section reads like some guy pulling facts out of his ass." I was just coming here to say the same thing. Classic.

By: zek

zek — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:52:49 -0800

Yeah -- I looked at the source to see if there was an actual {fact-ass} template.

By: spazzm

spazzm — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:29:27 -0800

Two or three times a month, the San Francisco Chronicle used to have an "Elephant(s) on Rampage" story. I was having a few beers with a bunch of Indians a while ago (well, I was having most of the beers), and I wanted to get to the bottom of the 'rampaging elephant(s)' story. Turns out it's incredibly rare, but mass media gives the impression they happen all the time. Like school shootings in the US, I guess.

By: mistermoore

mistermoore — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:38:16 -0800

"What are other wierd journalistic conventions?" Rather than "not guilty," we write "innocent," 'cause it's possible for the not to be accidentally dropped, leading to a lot of legal trouble.

By: mistermoore

mistermoore — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:39:41 -0800

Oh, and lending any credibility whatsoever to the existence of a "liberal bias" in the media. That's a weird journalistic convention.

By: planetkyoto

planetkyoto — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:32:24 -0800

In my college newsroom it was carnival accidents. We couldn't wait for 1-column news of carnival accidents -- the wrenching of limbs, the exquisite maiming. We didn't use any outside news as filler material, we just liked carnival accidents.

By: moss

moss — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 17:55:28 -0800

Yeah -- I looked at the source to see if there was an actual {fact-ass} template. I can see the talk page now: "I've deleted several paragraphs that read like some guy pulling facts out of his ass, as a blatant violation of WP:ASSFACTS"

By: donpedro

donpedro — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:47:12 -0800

Thank you for this!

By: dhartung

dhartung — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:20:44 -0800

I love how someone changed the {{unsourced}} message on this Wikipedia article to read "This article or section reads like some guy pulling facts out of his ass." Some dour Wikipedian with a poker up his ass has changed it back, I see. I loved the same bit languagehat did (of course) -- there isn't any particular bias based on skin color or perceived level of civilization. It's just shorter country names. I'd love to test that with a sample of a year's worth of wire stories and a year of the print Times. See if Fiji, Togo, Niue, and Chad all got bus plunge coverage above their population. Or aggregate highway mileage. Or elevation. As it happens, I was just reading about Yungas Road in ~~Peru~~ Bolivia, which has been called the World's Most Dangerous Road. Seems it's the perfect highway design for a year's worth of bus plunge stories, year after year -- an intermittently paved track, barely a lane wide, hundreds of feet above a river, with the road itself subject to unpredictable rainy-season washouts. Apparently the BBC likes a good bus plunge story itself: Further down the road we passed a spot where a set of fresh tyre tracks headed out into the void. They told their own story. Somehow, he only uses the verb plunge once.

By: grouse

grouse — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 06:25:49 -0800

I can see the talk page now: "I've deleted several paragraphs that read like some guy pulling facts out of his ass, as a blatant violation of WP:ASSFACTS" Creating such a page is sooooooo tempting. Even if in userspace.

By: tehloki

tehloki — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 23:38:35 -0800

Seems it's the perfect highway design for a year's worth of bus plunge stories.. Wait, so are so saying if you build it, they will plunge?

By: fixedgear

fixedgear — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:31:36 -0800

Bus Plunge, the follow-up.

By: grouse

grouse — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:48:27 -0800

Great K-hed from the follow-up:

No Blood in Ants Ants have no blood.

By: grabbingsand

grabbingsand — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:15:39 -0800

A new bus plunge.

By: Danf

Danf — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 11:40:07 -0800

You beat me, grabbingsand!

By: fixedgear

fixedgear — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:48:58 -0800

I dunno if that one counts, being in the US of A and all....

By: dhartung

dhartung — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 06:11:28 -0800

Nope, the NYT hed is Bus Plunges, Killing 3 Alabama Students: A school bus plunged nearly 40 feet off a highway overpass in Huntsville, Ala., on Monday and crashed nose-first into the ground, killing three students and sending 11 others to the intensive care unit, officials said. No doubt the editors were well aware of the Slate series. It doesn't fit hte "one paragraph" rule, but then it is in the USA, which per the original definition merits an exception. The article also fails to note the distance from Montgomery, and to use the word "ravine" or "gorge". (It appears to have been an overpass raised above level ground.)