Temporal dissonance on the bus

While this isn't a transportation-specific thing, I came across some very cool photos today and one was transit-themed. Flora Borsi takes old photos from the days before digital cameras and smartphones and cleverly puts herself in the photos using these devices. One of the photos is on a bus.

 The rest of the series is worth checking out.

(via kottke.org)

More transit pasts

In an earlier post, I talked about Pope Francis' use of transit - both in Argentina during his pre-Pope days and in Rome more recently.

Yesterday Nicolas Maduro was declared the winner of Venezuela's presidential election. It turns out he's a former bus driver who likes to use transit metaphors in his campaign speeches:

"We're all going in the bus of the fatherland, which has a driver," Maduro said upon launching his election campaign from the late president's childhood home. "Here he is, Chavez's driver!"

The transit-related pasts of social and political leaders continue to be noteworthy and an effective way to bolster images of their connections to the masses.


(via Reuters, Transportation Nation)

White like me

In the late 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin disguised himself as a black man and traveled through the still segregated South. He chronicled his experiences in his book Black Like Me:

His indoctrination into black life began at a New Orleans bus station. When he politely asked a white clerk for bus times, "she answered rudely and glared at me with such loathing I knew I was receiving what the Negroes call 'the hate stare,'" he wrote. "This was so exaggeratedly hateful I would have been amused if I had not been so surprised." 

In another instance a white bus driver prevented the blacks on the bus, including Griffin, from getting off the bus during a rest stop in Mississippi. Griffin and the others waited in discomfort for the trip to resume.

Eddie Murphy goes undercover as a white man in a 1984 Saturday Night Live sketch that's a satirical take on Griffin's book: "I studied for my role very carefully. I watched lots of 'Dynasty'. . . .And I read a whole bunch of Hallmark cards."

When he ventures out into the world, he finds that strange and unexpected things happen on buses - things that give the term "choice riders" new meaning. (Bus scene starts at 2:35)

(thx Nick K!) (via NBC)

The people's Popemobile

There's been a lot of coverage in recent days about the new pope, and I've seen mention several places of the fact that Pope Francis took the bus to work with the Argentinean masses instead of using a chauffeur. This reminded me of a favorite quote by Lisa Simpson, animated observer of the world:

Ah! The ol' Number 22. Clean, reliable public transportation, the chariot of the people, the ride of choice for the poor and the very poor alike. . . .

Apparently, Pope Francis also took a minivan to the Sistine Chapel the other day with the cardinals rather than the private Popemobile.

The LA Times did a roundup of Popemobiles over the years. It's a mix of open vehicles and ones fortified with bullet-proof glass. I'm digging the Mercedes-Benz Popemobile.

(via NBC News, The Telegraph, LA Times)

Will Ferrell on the bus

Will Ferrell has made a series of goofy ads for Old Milwaukee. This especially odd one ran during the Superbowl this year, but reportedly only aired in really random places in Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.

It left me kind of speechless. (That moustache!) I'll reiterate what I said earlier about the Starburst Korean bagpiper-zombie commercial: some things are only plausible on buses. Believe it or not, something like this transpiring on a bus would probably be completely ignored.

(via Yahoo! Sports)

Buses and Margaret Thatcher

As someone very interested in the stigmas around public transit, I was delighted a number of years ago to come across this quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

It turns out that the back story about this utterance is not as straightforward as it seems. David McKie from the Guardian did some digging around to get to the bottom of things:

I have quite often read that Margaret Thatcher declared that any man seen riding on a bus after the age of 30 should consider himself a failure. That most of those who have quoted this merciless sentiment have done so without checking their source is clear from the number of variants, with the qualifying age for establishing that you're one of life's losers being variously quoted as 30, 29 or even 26. Having spent much of a day trying to discover where and when she said it, I began to suspect that it might be apocryphal too.

He points out that other famous quotes have similarly questionable origins and they're difficult to validate once they're embedded in the cultural lore. The Thatcher bus quote even has its own section in Wikiquotes.

(via The Guardian)

A Scottish-Korean bagpiper and a white-collar zombie meet on a bus....

This Starburst commercial makes me laugh every time I watch it. I tried to use it in a research presentation, but it didn't go over so well. I blame that mostly on the fact that I couldn't run the video and so I had to explain the bagpiper-zombie exchange through still photos. I'll be honest, it's not the easiest thing to narrate and starting off with "a Scottish-Korean bagpiper* and a white-collar zombie meet on a bus" is a risky venture.

However, I think it was also partly that the audience wasn't all that receptive to the assertion (as light and comical as I tried to make it) that only on a bus would a slightly naive and good-natured Scottish-Korean bagpiper meet and be forced to have an ongoing exchange with a snarky, cynical zombie. Oh, you transportation planners, I wanted to show you via a weird candy ad that buses are unique mobile public spaces, but all I heard were chirping crickets. Well, at least now I know what it's like to be a comic bombing on stage. 

In any case, I think Zach Woods (Gabe from The Office and Erin's ex-main squeeze) is the zombie here, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. For some reason, I especially love his sarcastic "uh, everything's a contest, SIR" comment, even more than "you are boring me back to death."

* The Scottish-Korean bagpiper explains his ethnic identity in another commercial - though I never thought this was a good example of a contradiction of the solid-yet-juicy variety.

All aboard!

Thanks for stopping by! I'm starting this blog to share all the interesting transportation tidbits I come across that I don't see on other transportation blogs. I especially love transportation things that reference popular culture, examine social life and norms, and document transportation worlds through photography, art, film, and audio. I'm also planning to talk about (and decipher, if necessary) more academic work that considers transportation in a variety of non-transportation planning ways - by drawing from the emerging and interdisciplinary field of mobilities as well as cultural studies, visual studies, and literature.

I hope this becomes a fun and engaging hodgepodge of transportation-related items.  I would love if this collection helps planners think in alternative and innovative ways about measuring, understanding, and engaging transportation worlds, and helps non-planners appreciate the complexities of this aspect of everyday life. There's just more to transportation than discrete choice modeling and asphalt versus concrete debates. A lot more.
  
To kick off this blog, here's a photo I absolutely love that brings together my last name, a pugsley, and public transit. (You will see in the links to the right that I'm mildly obsessed with anything involving animals and transportation.)

Thanks again for coming along on the ride!

(via I Can Has Cheezburger)