The Pun Also Rises

"Who's The Bus?"

   There are many things that can be said about riding a bus. Most of them are probably not complimentary. But I can honestly say that riding a bus is the best mode of transporation when you don't have a car, can't afford a plane, your destination is too far to walk or bike, there are no tracks for a train or subway, and you aren't near a boat port. Or at least it's one of the best modes of transportation in that case. Horses may be better.

   Years ago, they told people that the bicycle would never replace the horse. Mainly because bicycles don't poop. (at least, well-trained bicycles don't.) But busses do poop, and since they carry so many more people than a standard horse, they have largely replaced horses in our society.

   They have not, however, replaced horses in our idioms. We don't tell young kids "If you had any bus sense, you'd stop bussing around." Nor do we tell pompous relatives "Get off your high bus." Nor do we tell a political candidate, "Hold your busses, you don't want to change busses in midstream." I'd give you more examples straight from the bus's mouth, but I wouldn't want to beat a dead bus.

   Anyway, I've written before about the BRTA (Beats Running To Adams!), but the other week I was taking some less local busses. The bus company on which I rode for many years used to be called Bonanza. For those of you unfamiliar with the word "Bonanza", it's actually pronounced "Dun Dadadun Dadadun Dadadun Dadada Daaaaaaaa! Dun Dadadun Dadadun Dadadun Dundada Dun Dun Dun!" But that would take far too long to write on all the tickets, so they just spell it "Bonanza".

   Anyway, this company called Bonanza recently got eaten up. Claim jumped. They have been enfolded into another bus company called Peter Pan. The change was difficult for me to accept, because it meant switching from gold dust to pixie dust. But I was able to deal with it somehow, perhaps due to my fond memories of pixie dust in pixie stix from my college years.

   So, on a recent trip to Boston, the Bonanza Bus I had taken for years was replaced by a Peter Pan Bus. Bonanza buses were like claims in the old west. They had numbers. Bus 142. Bus 37. Bus Eleventeen. But Peter Pan buses have names instead of numbers. Names like "Tinkerbell" and "Starry Night". Anyway, while taking the bus to Boston that was once Bonanza and is now Peter Pan, our bus broke down. And while sitting trapped in a no-longer-air-conditioned bus on the highway, I looked over at the window to see the name of our bus: "Quacking Hopelessly About."

   Honestly, who names a bus this? It's like naming your bus "Lost Somewhere In Pennsylvania", or naming your airplane "Extremely Susceptible to Gravity", or naming your kid "Ben Dover". It's just bad planning, and while any of these names would be amusing to give to someone else's things, anyone who had grown up enough to run their own company should know better.

   Maybe that's the problem. Peter Pan, after all, was famous for the song, "I Won't Grow Up!" Perhaps Mr. Pan ("Frying", to his friends) does not have the adult business sense to avoid naming his own busses things like "Quacking Hopelessly About" or "Stranded On The Highway On A Hot Day As You Are Delayed For Your Connecting Bus And Also Did We Mention That The Air Conditioning Is Broken".

   Another famous song from Peter Pan is, "You can Fly, You can Fly." After 15 minutes of sitting in our overheating disabled bus, it replayed itself in my head as, "You could have flown, you could have flown." But I hadn't flown. The truth is, flying is not only much more expensive, but requires more ridiculous security measures by the TSA. And worst of all, if a plane breaks down mid-flight, you've got some serious problems. When my bus broke down, I was inconvenienced for a half-hour or so, but then a replacement bus arrived and I was whisked safely to my destination. No falling from the sky.

   So I guess the moral of this story is, don't look a gift bus in the mouth.

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Seth Brown is a local humor writer with no car, so he lets other people drive him crazy. His website is www.RisingPun.com

   All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first.