A much better method is used on BC transit buses in Vancouver (and probably other systems elsewhere)--local poets' work is printed on ceiling-level "ads" that people can read while riding on the bus.

That's it. Not so hard, really.

Amen to that. I have commuted on an early morning bus, and you could watch each person get on, drop off to sleep, and then wake up right before their stop. If someone wanted to come on and declaim their poetry at that time of the morning, you would have found them in a bloody heap at the next bus stop.

Patrick and Teresa, Annals of Truly Bad Ideas is too important a title to use only on this topic. I would suggest that it would make a fine running feature, much like Open Threads. I am sure there are enough Truly Bad Ideas to keep it going.

Maybe it's a Northwest thing. Which is to say, the poetry on Seattle buses is also restricted to the ad panels. Some of it is pretty good, too. But sometimes it's way more important to watch the weather over Lake Washington, or keep lookout for turtles and herons.

Don't hold back, Patrick. Tell us what you really think.

What's so new about crazy people ranting on buses?

Wow, I knit on public transit because it makes the whole experience of having to get up at 5am a little more bearable. Public transit poets would break my concentration and that would make me grumpy at that hour, to say the least. Minneapolis needs to get a grip.

I'm a daily public transit commuter - if someone started this on BART, I'd consider driving my car again. I'm already dismayed at the signature-collectors and canvassers who have realized that a captive audience is likely to give them what they want just to make them go away...

To me, buses and trains are a sort of "quiet space", like libraries. A certain aural privacy should be respected.

I feel much the same annoyance at folks who insist I listen to television in public places. Hate hate hate that. Just because half the population can't deal with not having a TV going 24/7, the rest of us have to listen, too.

EXCUSE ME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

I AM SORRY TO INTERRUPT YOUR DAY

MY NAME IS JOSH, AND I HAVE BEEN AN UNPAID POET FOR NINE MONTHS

I DO NOT TAKE DRUGS, OR SELF PUBLISH

I HAVE THREE SMALL ANTHOLOGIES TO SUPPORT

ANY DONATIONS NO MATTER HOW SMALL WILL BE GREATLY APPRECIATED AND MAY EE CUMMINGS BLESS YOU ALL

What a horrible idea.

I recommend that all Minneapolitans do a little contingency planning. Find some embarrassingly bad poetry,* print it out, and keep it on your person at all times. When the Serious Poets start reciting on your bus, whip the piece of paper out, unfold it and start reading it aloud, stressing syllables at random.

* anything from this website should do nicely.

Patrick, I'm with you. I rarely ride the bus these days, but when I do -- and there were years when I did, daily -- I protect my physical space and that of my intellect and soul fiercely. I loved it when the Muni in San Francisco stuck cards with poetry up in the buses, and I looked forward to reading new poems each morning. But if you force me to listen to poetry, even good poetry, or just make it difficult for me to get away on those mornings when I have not yet had my coffee, I will become exceedingly cranky. Irate, even. Not a good thing.

I don't like poetry readings, either.

No uninvited poetry on the public bus system! Aux armes, citoyen! To the barricades!

Makes me glad I stayed home and wrote instead of venturing forth. I might have been forced to whack a poet with my White Cane of Smiting. I have a hard enough time hearing the driver call stops without someone yelling incomprehensible verse in my ears.

I wouldn't mind if the poets drowned out the cell phone conversations.

I seem to recall hearing about readings on the trains in Boston. But it was the commuter rail, so people could go to another car if they weren't interested. I think one of the south shore community colleges offered a class that met on a commuter rail train, with the professor lecturing in the aisle. Again, you could choose another car, so it wasn't a captive audience.

Perhaps Mipple-Stipple fandom could provide a gang of anti-poets who, upon the detection of one of these posturing fools, would stealthily board the bus, isolate him from the innocent, and then sieze him in the literary embrace of a mass declamation of The Tay Bridge Disaster, as they hustle him off the bus to his inevitable doom.

And if you do that, please put the video on YourTube.

I think we've had this in NYC for years.

Abi, which? Poets paid by the transit system to interrupt your sleep/thought/daydream/eavesdrop/elaborate plan to take over the world (choose one) or Dave Bell's antidote?

A potential quick cure, for those who are brash enough to do it: wait until the poet gets to the end, and then CRITICIZE. Do it fairly -- discuss the things you liked as well as those you didn't -- but if it's truly awful, don't spare them out of pity. Those who want a captive audience may have a different reaction when they themselves become the captives!

The Society to Make Sure Nobody Ever Gets on Another Fucking Bus Ever Again?

There's a group in the Cities -- the Rich Suburban Turds for What They Pretend is Tax Reform -- who would throw lots of money at that organization, at least as much as they pay our beloved For Sale Cheap governor to cut library funding and sign imbecilic videogame bills.

The capo of this gang announced, two days into the transit strike a couple of years ago, that since the city hadn't stopped cold (because people had taken days off and arranged carpools in anticipation) public transit was utterly unnecessary. This achieved the impossible: labor and management joined forces to call him an butthole. (Is that nicer than, you know, the other word? Because I'm sure not trying to be nice.)

And poetry on transit (and in other public places) is quite widespread; we've had it here, and I've seen it in other cities, including the London Underground (where I believe it was sponsored by London Transport, though I may misremember -- LT has a long history of giving people cool things to look at, including their posters).

The Toronto Transit System has also posted poetry on busses and subways for some time. Much of it is, I fear, of minor interest other than for local connections (Isabel Valency Crawford, anyone?) and much of the rest that is contemporary is, ah, minor. THey had the perhaps ill-advised idea of putting up one of Shakespeare's Sonnets (I think, "Shall I compare thee") in the series at one time, which had the effect of pointing up the gulf in diction and control between that one piece and the other scattered all over the system.

The idea of keeping some Julia Moore on hand as a defence against live poetry has an appealing feel to it...

Only if they promise to read Kubla Khan or the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. In costume. With props. And sound effects.

In a theater.

Far from the bus.

This is one of the things I love about DC. We may be an uptight, ulcer-feeding city with no nightlife, but if you tried that crap on the Metro, MetroPol would shut you up but good.

I'm personally a big fan of spoken-word poetry, but bus-time is hush-time. I don't want to hear the annoying tourists whining about how they should be allowed to eat on the train; why would I want to listen to an amateur slam poet whining about how much he suffers for his art?

It could be worse, frex mimes, accompanied by accordionists.

Also, I can't imagine any jury finding any fault with an angry mob forcibily de-busing a rush-hour poet.

Yeah, it's not just a Northwest/Canadian thing... they had poetry snippets posted on the ceiling billboards on the Paris Metro when I was there a month ago. It was an enjoyable distraction, trying to use high school French to decipher cryptic bits of verse between stops. I thought it was kind of nice.

... the boring, preachy, rhyming epitaphs they had posted all over the Catacombs, though, not so much. Ugh, shut up! The bones speak very well all by themselves.

"A lot of people just don't understand how literary this city is"

Says it all really.

... the boring, preachy, rhyming epitaphs they had posted all over the Catacombs

Le petit rhume
C'est dure et fort;
La toux, le goutte,
Alors, le mort.
Birmanie-Raser

In Amherst MA we have physics problems on our buses. No audio, fortunately.

I dunno, this could be a guerrilla marketing campaign by Apple to sell more iPods to transit riders.

If you don't like it, there's always showtunes.

You think ranting poets are bad...? Here is a Truly Bad Idea whioh is a day-to-day for millions of people.

In Hong Kong, commuters are trapped by the bus companies and the KCR (Kowloon Canton Railway) who have screens playing info-adver-tainment.

The television screens run set programs in several places on the buses without any possibility of control by the commuters. After some complaints, the downstairs sections are now silent (but the screens still go).

I used to love sitting on the upper deck of a bus and looking out. I still do, but now I have to try and position myself carefully to filter out most of the TV screen.

On the KCR, the screens go in all the cars of the train (including first class) except one, the designated "Quiet Car".

Even some of the minibuses run them.

There is a group trying to stop this practioe, called Hush The Bus but so far they have not met with much success.

And the earplugs I keep on my keychain find yet another use...how would a poet react to an entire bus conspicuously donning earplugs, Walkmen/ipods, etc. when he starts to recite?

From the original story:

Some riders gazed intently at her and applauded when she finished...

I'll bet.

This is why the Quiet Car was invented. However, I have only found the Quiet Car on commuter rails, not metro trains. Nor buses, for that matter.

Lee, your suggestion is brilliant. Bravo.

Of course it IS Minneapolis. Why not board the bus with replicas of Crow and Tom Servo and provide your own commentary?

hk-reader - Many of the newer U-Bahn cars in Berlin have info-tainment screens too, but no audio. I suspect that the otherwise good-natured Berliners would have ripped the speakers out with Teutonic efficiency.

More Northwest love: Portland also has the ceiling adboards with poetry on their buses. What's more, it's actually good, interesting poetry. I've seen snippets from John Ashberry and Ted Kooser, among others.

Le petit rhume
C'est dure et fort;
La toux, le goutte,
Alors, le mort.
-- Birmanie-Raser

AuugGGhhGHh.

The LA MTA had posters (and bookmarks) one year with poetry. This year it's posters with artwork celebrating places you can (theoretically) get to on the bus. Some of the art is even decent.

I can live without the guys who sing, out of tune, in the subway stations and (sometimes) on the trains. (I also can live without the information-TV screens they're starting to install. The station acoustics are bad enough already.)

Reporting in from another city with poems, rather than poets, on local buses. What do they call the program? "Poetry in Motion," of course. There was a lovely couplet in French on the bus I took home from work yesterday.

Speaking of unwanted entertainment in Minneapolis: we drove down there with our children for the Easter long weekend. When we stopped to fill the tank on the way out of town, a television screen on the gas pump -- precisely eye level with my five year old son in the backseat -- blipped on with gory details of the most recent bombing in Iraq.

Thanks a LOT, Citgo. Like we're not subjected to enough random TV.

I'd be interested to know if there were any fatalities during this dopey program. Road Rage Revisited: having to listen to poetry not of my choosing while dealing with someone else's elbow in my ribs and attempting to read something I actually want to read.

I also hate the screens that seem everywhere. I like TV, but I want to be able to choose when and what I watch. I have cultivated the ability to read while on the eliptical at the gym, just so that I don't have to watch ESPN, CNN, or the Soap Opera Channel while exercising; the fact that I'm at the gym is difficult enough.

Madeleine - My gym has far too many TVs in the cardio area and I find that I need to avoid the right hand side of the room because that's where they have Faux News running. Unfortunately, I can't read because I start with the stairmill, which just plum tuckers me out too much to read while on board.

The most annoying TV placement I've yet seen was in an elevator in a Manhattan office building. Thankfully, I was only going to 6, otherwise I'd have been tempted to commit vandalism. (One of my NYC colleagues told me that someone routinely slaps a post-it reading "TV Kills" over the offending display.)

I rode a couple of buses this morning. Fortunately for the poets, they weren't there.

I have no objection to, in fact I approve of, poetry on signs (typically where they would put ads if they managed to sell them). I can choose to read them or ignore them.

But if you insist on inflicting poetry on me, you take your chances.

Westjet (small Canadian airline, rather like Alaska) had a Poet of the Skies for a while.
She composed poetry to order on request. Apparently it was well received. Although I was flying via Westjet fairly often at the time, I never encountered her myself.
-Barbara

OK... I must have my pedant moment. The poem is said to be:

Le petit rhume
C'est dure et fort;
La toux, le goutte,
Alors, le mort.

But shouldn't it be?

Le petit rhume
C'est dur et fort;
La toux, la goutte,
Alors, la mort.

Otheerwise it doesn't make much sense. On the other hand, we are talking about poetry

Melbourne too had poetry placards on trams and trains. They did no real harm, and some weren't all that bad.

Long ago we used to have a collective of street poets who would hand out mimeographed poetry on street corners. I still occasionally wake up screaming, having remembered the first stanza or the first Street Poem I ever read:

"There's insanity in my brain
Driving me insane.
All those voices in my head
They start talking when I go to bed."

My pet hate (talkin' 'bout TVs in places I don't want a TV) is the television in the hospital waiting room. When I arrive in the room, I usually ask if anyone would mind if I turn the TV off. If no one minds, I do it. People say "Thank you." I have done this, oh, 20 times. No one has ever minded. The only place I don't do it is in the ER waiting room, because much as I loathe the tube, it does cut the boredom when you have been waiting as long as people sometimes wait in an ER waiting room.

How about having someone start reciting ancient Roman poetry in the original language at one end of the bus? And Greek poetry at the other end of the bus?

Lizzy L,

That was in '84, right? One of those poems hit me so hard I copied it into a notebook. I think I still have it, somewhere.

(The demise of most of my mid-eighties notebooks is too sad and stupid a story to tell just now.)

Serge,

The day I knew I was in a poetry class taught by a great man was the day he gave us a piece of anonymous Elizabethan verse to explicate. After we'd struggled with it for a while, he suggested our difficulties might be due to the verse not being very good.

adamsj... That is a possibility, but I think it might be a transcription error. Mike?

Adamsj: it could have been '84, I don't remember. But some of the poems were wonderful. I regret I never copied any of them down.

Serge,

Could be, but the verse was in Perrine's Sound and Sense, sixth edition (but not in the half of my copy I can find just now). Something about a dead infant, maybe a fountain, possibly in the chapter on simile and metaphor. '03, '04, I forget.

Lizzy L,

This was the one about the man fixing his roof. Umm...got it! "Neighbor in May". I think.

Adamsj...

Le petit rhume
C'est dur et fort;
La toux, la goutte,
Alors, la mort.

translates literally as

The little cold
It's hard and strong;
The cough, the gout (*),
Then Death.

(*) or, the drop that makes the cup spill over?

Serge,

Whoops! I thought you were replying to something I said, not what you were actually replying to. My bad.

The poets, as public servants, should have a uniform. I propose a black windbreaker with a bright yellow "Vogon" embroidered on the back.

IIRC, la goutte (the drop) idiomatically means 'a drop of blood.'

So, you start coughing up blood, and then you die.

So, TB? Pneumonic plague? Ebola? Or are even these too good for attack-poets preying on helpless commuters?

It was meant to be "goutter" as "drip." I did cross-gender it.

When a worker's out commuting to employment,
Or toiling to his boss's little whims,
There is nothing that can add to his enjoyment,
Half as much as poets left with broken limbs.
Our instincts we with difficulty smother,
For we know that such an action is a sin,
But, as warning from one poet to another,
May we tell you, rather loudly, "Pack it in!"

There are poets whose words stand through all the ages,
Such as Shakespeare, and the one who wrote the Psalms,
But, let's face it, you're not one of the great sages,
And you won't write very well with twisted arms.
For we like a verse whose lines with grace are written.
We's rather hear a verse with lines that scan.
You have with rhyme and reason not been smitten.
Can you tell yet we are not your greatest fans?

Hooray! We greet the slowing to the next stop.
Whoosh! The doors are open. What! You want to stay?
Pray, driver, summon hence the valiant bus-cop,
To drag this loathsome poet far away.
Constsble, now act to save enjoyment.
Let law, not tribal justice, guide our fun.
A constable engaged in his employment,
Now finds his duty is a happy one.

Dave, brilliant! The only problem I see is that it's a little dense with consonants (especially in the second verse) to be sung at the correct tempo. (I tried.)

OTOH, the first verse alone gets the message across nicely -- and I wonder what the likelihood would be, if one person started it, of finding a few more G&S adherents aboard who would spontaneously become the chorus?

There was a man on the tube in Prague a couple of years ago who used to post up beautifully poetic letters to his estranged girlfriend, typed up and Fablonned, every morning. Eventually, according to the letters, she forgave him for whatever he had done and the letters stopped. Did she ever exist? Who knows.

And this, from http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/000935.html:

Waiting for a bus in downtown Seattle, I see a disheveled and possibly deranged man with an enormous duffle bag sidling down the sidewalk, stopping to bellow "Are you going to the library?!" at each and every person in turn. Most ignore him until he moves on, but some -- out of compulsive politeness, or because they have somehow mistaken this raving for a sincere query -- begin to reply "No, I'm waiting for my --" at which point the man cuts them short with an impassioned and spittle-intensive "GO TO THE LIBRARY!!!"
I dunno. Call me cynical, but I just don't think Seattle's literacy program is all that effective.

if there’s one thing that public transportation needs, it’s crazy people ranting loudly about things that make little to no sense.

Presumably that should read "[...] it's more crazy people [...]".

And, Chris Clarke:

anything from this website should do nicely.

Somebody actually admitted to writing that? Like, put their name on the copyright notice? I mean: "Your/cavities and mounds ignore all/similes"? "One day the latitudes of everything/will change, but not your breasts"? "I am not in touch with/summer or some season thing"??

I am in awe.

'la goutte' (the drop) idiomatically means 'a drop of blood.' So, you start coughing up blood, and then you die.

Of course, Vian. (As in Boris Vian?) How could I not think of that?

On the other hand, that reminds me of the ending of Moulin Rouge. No, not John Huston's great movie about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. I'm talking of the so-called musical of a few years ago.

Hey, another bad idea for public transportation...

Poetry readings? Bah. Let's have people belt out arias from Puccini, or from Joe Green (as the SF Chron's Herb Caen was fond of calling Giuseppe Verdi).

RichardC, that's lovely.
Dave Bell, that's even lovelier.

As this thread's founding curmudgeon, I certainly agree about omnipresent televisions screens. They've made certain airport departure areas uninhabitable. I'm an avid news consumer but that doesn't mean I want mandatory CNN Headline News on ceilinmg-hung monitors every fifty feet.

On the other hand, I don't agree with the categorical dissing of mobile phone users. It's not mobile phones, it's people who thing they need to pitch their voices twice as loud as the ambient background in order to use them. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like this is a social problem that's been on the wane over the last few years, as people gradually get a clue.

How about waiting in line at my bank and the damn TV is on to F*cks News? Maybe I should ask them to switch it to something else, anything else, even a Teletubbies show.

"On the other hand, I don't agree with the categorical dissing of mobile phone users. It's not mobile phones, it's people who thing they need to pitch their voices twice as loud as the ambient background in order to use them. "

I often call people at random and read my poetry to them. sometimes just to their voicemail. While on public transportation. With my voice very loud.

This is a labor saving device.

"The only problem I see is that it's a little dense with consonants (especially in the second verse) to be sung at the correct tempo. (I tried.) "

I sung it to the tune of "What keeps mankind alive".
What was it supposed to be sung as?

If it's Vogons on the bus, would that mean they'll upgrade all the seats to poetry amplification devices? I mean, at least there would be new, unstained cushions, right?

Having ridden the #9 Bus on Cleveland's RTA for the five years I worked for E&Y, I can say that I was so jealous of my private time on the bus that I would only mumble good mornings/afternoons to the very beautiful women who'd sit next to me and wanted to strike up conversation (I guess I didn't look as crazy then as I do now). What hope does spoken poetry have then?

New York's had poetry on the subways at least as long as I've been riding them. The bits are short and well-chosen -- someone out there knows what they're doing.

Another good MTA policy is that they hold auditions for subway buskers. You only get to perform if you're good, and you can only perform in the stations and on platforms, not in the cars.

No. Kill the mobile phone users. I got stuck in a crowded elevator the other day with a young woman who was selling real estate, loudly, via her phone.

For Christmas, I gave my father a TV-B-Gone, a universal TV turn-offer. If I understand the concept correctly, it cycles through the remote control codes that turn off every brand of television known to the inventors.

My father often travels for work, and says it has made airport lounges much easier to handle.

I wonder if a TV-B-Gone would work on hk-reader's Hong Kong telescreens.

TNH:No. Kill the mobile phone users. I got stuck in a crowded elevator the other day with a young woman who was selling real estate, loudly, via her phone.

No jury would convict you if you faked an orgasm right next to her.

I so agree with Claude Muncey. Annals of Truly Bad Ideas needs to be a running feature, sort of like that book "Web Pages That Suck." Various features of the NYC Subway could keep the thread going for at least the first few months!

But wouldn't being in a lift with a jackass selling real estate loudly in person be just as bad?

I'm with Patrick, the generation of truly obnoxious mobile users seems to be gone; the people who loved interrupting everything to yell into a mobile so that everyone could see how important they were have faded into the background now that everyone and their dog has a phone.

Hello? Hello? Who's there? Damn you, speak!

Woof!

I hope someone gave them a scathing live critique in return.

Lee

I know that I was chiming in with "cent enjoyment" and "culty smother" right away.

Ah, to be in the chorus of a G&S operetta!

Has anyone heard the latest "Bud Light Presents: Real Men of Genius" spot on the radio? The honoree is Mr. Really Loud Cell Phone Talker Guy. "Because nothing screams I'm important! like a man screaming 'I'm Important!' into his cell phone." (I don't drink beer, but I really love those Bud Light ads.)

Behavior and social norms change around technology. Cell phones don't just communicate with the person you're talking to; how you use them also communicates things to the people around you. "I'm busy and important" is the most common message, but it can also say "Please leave me alone," or "I am so interested in what you are saying that I am texting a friend about it, and thereby including you in my social network," or "I may be utterly lost, but I have people right here, on the other end of this line, and if I disappear in this sketchy neighborhood you're getting yours, buster."

I find people who communicate that they're busy and important by talking loudly into their cell phones really, really annoying... but I also find them annoying when they communicate the same message by talking really loudly to their compatriots, or by complaining really loudly to the flight attendant about a ten-minute flight delay (no, really, they do that). The cell phone is just a tool that makes the behavior easier to engage in. (Confession time: if I'm trapped at an airport, and it's been a long day, and there isn't anyone else in immediate voice radius and a Mr. Really Loud Cell Phone Talker Guy is getting on my nerves, I will engage in retaliatory Really Loud Cell Phone Talking. Thus far none of them has gotten the point.)

Letter to the Editor

Poetry while we're commuting
s'an idea that's not worth instituting.
We in Minne-St Paul
already have call
ers whose musings could really stand muting.

I got stuck in a crowded elevator the other day with a young woman who was selling real estate, loudly, via her phone.

Just add your own (loud) commentary: "I heard that neighborhood has the highest level of termite infestation in the tri-state area."

Or just rip her lungs out.

In Hong Kong, commuters are trapped by the bus companies and the KCR (Kowloon Canton Railway) who have screens playing info-adver-tainment.

Aagh! I hate those! The last year I lived in Milwaukee, they put those thrice-damned LCD screens in every frigging bus on the 10 and 67 lines and cranked the volume to a headache-inducing maximum. Whatever soulless wank of a bureaucrat thought those things up has surely earned himself an eternity in the deepest pit of hell, where demons wait to force-feed him LCD panels displaying ads for mass transit.

As for bus-poetry, the poets will be richly repaid with a heaping pile of soul-crushing despair. Consider the following scene as a bus-poet shares his heart-loved work with the public:

Bus-poet: "I awoke one morning, gave myself a hug/ To discover I had become a giant bug."

(The sound of seventy passengers simultaneously putting on headphones, starting iPods, dialing cell phones, firing up GameBoys, and cursing loudly.)

Personally I wouldn't mind the poetry reading - but then, I wouldn't be listening, I'd be reading something else.

I can't help but feel, though, that if this was an attempt to showcase people's work, it hasn't been very successful.

Could the people at the back of the bus even hear the poet, or were they supplied with microphones?

Not long ago I inadvertently discovered an effective method of loud cell phone talker guy brain jamming. FWIW.

Annalee Flower Horne wrote "if you tried that crap on the Metro, MetroPol would shut you up but good."

And yet, the Metro's Korean hymn-singing guy roams free.

TV-B-Gone is a great idea, but if you have a PDA with an infrared port you already have the capability -- you can download a program to use it as a TV remote. It contains codes for the most popular TVs. So you can sit, say, in the dentist's waiting room and look like you're playing solitaire until -- ah, blessed silence! -- you find the code that turns off their TV.

The thinking in library circles is coming around from "ban all cell phones" to the realization that it's simply another version of the noise problem, and if they're speaking as quietly as the rest of the patrons, there's no need to hush them -- as long as they turn off the ringer. Still, there's something about hearing only one side of a conversation that is more distracting than two voices murmuring back and forth...

Dave MB, I think the correct link is this. I make a point of riding the buses once in a while just to see if there's new ones.

I have been seeing mini tv-screens appearing on the gas pumps lately that play ads for junk food you can buy inside; since you can no longer legally prop the nozzle handle and have to stand there holding it, you are a captive audience. And they're LOUD.

When I spent a summer living in France, there were people who would get on the Metro trains and sit there quietly until the doors closed, then they would stand up and begin to rant loudly and passionately to the rest of the passengers, passing around a little can for donations. As soon as the doors opened again, they'd get off the car and get on the next one. Since I speak almost no French, I had no idea at all what they were going on about and generally found it entertaining. We'd try to guess who the ranter was before they stood up. At the time I assumed it was politics, though if it was poetry it lacked any discernible rhythm.

Janet Croft: since I don't have a PDA, I resort to less technological means to turn the television off: I stand on a chair and punch the off button. I find it quite satisfying.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to commute from NYC to Englewood Cliffs, NJ on a bus which also had, as a regular commuter, a Jamaican 'warner woman'. This is a female person, of a certain age, who has taken it upon herself, or has been deluded into, sharing a fire and brimstone gospel with anyone in reach of her voice, which has developed force, depth, and projection from frustrating her children for years.

I occasionally suffer from a related phenomenon -- the black, male preacher to a captive audience -- on buses and trains in Atlanta.

Then there was the MARTA bus driver who would address everyone on the bus, and comment on every single thing that caught her eye....

...A constable engaged in his employment,
Now finds his duty is a happy one.

/* Waits for applause to die down, and then strides purposefully to the front. Takes a deep breath, and ... */

"When I was a lad I used to busk as
Poet stationed on a metro bus.
I said my verses when they closed the door,
And I -- "

Ow! Hey! Quit pelting me -- Ma'am, I believe this is your purse -- alright, who threw that? -- Ouch! now that smarted. Look we're almost --

/* sound of air brakes */

"I rhymed my verses so carefully
That now I am the chairman of the D.O.T!"

Watch your step. Have a nice day!

TNH:No. Kill the mobile phone users. I got stuck in a crowded elevator the other day with a young woman who was selling real estate, loudly, via her phone.

Michael Croft: No jury would convict you if you faked an orgasm right next to her.

I'd prefer to yell, "Hey, Real Estate lady! You want some more of this crack or not?"

I loved the (printed) poetry on the buses in Seattle. One of my favorites was written by a local 8th grader.

I too resent the "captive audience" phenomenon. Ubiquitous, non-turn-downable ads are a prominent trope in Ursula LeGuin's fiction, and they never fail to elicit a shudder from me.

it's people who thing they need to pitch their voices twice as loud as the ambient background in order to use them.

(into phone)

I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU PLAY AS LONG AS YOU PLAY IT LOUD!

Last night I was driven out of a bus shelter into a cold breeze by a woman spilling her guts into her cell phone at high volume. Oh, well, at least it wasn't raining. The louder voice is all quite unconscious; the phones interfere with us hearing our own voices, so we talk more loudly when using them. And then there's the "bubble of privacy"; people concentrate on their conversations, and say the damndest things at high volume.

At least Rhysling was below deck.

I don't remember where I first encountered these "Dear cell phone user" cards but I suspect it was in Teresa's Particles. In any case, they're worth a visit.

No. Kill the mobile phone users. I got stuck in a crowded elevator the other day with a young woman who was selling real estate, loudly, via her phone.

She wasn't the one who was practically shouting into the phone, "How much was it? How much was it?" then got disconnected because, duh, she was in an elevator, and then called! back! to say, "Sorry, I got disconnected. How much was it?" was she? Maybe they don't have offices, so they just ride elevators all day.

As for the auditioning of buskers, yes, it applies to those who play in prominent spots in the busiest stations, but I can't believe the MTA actually approved that guy who's always playing drums on the platform at Union Square. Gaaah! I'd be happy to take a dozen dueling poets in exchange.

India, the (very) few legal ones have a banner over them that says "Music Underground." All the rest are breaking the law.

Every so often here in London, someone gets up on a tube or a bus and begins to declaim loudly. But it's not poetry, it's usually a rant about Jesus. Although there was this one old East European lady who treated us all to a lecture on proper marital behaviour, explaining that it would be necessary to kill the woman her husband was unfaithful with. She was pretty entertaining. But other than that, well--this makes me wonder if someone in Minneapolis-St. Paul is making an effort to wipe out all the poets in the area via mob action.

I'm waiting for the technological solution to the cellphone problem. Try this: Pick up your landline. Don't dial, just talk to the dial tone. Now push down the hook but keep talking. Yeah, the dial tone will be gone, but your voice will sound different.

That's because regular, old-fashioned land-line phones feed your voice back to you through the earpiece, so you can hear yourself talking as you speak. It's a subliminal thing, but it really helps people to modulate their voices. Cell phones don't do that (it would waste bandwidth), and they should. The processors in phones are powerful enough now that it could be done completely inside the phone. This has the added advantage that the people who use cell phones the most - and who also tend to replace their phones the most - will get that feature first. And they're the ones that need silencing.

Also, I second the motion to do "Annals of Truly Bad Ideas" periodically. I might even borrow that myself, with appropriate attribution, for my humble blog.

We have the 'Poetry in Motion' bus ad placards, too, and a corresponding 'Art in Motion' poster campaign (although I haven't seen new ones in either series for a while, so it may be discontinued.) I've never heard of anyone declaiming live poetry or anything else on a bus or train, though.

Nor on the platforms, most places and most times. Near platforms, though, appears to be fair game.

The closest Calgary gets to the sort of public literary display Patrick mentions occurs during Freedom To Read Week, which is a yearly pro-lit event. Along with the child and adult literacy drives and the library events and the fair and everything else that happens, there is a day for 'guerilla readings' in public spaces. Volunteers read aloud from banned or challenged books to (often surprised) downtown office workers, usually with a before and/or after explaination regarding what they're doing and why.

I hear the Harry Potter books are a popular choice.

Thanks for the link fix, Suzanne -- I left off the http://

The ShopRite in Hoboken has little TV screens AT CHECKOUT. Mostly ads, but also recipe demos, helpful advice...all insulting and annoying IMO. There was one little cartoon ad where the "little girl" was voiced by an actress who attempted to make her voice sound kidlike by essentially screeching. Five registers over you could hear it, which meant that you heard it about 10 times while waiting in line.

I wonder if TV B Gone works on those things?

Xopher, I wish! The market I usually go to has those. Fortunately, either the volume is set lower or the ambient noise is greater, because it's still tolerable. (The recipes are amusing, mostly because they're useless - they go by too fast to write them down.)

New from Reclamation Tech: DieboldBGone, an inconspicuous IR device that causes electronic voting machines to lock irretrievably, while displaying the message I LIE LIKE A [insert noun here] and dumping all data on recent . . . accesses to the hand-held and backup relays for future reference. Not sold in stores. You know why. You know where.

TV B Gone: makes me pine for my old Toshiba Satellite laptop. It had an infrared port; there may have been a way to zap a TV with it.

Cell Phone "bubble of privacy": This is the most flabbergasting anecdote I know. Apparently, our hero gets in an elevator and finds it already occupied by a young woman who's occupied in earnestly giving a friend every intimate detail of her last night's date. Shortly after the doors close this twit turns to our hero and says, "Do you mind? This is a private conversation!"

(Our hero, in fact, would be Steve Rasnic Tem, who took writerly revenge upon the twit by sharing the anecdote with Melanie, who in turn shared it with her semi-monthly writing class in the form of an exercise prompt. In the five minutes allotted, we came up with all sorts of unfortunate fates for the twit.)

Captive audiences: Sometimes as the St. Charles street car makes its right turn onto Canal Street, you get "treated" to evangelistic ravings being shouted in at the always-open windows. One of these days I'm going to sit down and memorize "The Charge of the Goddess" to shout back on just such occasions.

Is there anything we can *do* about those annoying TV screens? Vandalism is starting to seem like the best option....

I would love guerilla readings during Banned Books Week. Our library makes a big deal out of it every year and there are usually people browsing the display muttering, "Somebody banned THAT? I don't believe it!" Sending library volunteers to the coffee shops to catch people who don't go to the library very much could start a town-wide discussion.

It would also be kind of cool to be able to go to one car on the train to listen to, say, "The Frost You Didn't Get Every Year in High School." Or maybe get on the redeye and find out that the little headphones and DVD players you can rent have a channel with somebody giving a mellow reading of "Endymion." I might actually be able to sleep in those cramped seats with, say, Anne Murray murmuring "Endymion" in my ear.

A year or so ago, I worked in a fancy office building with TV screens in the elevators. The saving grace was that they kept the sound off, and captioning on. This made it much easier to ignore. I use a coffeehouse that keeps some cable news or other on a tube up in the ceiling, captioning on, sound off. I find neither of these outrageously offensive, although I try to face away from the coffeehouse tube, just to keep from getting distracted.

This is in contrast to our gas station, which does not have TV screens yet (I'm sure they're imminent) but continually plays annoying advertisements at top volume.

Yet another lesson in the intrusiveness of sound.

I have a sheet of removable labels for 3.5" floppies (remember those?) - I think they are just the right size to tag becoming-ubiquitous LCD TV screens with the phrase KILL YOUR TELEVISION.

The thing is, most people, at least based on their actions, aren't irritated by television sets. I was at my car dealership earlier this week (my car is having weird problems). There's a waiting room, with a large, loud TV. Everyone in there was just passively watching whatever was on TV - I'm sure no one considered changing the channel. While I personally can't imagine going to a place where I know I'll have to wait without my choice of entertainment - a book or, in this case, a laptop (the dealership has an open wireless network, bless its heart), there's little evidence to suggest that the majority of people actually mind. Otherwise, most of the waiting people would have vacated the Zombie Room (I'd say the ratio was about 15 people in the TV room, and three of us outside).

The captive-audience screens in the elevators in my building are text-with-stills (except for the ads) and sound-free. It's possible to ignore the screen. On the other hand, it does provide some useful information (weather forecasts and some news headlines).

Apparently, our hero gets in an elevator and finds it already occupied by a young woman who's occupied in earnestly giving a friend every intimate detail of her last night's date. Shortly after the doors close this twit turns to our hero and says, "Do you mind? This is a private conversation!"

At which point, our hero says, "No, it's an elevator."

I assume Twit said ... I don't know how that sentence ends. What could Twit have said?

Blessings upon the person who set up the tv sound in the British Midland gate lounge at Heathrow so that if you want to listen to it, you sit close to it and can hear it clearly, and if you don't want to listen to it, you sit further away and it's quiet enough to ignore. *That's* the sort of tv news access I want when I'm waiting for a domestic connection after an international flight. It's ever so much nicer than the compulsory CNN in San Francisco airport.

I remember the phrase, though not the source:

"There are two types of people at Open Mike Poetry Night: Those who brought poems. . .and those who didn't know it was Open Mike Poetry Night."
(Maybe a Life In Hell cartoon?)

Northland, I'd like to use some of those "Shhh!" cards on people yammering away during movies.

people concentrate on their conversations, and say the damndest things at high volume.

This week's winner was: "Fine! Then I'll just sell my twenty-seven inch TV! I'll just SELL my twenty-seven inch TV!"

Turning off TVs... I remember the Max Headroom episode where the cops go into a suspect's appartment and one of them goes gasp! upon seeing that the man's TV set has one of those illegal off switches.

Julia Jones: It's ever so much nicer than the compulsory CNN in San Francisco airport.

The SFO CNN monitors can be a bit loud, and annoyingly, there are lots of spots where the sound is blaring, but the TV is pointed the other way.

But for compulsory TV, it's got nothing on the Northwest terminal in Detroit.

Xmas season before last, I was stuck overnight in the Cincinatti airport. Total shutdown, hotels full, & etcetera.

I made a nice nest of newspapers behind some benches, draped my towel* over some boots as a pillow, and settled down.

As things got quiet 'round 1 am, the formerly unobtrusive audio for the CNN news playing on the monitors overhead became unignorable. Man, that was an awful night; I got more sleep on the puddle jumper I completed my trip on the next day.

* Always carry a towel.

Jen Roth wrote: "Northland, I'd like to use some of those 'Shhh!' cards on people yammering away during movies."

Jen and Northland: Yeah, me too. Preferably printed in raised letters on 1/4-inch steel plate. Hand grips near one end would be nice, but not really necessary.

As an MTA tourist last weekend, I was charmed by a brazen fellow singing on a mid-afternoon 3 train -- nice lead voice with surprisingly rich bass rhythm notes, almost a completely different voice in that low register. (His two brief forays into falsetto were, alas, not a success.)

I was sitting next to a friend, who makes his living as a tenor; we looked at each other and he said, "He's really good." I asked, "Are they usually this good?" to which the reply was a stark "No." I felt kind of bad that I could only come up with a quarter when the singer passed the hat.

When I first realized the guy was about to sing, my reaction was dread. For once, I lucked out.

Patrick Connors: do you mean acoustic or electric feedback? IME, a typical fixed-base handset acts like a speaking tube, so no circuit juggling is necessary; cellphone designers seem not to have realized this. But why would it take bandwidth rather than internal wiring to fix this?

TV:

I ate lunch today much earlier than I usually do at work (my contract client.) I was sitting in the lunchroom by myself, enjoying the beautiful view and my thoughts, when another employee came in. He looked at the turned-off TV and asked, in a horrified tone, "Is the TV broken?"

Clifton, point of purely local interest: Lex Brodie Pearlridge has Fox on the tube all the time.

On the other hand, they did (temporarily, it turns out) fix my broken car door mechanism for free a couple of weeks ago.

Bryan: Dave's song looks like it's TTTO "When a Felon's Not Engaged in His Employment". Of course, with filk, anything that scans will work!

I love the SHHH! cards, but I think they need one that goes on to say, "...and we're all laughing our asses off behind your back." And yes, those would also work very well for people who make noise in movies or during concerts or...

"IME, a typical fixed-base handset acts like a speaking tube, so no circuit juggling is necessary"

Dear gods, no, that's not so; the sidetone is electrically provided. I think battery life is the reason cell phones don't do it.

At which point, our hero says, "No, it's an elevator."

I assume Twit said ... I don't know how that sentence ends. What could Twit have said?

My 5-minute scribble went something along those lines, and Twit rolled her eyes, and then the elevator got stuck.

The guy sitting next to me, his Our Hero character turned out to be seriously creepy so that we actually were scared for Twit by the end. Things were presumably going downhill for her after he prevented her leaving the elevator two floors later.

The writing class devolved shortly afterwards into a discussion of privacy bubbles, cell phone etiquette, and how we sometimes get speechless in the face of breathtaking rudeness. (Second anecdote: upon being told that he ought not to pet the guide dog, what with the sign there saying "don't pet me," the guy petting the guide dog says, "Yeah, so?" True. Made her jaw drop. I am sure that she, being an excellent writer, thought of a million great comebacks within five minutes of leaving the 7-11.)

...and back to the ubiquitous TVs: I always turn the dang thing off at the car dealership where I have to take my car every 3,000 miles. It is a wonderful feeling to say to a roomful of people, "Is anyone actually watching that?" and watch them all shake their heads and murmur, "No... no, not me... how about you?" to each other.

The electrical circuit of the traditional 2-wire telephone is a thing of beauty: no electronics, components doing multiple jobs, and speech going both ways.

Of course you hear your own voice through the electrical circuit.

Chryss: Of course it IS Minneapolis. Why not board the bus with replicas of Crow and Tom Servo and provide your own commentary?

I would pay heavily if we could film this with Crow T. Robot doing The Tay Bridge Disaster and Tom Servo doing A Little Belgian Orphan.

Lizzy L: My pet hate (talkin' 'bout TVs in places I don't want a TV) is the television in the hospital waiting room.

There's nothing quite like visiting your mother in intensive care when the crash cart operators show up to work on her while the "ripping the heart out" scenes from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is on the room's TV. Trust me on this.

Fragano: Then there was the MARTA bus driver who would address everyone on the bus, and comment on every single thing that caught her eye....

I once rode the bus from downtown San Francisco to the Exploratorium with a bus driver who made the same sound as the air brakes would make (and for the same duration) just before the brakes did. Not a lot of fun.

Speaking of bad ideas... Remember that, tonight on the Skiffy Channel, people create a black hole near St. Louis.

(Thanks to this thread I have just moved my TV-be-gone onto my keyring. And I'm now thinking about more permanent solutions -- A4 sized sheets of self-adhesive plastic printed with I DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING ADVERTS spring to mind -- for retail establishments that use screens for pitching at a captive audience.)

While megaphone-on-the-mobile man is gradually dying out, a new pest is showing up, at least in the UK: textperson. Textperson is so focussed on destroying the cartilage in their thumb that they walk everywhere with head bowed over their mobile as they text approximately the word count of "War and Peace" to their friends in leet-speak. These people assume they have right of way over other pedestrians, street furniture, cars, trucks, etcetera. It's hard to avoid being run down by them on any sunny pavement in Edinburgh, and if you don't get out of their way in time they blame you.

And one of the reporters in the preview says "I think I'm looking at some kind of black hole." How many kinds are there? And you can't actually look at a black hole, can you?

Later in the preview someone says it will eat half the state. Um...it would eat the planet in short order, wouldn't it? And the solar system in due course?

The only good thing I've seen was that someone says that a black hole isn't something you can destroy by dropping a bomb on it. It's not enough. I'll avoid it like the plague it is...else I might get sucked in, watching in fascinated horror and howling in pain. This has happened before.

Charlie: Trip 'em.