I can't tI want to favorite other people's favorites.

August 6, 2010 10:54 PM

I would like to be able to favorite posts from this page, this one, and that one. That's pretty much it.

Also if you want to tell me a boring story that will put me to sleep (it's 1 am) that would be cool too.

posted by desjardins to Feature Requests at 10:54 PM (50 comments total)

wow, title fail.

I can't tl want to favorite other people's favorites.
posted by desjardins at 10:55 PM on August 6, 2010

One time I was riding a Greyhound (don't ask). Behind me was a young black guy. Talked on his phone a lot of the way, trying to sound real tough. Mostly it seemed to be talking with friends.

Then he gets a call and the conversation consists mostly of:

"Hey--HEY! DON'T FUCK AROUND WITH ME! I SAID DON'T FUCK AROUND WITH ME! BITCH YOU BEST NOT FUCK AROUND WITH ME!"
.... (other person talking)
"I SAID BITCH DON'T FUCK AROUND WITH ME!"

It went on like this for about five minutes. Finally he was getting ready to hang up and said "Remember, bitch, don't fuck around with me. Hey. Hey. Much love to you."

And hung up. Most surreal thing ever. Greyhounds in general are a completely different side of America.
posted by resiny at 11:00 PM on August 6, 2010 [5 favorites]

As for the pony, I second the request.
posted by resiny at 11:01 PM on August 6, 2010

Years ago, I once rode a Greyhound from Rapid City, SD to Bozeman, MT with a midnight to 5 am layover in Billings. Two people were arrested during that layover. I badly needed sleep, but I had a backpack full of stuff and was afraid it'd get stolen. En route to Bozeman, the smelliest guy alive sat next to me (the only seat left). And then I had to go to work at 9. I have not been on a Greyhound since.
posted by desjardins at 11:10 PM on August 6, 2010

Yes, to the pony!

Now for my boring story...
I just waited 40 minutes for the bus. I did a crossword puzzle while waiting. The rest of my night was pretty hilarious, but now my back hurts and I'm tired and cranky. I'm too uncomfortable to fall asleep.

Waaaah.
posted by phunniemee at 11:14 PM on August 6, 2010

I rode a Greyhound from Denver to Philadelphia once. The entire trip, I sat next to a skinny bearded dude with a sleeveless shirt who claimed to have "made homelessness cool" in Nyack. Right there on his shoulder, staring vaguely at me, was a tattoo of Gumby smoking a cigarette. It took me the first twenty hours to pluck up the courage, but I finally turned to him and asked him:

"So... about that tattoo... I mean, why... why that?"

He looked at me, squinted, and said:

"Well – I wanted to get a tattoo. But I wanted to get something I wouldn't regret later in life."

And that was apparently all he had to say about that.
posted by koeselitz at 11:41 PM on August 6, 2010 [13 favorites]

Oh, and a Greyhound story (secondhand). My brother rode a Greyhound from Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Savannah, Georgia a couple years ago. The trip took something close to 21 hours because they were supposed to change drivers at a Dairy Queen somewhere once they crossed the GA line, but when they got there (in the middle of the night, behind schedule, no less), the only Dairy Queen was boarded up from a fire that had clearly happened years earlier.

My brother rode next to some guy who said he played football at Ole Miss (who knows if that's true), and insisted on texting with my bro to converse, even though they were sitting together and could have easily talked. So, they text back and forth, get to know each other, guy asks my brother if he works out because he has a good body, clueless brother thinks the guy's talking sports...and so on. The guy text-hit on him for almost an hour and my bro catch on.

It wasn't until the guy grabbed my brother's thigh that he realized the dude wanted to bone him, but by that time, the dude thought my bro was into it. What with the texting and all.

That was less than halfway into the trip.

It was good, though, because it taught my brother a valuable lesson--if you drive your Jeep Liberty into a tree, you might have to sit next to some dude who wants to sex you on your way home for Christmas.
posted by phunniemee at 11:44 PM on August 6, 2010 [5 favorites]

We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. "Give me five bees for a quarter," you'd say.

Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:04 AM on August 7, 2010 [7 favorites]

Wow. Looking at that Popular Favorites page is a little terrifying. I browse with favorites turned off, so I generally have no idea how many favorites people get. But seriously? That many comments are getting 100+ favorites? I mean, I've heard talk about favorites inflation, but that's just ridiculous. It was only like a year ago that 75+ favorites meant "holy shit, get this one on the sidebar NOW!"

And here I thought that a 40+ favorite comment was still a big deal. Pssshht.

Moral of the story : don't look at the Popular Favorites page.
posted by Afroblanco at 2:40 AM on August 7, 2010 [3 favorites]

I quit a job in Orlando and rode the dog back to Birmingham with a pint of George Dickel and two joints. It took forever. It was fine. I got some thinking done.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 2:46 AM on August 7, 2010

I once took an airplane and there was a baby crying. Also, the food was bad.
posted by qvantamon at 3:16 AM on August 7, 2010

I once took an airplane, but they made me give it back.
posted by Dr Dracator at 3:21 AM on August 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

I once took an airplane, and boy were my arms tired.
posted by Karlos the Jackal at 3:28 AM on August 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco Bay.
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:00 AM on August 7, 2010

Some day, when I am elderly, and I tell young people that I can remember when cross-country buses had smoking sections, they will decide that I clearly have Alzheimer's and put me in a home.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:06 AM on August 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

Favorites inflation!
Bad Bus Rides!
Onions on Belts!

Why do I think this MeTa would be a lot more interesting/funny if only I was soused?
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:30 AM on August 7, 2010

The only time I was invited a threesome was when an exgirlfriend asked me to join her brother and his boyfriend.

It wasn't so bad.
posted by nomadicink at 5:45 AM on August 7, 2010 [3 favorites]

I would like to be able to favorite posts from this page, this one, and that one. That's pretty much it.

I was reading the Digg gaming thread just before this and I think anything that makes the popular favorites even more popular is unlikely to be implemented. You can still favorite those posts, it will take one additional click.

My Greyhound story is about how I took Greyhound home from Milwaukee [hi desjardins!] after my 9/11 flight was cancel. The driver picked up a hitchhiker and did a bunch of other sketchy stuff. I wrote Greyhound an annoyed letter (fourth Google hit for "greyhound sucks") and got my money back. Good times.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:14 AM on August 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

A fucking Greyhound driver picked up a hitchhiker? Seriously?
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:15 AM on August 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

My story's pretty boring. After scouring Ask Metafilter for a good book recommendation, I checked "A Drinking Life" out of the library last week. Just started reading it yesterday.

My story's boring, but Pete Hamill's isn't. In Brooklyn, during WWII:

Then one June afternoon, I came home from Holy Name and saw everyone rushing around, waving newspapers, shouting, pumping clenched fists in the air. D Day! We had invaded France! Radios blared from hundreds of windows telling about landings in Normandy and heavy fighting as the troops moved into France.

...

I heard people coming up the stairs. Mae McEvoy and her daughter, from the first floor. Mrs. Halloran and Carrie Woods from the second floor. They had sandwiches and soda bottles and pails of beer and were heading for the roof. Across the hall lived the Caputos... their door opened and all of them started for the roof too.

Let's go Mommy. Come on! Everybody's going up on the roof.

She said, Okay, but be careful. It's almost dark.

The roof was packed as the street during an air raid drill. I saw people from every building on the avenue, and men from bars, and they were all looking out at the harbor. ... The sun was now setting into New Jersey, the sky all red and purple, the skyline disappearing into the darkness. We could hear the foghorns of dozens of ships. And then the sun set, the sky turned mauve and then black. For a long time, people murmured to each other in hushed expectant voices.

What's going to happen? I asked. Why is everyone here?

Just wait, my mother said. Watch the skyline.

And then, without warning, the entire skyline of New York erupted into glorious light; dazzling, glittering, throbbing in triumph. And the crowds on the rooftops roared. They were roaring on roofs all over Brooklyn, on streets, on bridges, the whole city roaring for light. There it was, gigantic and brilliant, the way they said it used to be: the skyline of New York. Back again. On D day, at the command of Mayor LaGuardia. And it wasn't just the skyline. Over on the left was the Statue of Liberty, glowing green from dozens of light beams, a bright red torch held high over her head. The skyline and the statue: in all those years of the war, in all the nights of my life, I had never seen either of them at night. I stood there in the roar, transfixed. And then softly, her voice trembling with emotion, my mother began to sing:

There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, when the world is free...

And the others joined in, most of them women, some of whom had men in the army, fighting or dying out beyond the Narrows, their voices now joined, singing hard and loud, some crying, all gazing at that blaze of light.
posted by marsha56 at 7:50 AM on August 7, 2010 [7 favorites]

I agree with Jessamyn. If you want to favorite something on a popular favorites listing, click on the item and hit the favorite button that already exists. If that's too much bother, it's too much bother. No biggie either way, but there's no obvious need to make it super-extra-convenient to favorite something that already has a buttload of favorites on it.

It was I think twelve years ago now that I took a bus from Portland to Denver, late in the summer, to meet up with a friend who wanted to drive cross-country to Massachusetts for the beginning of the new school year.

We had a two hour layover in the late evening in Salt Lake City, and they don't exactly burn the midnight oil in SLC so I found myself wandering around an extremely clean, extremely empty pile of cement. At one point I found what turned out to be a shuttered subterranean McDonalds.

At some point the other non-sleeping person in the city found me and hailed me: a crusty streetkid-looking guy who wanted to as far as I can tell unconvert me from what I guess I can't completely blame him for assuming was my Mormonism, though he probably should have at least asked. So it was him and me and the Disney-lit temple in the background and his sort of scattered and frenzied spiel about rejecting something or other, and I remember feeling like the whole thing was weirdly loud in the quiet.

I also remember sleeping pretty poorly on the bus, and enjoying the everliving hell out of a truckstop diner breakfast at one point.

a midnight to 5 am layover in Billings. Two people were arrested during that layover.

Congratulations, desjardins: you were present for the most exciting five hours in Billings history!
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:23 AM on August 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

"I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco Bay."

I fed a pelican to a fish on Amity Island.
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 8:31 AM on August 7, 2010

I've wanted this pony for.ev.er(!!) because I'm a lazy reader and often check the popular pages first thing, so yes please.
posted by ifjuly at 9:03 AM on August 7, 2010

There was a thing yesterday or the day before about how much is a pelican worth. I don't have an answer in general. But anyone who has been next to a pelican sitting on a post holding a glop of rotting fish in its beak in the already fishy, kelpy, rotten scent of a Florida marina knows that the value of the specific one that is close to you is a negative value.
posted by Babblesort at 9:23 AM on August 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

In 2005, I scored a blanket someone had left on the Chinatown bus from Philadelphia to New York City. After a number of washings, just to be sure, it turned out to be awesome. I still have it.
posted by valkyryn at 9:28 AM on August 7, 2010

On alcatraz island I watched two seagulls seize a third by the head and tailfeathers and try to tear him apart.

Somebody broke it up by throwing a film canister at them.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:07 AM on August 7, 2010

You guys suck at boring stories. I have read through to the end of every one of your comments.
posted by desjardins at 10:44 AM on August 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

Last time I took a bus, it was home from my final high school basketball game. Drinking age was 18 at the time and our coach was a known drunk. But in a good way. Anyhoo, we had just finished an 8-8 season after going 2-14 the two years before. It was sort of a celebratory bus ride home. Anyhoo, we get back to the school and coach stands up to give us some sort of end of season thank you talk or so we thought. He stands up, calls the young (23) assistant coach to the front and says, "Fuck the talk boys. Here's $40. Go get drunk." He hands the two twenties to the assistant and at the same time my buddy Billy leans over the seat in front of him and pukes up the entire pint of Jack he was secretly drinking on the way home. "Too late screams Joe, we already drunk!" With that, my high school basketball career ended.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:47 AM on August 7, 2010

rode the dog back to Birmingham with a pint of George Dickel and two joints. It took forever. It was fine. I got some thinking done.
posted by BitterOldPunk

A long time ago, I took the Greyhound from Boston to San Francisco. The bus driver kicked someone off the bus at night in the middle of the desert for smoking pot in the bathroom.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:51 AM on August 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I was born in the backseat of a Greyhound bus, rolling down highway 41.
posted by gingerbeer at 12:29 PM on August 7, 2010 [3 favorites]

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posted by Splunge at 1:23 PM on August 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't really have a Greyhound story, but... The first time I ever left home was on a Greyhound trip to glamorous Winnipeg. Nothing much happened, but fourteen years later some maniac decapitated a guy on that same run. I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to be alone in the middle of the dark prairie, with no light except the island of illumination coming from your bus and maybe a few stars, traveling down the dark highway. Just you and the other passengers, the driver, and the white line. Then there's a strangled scream and you suddenly realize that a gore covered murderer is right behind you, cutting off somebody's head. He's in a psychiatric hospital now, and they say he's doing quite well. I hope he never gets out, but who knows.
posted by Kevin Street at 1:56 PM on August 7, 2010

I fed a bottle to a Bengal tiger cub, who sat on my lap, at the county fair once. His momma wasn't very happy about it. Luckily she was in a cage or my story would be a lot more exciting.
posted by IndigoRain at 2:28 PM on August 7, 2010

I spent last night on an overnight bus from Monterrey, Mexico to Austin, Texas. They show movies on Mexican first-class buses, and over the course of the ride we watched Beverly Hills Chihuahua, the new Chipmunks movie, and something about talking golden retrievers who want to be sled dogs. I am not entirely sure why the night bus from Monterrey was animal-themed, but there you go.
posted by nebulawindphone at 3:16 PM on August 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I've always been fond of the fact that Peter Pan buses are named after things in the book Peter Pan.
posted by sciencegeek at 3:24 PM on August 7, 2010

I once rode the greyhound bus to from Toledo to Chicago. I slept most of the way there.
posted by biochemist at 3:50 PM on August 7, 2010

I rode on a Greyhound 30 years ago, I was 13. I had taken Amtrak from Modesto to Los Angeles but had to take the bus down to Santa Ana. I don't know why there wasn't a connection. Anyway, nothing happened on the bus. True story.
posted by deborah at 4:38 PM on August 7, 2010

I once rode the Greyhound bus from NYC to Boston. It left at 3 in the morning and I'd been up all day and I was dead tired. I sat next to a guy who looked like a college student. Apparently we both fell asleep, woke up briefly when we stopped in Connecticut, and then slept again all the way into Boston. Unless the dude sat up watching me sleep and then swiftly feigned waking up from sleep as I came up from it. Which would just be creepy.

Anyway.
posted by sigmagalator at 5:37 PM on August 7, 2010

I rode Greyhound from Atlanta to NYC. It was pretty uneventful other than when one kid, who boarded in Atlanta, started having a first-class conniption after our stop in Charlotte when his bag was stolen. Now, anyone would be pretty angry at that, but this guy started screaming about how "fucking n****s" stole his bag - despite the fact that he and I were the only white people on the bus. The driver put him off the bus when we got to Durham, "for his own safety."

On the way home, I got stuck sitting next to a guy who smelled like he hadn't showered for a week, heading home to Alabama after some short-term work he was doing for an uncle in Virginia ended. He was a pretty nice guy, though, but I remember that he couldn't quite wrap his head around why someone who did "computer stuff" for a living was riding Greyhound. I also met a kid leaving home for the first time, to go run a motel his parents bought in South Carolina. That was when I learned that a disproportionate number of the chain motels in the US are owned and operated by Indians.

Now that I think of it, that was a pretty cool trip.
posted by deadmessenger at 5:52 PM on August 7, 2010

The summer of my Junior year of high school I took Amtrak (it's like Greyhound except not at all) from Milwaukee to Rochester, NY to attend some dog & pony college shindig for RIT. On the way out there was a sleepless Vietnam vet who was chatting with someone all night long which kept me from sleeping, and I discovered that I'd have to find my way from the Amtrak station to RIT pretty much on my own, without money for a taxi or anything. I think I hung around at the mall with the mall walkers until the bus service picked up.

After I discovered that tuition per semester was approximately twice what my parents earned per year, I stopped paying attention and latched on with a bunch of other ne'er-do-wells. I cajoled a townie I had befriended into giving me a ride back to the Amtrak station after the tour ended the next day, and I spent the next 13 hours waiting for the westbound train to arrive, reading a book on the hard tile floor.

...I used to be resourceful. What the hell happened?

The only other boring story I have is the time I made an emergency flight out to Washington DC on Memorial Day Weekend to replace some power supply in a router that was somehow taking down our entire east coast operation. Because it was a holiday weekend, it was actually cheaper to put them on a plane with me than to try and ship them through one of the major parcel carriers.

I brought the replacement power supplies with me in my carry on luggage.. This was pre 9/11, so security just looked at me and decided I was a trustworthy guy who could be allowed to bring a pair of radio opaque boxes onto a plane. I don't think they even gave me any trouble about my Leatherman. I ended up out at National, and took the Metro over to roughly where I figured our equipment was (I'd never been there, but I knew the address and had a rough idea about how Washington's address system worked from a prior visit a few years earlier), coming up to the surface only maybe two blocks away. I find the address and walk up to the doors and discover they're locked. Now, it's Saturday, so that's not too surprising. So I call back to my manager and ask her to try and get a hold of someone to let me in to the office so I can replace the hardware. I sit down on the sidewalk, get out my book, and start reading. I hadn't gotten too far into the book on the plane, because I'm naturally a people watcher, so I like to see what's going on on the plane.

I get about 50 pages into the book and nobody has arrived. I figure maybe they came up from the parking garage and check the door to see if they're answering the intercom. Nope. I go back to reading. 50 pages later, try again, no response. Call back to my manager and see if she managed to rouse someone.

Long story, but I think I finished Neuromancer on the sidewalk before someone showed up to let me in.
posted by Kyol at 7:33 PM on August 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

I drove through two states in the dark just to see my best friend. We were chatting about this and that and the beginning of time. Friend says that it's OK if God didn't create the world from nothing - she herself uses stuff already in existence to create art - "what more could you want of God?" she asked.

My sister, the technical writer, pipes up. "Better documentation."
posted by lysdexic at 8:26 PM on August 7, 2010 [4 favorites]

I grew up in New York and went to college in Boston. When I needed to get home for the summer or over holidays, my mom was always scared I would die on the bus ride. She had heard horror stories from a friend, or maybe the internet, about wheels coming off on the highway and people getting murdered in their sleep and God knows what else. She also called the Chinatown route "the chicken bus."

Anyway, it turned out that she would rather pay for me to take Amtrak than allow me to pay for my own bus ticket -- which was fine by me. Now that I'm paying myself, though, I take the bus.
posted by danb at 8:55 PM on August 7, 2010

Okay, it's a festival of 'class racism'. But since no-one else seems to have posted it...

30 Miserable Lives Lost In Greyhound Bus Crash
posted by lapsangsouchong at 3:04 AM on August 8, 2010

Okay I know this wasn't the intention but all of these stories just make me want to take a long bus.

(And not because of the overly friendly football player.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 6:05 AM on August 8, 2010

long bus trip obviously.... obviously my mind was elsewhere
posted by MCMikeNamara at 6:05 AM on August 8, 2010

Many years ago i found a matchbox on the upstairs backseat (the unofficial smoking section) of a red double-decker bus, with an eighth of hash in it.

I have also been asked for rizla on the upstairs section of a bus.

me: How many
guy: two (or 3)
me: (passing rizla) skinning one up?
guy: yeah, you want some?

ah the good old days.

/waves cane
posted by marienbad at 8:02 AM on August 8, 2010

I was offered money for sex in a Greyhound bathroom when I was 15 or so. Around the same age, when I'd ride the hound, I used to try to sit next to a cute guy, and then pretend to fall asleep so I could rest my head on his shoulder. My other association with Greyhound and sexuality was the guy in the sleeveless shirt who lifted his bag over my head to stash it in the overhead bin, revealing his tattoo up the inside of his arm and side of his chest of a woman's legs coming together in an armpit/vulva (imagine a more low-budget version of this).

Don't even get me started on Green Tortoise.
posted by serazin at 7:34 PM on August 8, 2010

Good use of "That's pretty much it. [more inside]".
posted by Dr. Send at 9:08 PM on August 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

My friend Bill often takes the bus between Regina and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, as he lives part-time in each city. They have wifi on that bus route, not a bad way to pass 2.5 hours. Especially when that 2.5 hours turns into 6.5 hours because halfway through the trip, the RCMP closes the highway due to a whiteout blizzard and snowed-out roads. No food, no water, but at least there's a toilet and internet.
posted by lizbunny at 11:57 AM on August 10, 2010

I was born in the backseat of a Greyhound bus . . .

Aren't pretty much all the seats backseats, in a way?
posted by Nabubrush at 4:12 PM on August 17, 2010