Bus Plunge!

You truly can find everything on the internet. Who'd have thought there would be a web site devoted to the phenomenon of the Bus Plunge:

BUS PLUNGES

A handy guide

As bizarre and random as bus plunges might seem, they generally fall into several well-defined types. For instance:

Bridgus Slipperius
Perhaps the most common species of plunge, bridge mishaps surely helped cement the term "bus plunge" because, well, bridges are usually pretty high up in the air, right? Also, many lesser-developed countries – where BPs proliferate – often rely on primitive, ill-designed bridges to navigate mountainous and rain-swollen terrain, meaning there is, unfortunately, many opportunities for the Bridgus Slipperius to prosper.

Curvus Skiddus
You'd think that someone driving a rickety bus holding twice the tonnage designated for it when manufactured thirty years ago in a country that cannot make cars that don't explode when you stop short and that don't leave parts on the highway when you shift gears would slow down when approaching a pot-holed, goat-soiled, dimly light hairpin curve, wouldn't you? [...]

The Slate article where I found this site isn't about bus plunges in far-flung foreign lands per se; it's about the way that such single-paragraph pieces, once a staple of newspapers everywhere, have been squeezed off the page because the flexibility afforded newspapers by of electronic typesetting relieves newspapers of the need to plug gaps in their page layout. Not that all the one-paragraph stories were about buses:

At the Times, the shortest stories – a one-line hed and a single paragraph of copy – were called "K-heds."

"The great challenge was to edit those things as short as they could be and still have them make sense," Siegal says. Great acclaim came to the editor who could artfully reduce wire stories to their absolute essence. One of Siegal's favorite K-heds, which ran in the Times in the 1950s, read in its entirety:

Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press.

The piece's hed is lost to posterity, Siegal says.

[Via Slate]