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I hate vanity plates. No one, in the history of mankind, has ever looked at a vanity license plate and said, "That's really clever!" (and meant it). To me, they fall into four categories:

1. The Ironic - For example, I once saw a mid-eighties civic hatchback with the license plate MUSLCAR. That's kinda like seeing a Hummer with a plate that says THRIFTY.

2. The Need to Explain - i.e. a plate that has some sort of story behind it. When I first met my friend Colleen, for the first two weeks I tought her name was Canessa, because that's what she had on her vanity plate. Turns out, she nicknamed her car after the plane from the book Alive. Take a long moment to think about that. She named her car after a plane that crashed in the Andes mountains and made it's passengers resort to cannibalism. Needless to say, when she and I first went out, I insisted that I drive.

3. the huh? - These are the ones that could go different ways. For instance, I remember seeing one that read BADSCAR, and I kept thinking to myself, "Is it Bad's Car, or Bad Scar?" I couldn't figure out if it was a guy with a really weird nickname who wanted to tell everyone that this was his car, or if it was some guy who's unusually proud of his disfigurement.

4. The Puzzler - This kind is what inspired this little rant, because I sat behind a guy in traffic today for about ten minutes just trying to figure out what his plate meant. I'm horrible with word puzzles, so this one really pissed me off. It read 42ITUS. When I got home, it hit me: Fortuitous! Given the fact that this guy substituted numbers for letter combinations, which if anyone sends me a text message doing that, I fight the urge to block their number forever...and the fact that he was using a fairly obscure adjective, I'm glad I had to turn right at 31st, otherwise I would've followed that guy home, and one of my friends would have to be raising bail money right about now.

I guess what I'm saying is this: Folks, don't buy vanity plates. It's just another way for the State to make you pay more money on your piece-of-shit car, and all it does is make you look stupid in the process. The last time any vanity plate looked even remotely coll was on the OUTATIME plate on the DeLorean in Back to the Future, and that was in 1985, and it was only cool for the three seconds it was shown on screen.

I know, I may talk a good game about being a pacifist sometimes, but that only means that I detest physical voilence. On the other hand, I realize that I have a pretty short-fused temper when it comes to stupid shit. Stupid shit that has no real purpose in the grand scheme of life. It just really pisses me off that the same people won't bother with donating to a worthy charity will turn around and buy a spoiler for their 4-cylinder Honda, as if that little fucker would ever go so fast that wind drag would be a problem.

On a related note, wanna know a great way to keep your car from getting broke into? Keep everything in it factory standard. Do you really think a theif is gonna try and take a stereo with the Ford logo on it? I think not.