Weird title, but its all I could think of related to procreation in a semi-humorous light. Why? Today, on the highway, within 5 minutes, I saw two very interesting license plates. One was from NY: MIDWIFE3. The other was from Missouri: MIDWIF. Is there some sort of convention going on? What’s up with that?
I was coming home the other night and a little sports car shot by. The plate read MIND DOC. Now, I know you may have jumped to the conclusion that this was a Psychiatrist, right? But let’s think for a minute. Would you, as a sensible, literate, American individual trust your mental health to a Board-Certified quack with the plate MIND DOC. A joke? Not acceptable. Mental health is no joking matter. And mental health professionals should be distinctly bland and particularly serious. You know, like Peter Bogdanovich on the Sopranos. Uptight. Wussy. The kind of guy who likes how he looks in an ascot.
No, this was no head shrinker. It was clear to me that MIND DOC could only be one thing. A super villain. Don’t laugh (be a humorless shrink for a minute and consider). This was a flamboyant plate for a flamboyant person. This was a plate for the kind of person who would use his enormous intellect (probably enhanced by some sort of complicated encounter with radioactive space debris) to develop a sinister plot that would put all humankind in fearful jeopardy. This was some serious shit. A brush with MIND DOC.
You can laugh at me now, but in a few weeks, when there’s a doomsday ray pointed at the White House, and MIND DOC is demanding a billion dollars or he’ll vaporize the president…ok, bad example. Maybe the ray is pointed at the United Nations, or a box full of newborn kittens. The point is, when that doomsday ray is pointed at something we actually want to save, you remember you read it here first.
Two amusing license plates spotted a few days ago. First, I think I may have brushed with political austerity. On the Taconic I saw a nice blue Jaguar with a soft top. Looked very new as it blew by. When I spotted the plate ROLLBAMA I was like, “Hey, hold everything.” Could it be a clever play on ‘rolling down the highway’ mixed with Obama? Could this be the Democratic Presidential hopeful, out for a drive, sans secret service? Probably not. I don’t recall from TV news that he was anywhere near New York. And though I tried to catch up, a glimpse of the candidate wasn’t worth getting a ticket for doing 80+ on the Taconic. Too much fuzz for comfort. So, I can’t be totally sure, now can I?
But a Jag, man. Makes you wonder where those record breaking campaign contributions are really going, doesn’t it?
My disappointment was soon replaced with a good, hearty belly laugh. Yet another car blew by me. Where were all the cops? Geez, from Dutchess to Westchester I often see more 6 or more cruisers. Still, I’m glad they weren’t out or I might have missed this gem. It was a Pontiac Vibe. Sure, not as cool as a new Jag convertible, but here was the license plate:
VIBERADR
That’s a man confident in his ability to please the ladies, know what I mean?
I’ve been silent for a while. No reason, just been a little busy. And no really good license plates lately. Though DEBS TRK (a Ford F350 supersized pickup) had a funny sticker, words surrounding a giant Ford logo: Bad ass ladies don’t drive Mercedes. She had another sticker of a cowboy on a horse (maybe a cowgirl with mannish hair) next to a bull. No lie, it kind of looked like the horse was mounting the bull. I think it was an optical illusion, but it did kind of look like Deb was riding a horse trying to ride a bull. Hee hee. Go Deb.
Which brings me to my next point. Is your baby gay? If this concerns you (which it should, right?) then you can drop everything and for only $19.99, get the definitive answer from Is My Baby Gay .com. I’m not linking to it because I spent a minute and a half on the site and these donkey fuckers do not appear to be kidding. See, you make your kid lick a piece of paper (not just any paper, you have to print a page from their site and press your infant’s tongue to a circle – don’t salivate outside the circle), mail the paper to these bags of shit and they will somehow use the magic of science (or perhaps some sort of Divine Communication – they don’t really say) to tell you if your kid is gay or not. Even better, there’s a 150% refund if they’re wrong!
Somebody shoot me in the head. This is worse than prime time Bingo – and that’s saying a hell of a lot. How sick is this. First, who is the warped ass who came up with this idea. Second, who are the completely fucked parents who are mailing this crap in with their $20. And don’t scoff, you know people are doing it. This kind of nonsense really does make me ill, though. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t think it’s a joke. I mean, at first I thought it was really funny. Then I realized they’re not kidding. At least I don’t think they’re kidding. Oh man, please let them be kidding.
Here’s what we need to do. We need to all send in saliva samples, maybe a few blank sheets just to test their system too. Or better yet, get your dog to lick it – but don’t let him or her lick outside the circle. You may end up with an inconclusive result. Then, everyone who gets a negative needs to file a claim in a few weeks.
Dear shitbags! You sed my kid was not gay but you were rong. He refuses to particimpat in jim class and only wants to dance ballay. He sings and has expersed sirius intrest in crochet. Your test was shit and I am very disastified. I want my money back. I sent 20 bucks and I want my 150% back. I will expext 25 bucks in the mail very soon or you will be hereing from my brother who is also a attorney.
Or maybe your daughter expresses too much interest in Tonka trucks and dodgeball. Whatever. We need to take these fuckers out!
Oh please let this be a joke…
[sigh]
Saw two decent plates this morning. One was on a convertible (looked very new with sharp cornered edges, but I did not get the make or model). It had a light metallic green paint job with the color appropriate plate LIMELIFE. Cute.
A few minutes later I caight site of an equally new looking Corvette with an otherwise hideous orangey/burnt umber paint job, though the plate made the color seem okay, if not exactly cool: CREMSICL.
Then some dimwit pulled out in front of me from a side street. I was doing 65 on cruise control with only one car behind me, but apparently she couldn’t wait. So in about 200 feet I had to go from 65 to 0 (yes, I was stopped dead on the Taconic). Right about then, when my heart stopped pounding, I was very happy about our brand new car with the brand new brakes. Funny thing , the pos Oldsmo-buick that pulled out had a huge…thing on the trunk. It was like a bumper sticker only about six times bigger. Sky blue with a big logo: Avon.
So, when I laid on the horn and she threw me the bird I muttered aloud, “Wow, the Avon lady just flipped me off.”
Just saw an awesome license plate…but that’s not the good part. The plate was SCALPEL. Heh, I wonder what he (or she, though I imagine it to be a he) does for a living. It was a new silver Lexus, looking somewhat valuable. The funny thing is there was this bumper guard thing hanging out of the trunk. Maybe I’m out of it, but this is something I’ve never seen before. It was about 30 inches long, 4 inches high, and maybe 2 or three inches deep. Looked like a hunk of two by four wrapped in dirty white vinyl, though I assume it was made of some sort of cushiony, foam rubber material, not pine.
The bumper bar hung from two adjustable straps, kind of askew. It looked like SCALPEL just popped the truck when he parked, pulled it out, and (probably self-conscious) didn’t take the time to straighten it out. I’m not knocking the idea. My cars, especially newer ones, have suffered at the hands of other drivers. Scraped bumpers, dinged doors. It sucks. This was in an on-street space, with cars in front and behind… double clear and present danger. The funny thing about it was that there were several grommets in the vinyl where the straps attached to the two by four. White painted metal grommets. Just the kind of thing that would ding, scratch, or otherwise mar the surface of a nice, new silver Lexus.
But what REALLY made me laugh is when I imagined the driver. I thought of Eriq La Salle, the driven, and somewhat unsympathetic surgeon from ER, back when it was sort of palatable…maybe even engaging once in a while. I didn’t see him as Dr. Peter Benton, however. I imagined him as Darryl Jenks, in Coming to America with Eddie Murphy and pre-whoop whoop Arsenio Hall. He had that crazy, curly, Soul-Glo hair. I imagined him, dripping with ersatz Jheri-curl activator, scooting to his trunk and flipping out the bumper guard before rushing into the barber shop for a greasy touch-up.
Saw an awesome bumper sticker this morning, fine green script text on white:
God can…
He can did everything!
Someone, probably the owner of the silvery blue minivan, deigned to correct the wording with a thick black marker. S/he traced the d of did and attempted to obscure the id with an o. The message now being He can do everything. Personally, I would have just blanked out the word ‘can’ so the message would be He did everything!
Sure, that leaves a weird space, but I think it looks better than writing over it. When a schmuck like me sees that, all he can think is God can do everything except find followers who use spell check.
Saw an interesting license plate the other day: ILUVPITS. My first thought, in spite of the dog paw stickers on the trunk, was armpits. Clearly it was a reference to pit bulls, but I couldn’t help but think, “who loves armpits?” Even when you’re right out of the shower, they’re still, well, pits. I know there are pit fetishists, and I’m sure my lovely wife will be googling it as soon as she reads this post. Sure she writes about the lovely nose of the better vintages at Celebrate Wine, but here she’ll no doubt be waxing poetic with comments about armpit squirters the world around.
And talk about a French connection, eh? Between pits and wine I mean.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I love the French. Bill O’Reilly is an idiot. Boycotting France is stupid. They are the only world power that had the balls to tell Bush to shove it when he couldn’t prove that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Maybe that’s why O’Fuckly was so loud about it. Let’s be so busy hating the people who refused to go to war without reason that we forget about the big fucking lie our president told the entire world…and us, the American people. The Evil Blimp (Rush Limbaugh – that’s from a mid-90’s song, by the way) was shouting that we should hate the French because they don’t thank us enough for helping out in WWII and I kept asking if anyone remembered Grammar School Social Studies when we learned that France was a primary backer of the American Revolution. Oh yeah, but what have they done for us lately. Besides inventing the blow job.
But I digress…my point is that I love the French. I love their culture, I love their art, I love their music (Serge Gainsbourg, Telephone, MC Solaar…aural ecstasy!), I love their wine, and I love their stinky pits. Well, not literally. Personally, I’m kind of into deodorant, and I’m not saying that the French are pit fetishists. I think they, like many Europeans, just don’t care. They’d rather musk it up naturally than try to cover it with floral aromas. Hell, I remember when a good friend in college, a native Frenchman, started using deodorant, and his roommate threw a party. Though I was happy for all involved, I recall a sense of loss. We had Americanized my friend. We had taught him that Quarter Pounders and Big Gulps were good, and stinky pits were bad. We had taken something natural and made it, somehow, unclean.
Oh well.
Then again, maybe the plate had nothing to do with pit bulls. Maybe the driver is just a big fan of Angelina and Brad, and all their little adopted babies. How do you think their pits smell? I mean Pitt’s pits and Jolie’s pits, not the baby pits. I think Brad’s smell like nutmeg and clover honey and Angelina’s smell like purple ditto ink. I bet I’m right.
Stupid license plate on the back of one of those ridiculous Mercedes SUVs: MELZBENZ. Boy Mel, aren’t you clever. I usually find it quite annoying when people get a plate of this sort combining car model with their name. I can see you’ve wasted your money on a gas-guzzling Auschwitz-mobile, and I don’t care what your name is, so…shut up.
Then I saw a second plate, even stupider than Mel’z. Actually, it was so stupid, it made MELZBENZ look like a pretty good choice as far as vanity plates go. This plate was on a Mazda 626, right next to the little metallized plastic nameplate that says Mazda 626. Want to guess what the plate said? I kid you not…MAZDA626. That must be easy to remember when filling out the little space for your plate number when you check into a hotel.
Then I saw a Prius Hybrid with an interesting bumper sticker. My other car is a locomotive. I thought this was particularly interesting since the word locomotive makes me think of big, coal-powered, smoke-belching, pollution machines. I know that modern locomotives are, for the most part, either diesel or electric, but the word has that antiquated feel. And anyway, doesn’t a huge percentage of our electricity come from coal? Stinky, stinky coal?
Anyway, the word locomotive does seem to suggest something not altogether environmentally friendly. Slapped on the back of a hybrid car, I don’t know, it just seemed wrong. Maybe it’s me. After all, what do I know of big machines and energy-efficiency, and all that educated science stuff. I shop at the Dollar Store.
I dropped the boys off at Grandma’s house the other night and was heading home for 24 hours of time with my honey. Things were looking good until I hit a full-on traffic standstill on the good old Taconic. I didn’t move for about 10 minutes. Then it was a slow crawl. Then there was a cop with flashers in the left lane forcing everybody in the left lane over to the right, and everybody in the right lane onto the shoulder. This was especially annoying because there was a line of cars hugging the cop’s butt, so as he passed, about 12 jerkoffs took advantage. I blame the cop. Why didn’t he just drive in the shoulder? It would have been a hell of a lot faster than waiting for two lanes of traffic to push over. And there would have been a lot less angry glaring.
In the end there was no sign of an accident. No twisted metal, no tow trucks. Things just started clearing up at one point and then we were all doing 60 again. Now, I’m not saying I want to see anyone hurt, but isn’t that just so frustrating? After a half hour of stop and go anxiousness, you kind of expect a reason for it all, right?
But let me get to the point. I couldn’t help noticing the vanity plate FRENCHY on a big, black Cadillac. When I came up alongside the car for a moment I got a look at the driver. I can’t be sure, but the woman driving, her age, her general carriage…it could have been Didi Conn. (That would be the actress who played Frenchy in the film version of Grease.) Hey, if the height of your career was playing Frenchy on-screen in 1978, and now you’re reduced to infrequent voiceover work and an appearance on Where Are They Now on VH1…well, let’s just say I think it would be an ok license plate.
Here’s the thing, though – Frenchy totally cut me off when traffic started moving. She almost clipped me with her frickin’ Sedan Deville. Come on, Frenchy! You made pink hair famous. You got to hang out with Stockard Channing and Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta and Jeff Conaway (he’s the guy from Taxi, remember?) Frankie freaking Avalon serenaded you in a Diner. That wasn’t enough? You’ve got to cut me off when all I’m trying to do is get home?
It’s alright, Frenchy. I’m not one to hold a grudge. Though I do have to ask, what the hell were you doing on the Taconic Tuesday night?