Small wonder I still haven’t started looking at the news since 2019.
If it’s not America and (he’s not in jail yet) Trump, it’s Russia and (he’s not dead yet) Putin.
And people wonder why I wish the Cold War was still raging, and Reagan and Gorbachev were still around
While I suppose I have to be completely honest and admit I’ve never taken the time to read very much about American vehicle licensing, I have picked up odd bits and pieces.
For example, it looks as if there are now few states that require FRONT licence plates to be displayed, so if you are looking for a plate on a car, your time is best spent looking only at the rear.
Quite a few owners still have plates on the front, but they are usually specialist, or novelty types only, taking advantage of the space left by the removed license plate.
That said, I’m a little surprised at the violations I see as I look at street videos today, and how many cars have obscured plates – given the various claims by activist groups of how keen the police are supposed to be to jump on drivers and issue fines etc, such things would seem to be so obvious and easy to ticket, you might think nobody would dare. Even more so given the activist claims that the police like to shoot people for the most trivial, or even non-existent violations.
Still, it’s hard to see how this driver seems to be driving around happily with this plate.
Looks more like a big flag saying ‘PULL ME OVER NOW MR POLICE OFFICER’ than a plate.
Intriguing American License Plate
Someone like the plates I’ve noted – guess they decided to gift me this piece of fun.
Don’t know anything about it though.
At least it’s ‘safe’, and not likely to be confiscated.
Vanity Plate 1EARUP
After the example I moaned about in the previous post…
I learned of an American vanity plate that was spotted by the authorities, upset them, and was reportedly confiscated from the naughty owner.
Enjoy working out the problem with this one :o
Confiscated American Vanity Plate
While there could be an argument that there are well over 60 million good reasons NOT to go to America (mainly Trump’s loony MAGATS), there’s one that would take the option off the table if I ever did have the thought cross my mind.
VET BILLS!
I’m always wandering through a website where cat owners share their vet bills, often appealing for cash to help pay them.
It’s not unusual to see them with detailed bills totalling anything from $3 k to £5 k and upwards, just after rushing a stricken pet which has collapsed to the nearest emergency vet.
The lucky ones get away with an hour plus charges, but those who need overnight stays, or observation come away with frightening bills – or just have to bring their pet home, undiagnosed and untreated, and hope for the best.
The lucky ones may be near a charity, subsidised, or similar practice, but they seem to be in the minority.
Of course, some do have insurance, but how many, and given horror tales of American insurers and ‘Get Out’ clauses, does it always work?
It certainly makes me appreciate our local vet, where I made more visits than I might have wanted to, but, over the years, never had to spend a total which came anywhere near this single American vet bill – and some of those visits DID include anaesthesia and overnight stays!
American Vet Bill
While I may not be in America, I’ve been intrigued by their ‘vanity plate’ system for years – although I’ve never really looked at the rules, probably because the details will never matter to me.
One tale that almost stuck in what passes loosely for my mind dates way back to the days when the IBM PC (and clones) were coming on to the market.
Seems there was a guy who was pretty good at troubleshooting all kinds of software, firmware, and all things code related. Rather than take a salaried job with a big company, it’s said he made a small fortune by staying freelance, and negotiating a fee for every job he took on.
Sadly, this tale’s buried so far back I can no longer remember the plate, but according to the story, he got his jobs just by cruising the roads along Silicon Valley in his car, which had plates which related to his coding skill – any of the businesses there who knew him by reputation just sent somebody out to watch for him, and flag him down.
I can’t speak for the veracity of the story now, but I’m sure it was backed up by his name and business details back in the days when I first read of him.
I tend to think of that sort of plate as an ‘old style’ one, based on something tangible – as opposed to the novelty or insulting/derogatory types which are more common today.
I spotted this one, which I think is in keeping with the ‘old style’.
Hopefully, it shows up well enough in this grab. This one suffered from the motion blurring and I had to take quite a few grabs until I could read enough of the letters to make sense, then go back for this frame, which isn’t too bad.
The car is a 2009 Cadillac CTS (MSRP $36 k).
Plate is in the clear in the caption – hopefully not in need of interpretation (unlike some of the dreadful UK efforts where numbers have to be convoluted into letters using drug induced imagination).
Cadillac CTS I-ERNDIS
Relax, you don’t actually need to educate me, and tell me Americans suffer rust and rotting vehicles as a result of salt on the roads.
However, unlike Scotland, this phenomenon is not common to the whole of the land, and only some states (mainly in the north, I think) share the rot problem.
Head south, or into California, and the problem is not salt/rust/rot, but endless sunshine which can bleach car paintwork, and is so good at causing dashboards to disintegrate that there’s a steady market in dash top covers to keep the sun off!
It’s so depressing to watch American cars being serviced, where 200,000 mile examples dating from the early 2000s can be raised on a lift and, apart from a coating of dust, can look almost as if they had driven out of the showroom only a few months ago – I think Scottish car owners probably think I’ve been indulging in too much golden nectar as I describe such a thing.
That said, I think there is a downside too, and cars that DO live in salty states develop the rust bug even faster than ours as the makers there just don’t understand the problem. I’ve also seen cars only a few years old with chassis that look like tissue paper.
I was moved to mention this not because I saw a nice clean underside that had covered a quarter of a million miles, but this truck, which looks as if the owner just runs a sanding disc over the body work to clean it up occasionally.
Imagine trying to run this truck in this condition in Scotland for a few years!
Not a rusty truck
This reminded me of a new car I tried to look after in the days when I had to be on the road for work, 52 weeks of the year.
Even though I had kept it hosed down during the winter and didn’t let the road salt lie – by the start of the third year I could already find bottom seams and edges where the rust bug was laying claim and setting up residence.
And that was with a warranty against rust in that time interval (but the conditions of such warranties are usually cleverly crafted to make sure you can’t claim, unless you’ve jumped through hoops at your expense – or at least they were back then).
Although they’re not the same as our cherished registrations, it’s still interesting to spot American vanity plates, something I’ve been playing at with some relatively decent res video.
Unfortunately, a combination of motion blurring and upload rendering (and who knows what else) mean that detail can often be lost/lacking – not a great help when trying to read number plates.
It’s taken a while to raise this one from the much, partly because some of the letters looked like others and led me astray until I realised how wrong I was after the first glimpse – it can be hard to change perceptions once a possible interpretation get lodged in your head – you really do have to work to ‘unsee’ it.
Because of that, I don’t know how obvious, or not, this one is in this ‘best’ enhancement of the video grab.
I’ve added the final guess (better call it that since it is the best obtained from enhancing the plate) after the pic, so you can have a guess before looking.
Chevy plate
It’s funny seeing it now that the original unenhanced version of this image has been forgotten, or unseen.
With that out of my head, the correct interpretation looks blatantly obvious.
But then again, the original grab was nowhere near as clear or distinct, with the edges of the letters considerably more blurred and smooched out.
Not helped by any of the missing or distorted strokes either.
In fact, it was a real pig to read after looking as if it was in the clear, and easy to see,
Got it?
I changed the text colour to yellow, in case a glance gave it away – if it’s hard to read, just select the line below, and it should be legible.
BLAMONT
A bit of a diversion, but I couldn’t help but try to get some closer views of a guy I saw wandering around a road junction in the US today, and appearing to have some sort of signs front and rear.
I didn’t really expect what I saw when I did find better views.
Given that almost half of voting Americans seem to have lost their senses, I might be tempted to say I’m surprised he survives there, and hasn’t been mown down by some Confederate flag waving Republican Trump supporters in a pickup truck bristling with guns.
All he actually seems to get is a polite beep if he’s standing in the wrong place when the lights change.
I’m not surprised to see him there, given some of the utterly insane court judgement being handed down in a disturbing number of such cases at the moment.
I had to do a year of law, and came to understand where a lot of apparently ‘odd’ UK judgements come from, but US judges seem to be able to do as they please, regardless of law and circumstances, and some are either GAGA, or the ‘c’ word applies (the one that continues with ‘orrupt’).
Not sure I’d be happy to stand in traffic like him.
Then again, it probably depends on which US state he’s standing in.
Srop Shooting People Street Guy
See Part 1 here
I’ve had to give up on efforts to get a better view of this now completed mural – the cherry pickers have left the street, and the perimeter barriers are gone.
I’ve been trying to satisfy two criteria for this one, but I never got both together.
First is a damned camper van, or in American, RV. This mobile home is nearly always planted somewhere in the street most days, blocking the view towards the mural.
Second is YouTube (or some other technical hitch) delivering this section of video in smudgy low resolution for nearly all the time, even if I try to force something higher. It always seems to drop in this area.
So, this is the best I can screen grab – as has been said, the best pic you can ever have is the one you get, it’s ALWAYS better than a missed shot.
New US mural completed
That said, I did come across a view of the same wall a few weeks ago, before the work started.
Mural wall with no mural
It seems the chances of spotting many more are much lower than anticipated after I spotted the first one.
I’ve spent a lot longer than I really should have, pausing videos and peering at plates – all for absolutely nothing (not counting this one of course – although I saw it without having to look), as they just don’t be circulating, or parking, on the streets I can see. A little odd, as there’s no shortage of expensive cars or giant 4x4s on ridiculously large rims, but all seem to have standard tags.
Guess I can save some time, and just leave it to my ‘plate radar’ to drag my eyes towards anything interesting.
Better not make any comment about this one, which had an ‘obscuration oval’ overlaid, but the tracking failed (you can still see the blurry oval, just to the left of the plate) just as it was leaving the frame, so it could be grabbed in a still frame.
I’ll let you consult your favourite urban slang dictionary, and decide what best fits this use of ‘LIT’
Possibly an interesting comparison between the US and UK issuing authorities though, where the UK tends to filter out anything questionable, while (if I collected them) I could have a fairly substantial collection of US vanity plates (and even standard issue) which are dripping with innuendo and insults. They do disallow numerous references, but it looks as if the country that has lap dance and strip joints, yet seems to suffer from apoplexy over a boob in public (and you will even find a news story about a well-endowed mother being banned from a swimming pool with her daughter – both wearing bathing suits I might add), will hammer anyone trying to get a plate with an alcohol or tobacco reference before they crack down on those other options.
Also, I did spot an article written not too long ago (last year, I think), which began “A Rhode Island law allowing the Division of Motor Vehicles to reject vanity license plates that are “offensive to good taste” likely violates the First Amendment, a federal judge ruled.”
![[LIT] American Vanity Plate](https://secretscotland.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/lit-american-vanity-plate.jpg)
[LIT] American Vanity Plate
Secret Scotland 