Skip to main content

Look, I'm an idiot

You tell me. What are personalized numberplates all about? What are they for? I really don't get it.

Once upon a time they were the preserve of celebrities and the local mayor. That I can kind of understand. These are people with a burning need to say 'Look, here I am!' But now they're as unlikely to house a celebrity as is a stretched limo.

I can just about understand the people who spell out their name or initials. But there are two classes of personalized plate I don't get. First there's the people who just spell out anything that can be made with a number plate. ST04TOK, for instance, to say 'STOAT OK!' (You have to look at the 4 at a slight angle.) Why would anyone want to say 'stoat ok'? Is this car driven by a stoat? Who knows.

Even more bizarre are the personalized plates that refer to the type of car - Jaguar XKR owners seem particularly prone to having numberplates with XKR in them. Why? The car doesn't care. It isn't a person. Really. The worst thing with this type of plate is that those who have become short of cash end up displaying their reduced circumstances. I saw a BMW 3 series yesterday with an M3 numberplate. The trouble is, it wasn't an M3, just a bog standard 3 series. And that's just sad.

Comments

  1. Some can be very effective - there is a tree surgeon in Berkshire who has a vehicle with the registration LOP 1T which makes people remember (obviously)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mildly witty, but makes people remember what? To avoid his car because it may have a chain saw sticking out of it? I'm still not convinced!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Investment, if you buy the right one. Also a bit of tongue in check. I have UP51ART on a Kangoo van and its always getting reactions. I bought it from DVLA for £799 using a free search engine ( http://regfinder.net ) and, love it or hate it, you don't have to look far in the dealer ads to know it's worth 20 times that.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Investment is a point (though can you invest in them without putting them on your vehicle? So much more subtle).

    I'm struggling to see what UPSIART means, though...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense