TL; DR: read just the plates in the photos — 34 word story (but which took 36 months to “write”):
A “vanity plate” is a customized license plate you personally create for your vehicle. People use them to showcase their profession, favourite team, name, quirkiness, date-ability, and whether or not they graduated from high school — “DROPPOUT”, “EXPELLED” and similar bold declarations in BOLD hang on the back of more than a few supercars, (as do variations on “SUM2PRVE”).
Bespoke license plates are restricted to an 8-character combination of letters, spaces, or numbers, so numeronyms are often used to squish more information into the limited space, i.e “H8R” for hater .
These customized plates cost more than regular tags, about $50 across most of the US. The most coveted plates have only one or two characters. All the good short ones are long gone, and you own them as long as you renew them… however, you can transfer them to a new owner. And for more than fifty bucks. Far more, so the tag transactions usually happen through brokers or auctions.
In 2023 someone in Dubai bought “P7” for $15 million dollars. (The P is off to the side, so it reads as a single “7”). In California “MM” is up at auction for about $40 million. (It comes with its own NFT, naturally. See the Tulips to Crypto photo series for more on that subject).
The very first vanity license plate was issued in 1931 in Pennsylvania — Robert E. Kent bought “R.E.K.” — but now they are in every country except the Vatican City (population: 764; mileage of road: 1.2 ).
Many territories skip certain letters due to legibility. The most commonly excluded characters are I, O, Q and U. British Columbia also disallows Y and Z. So if you wanted to showcase your quirky inquisitiveness whilst driving around Vancouver (population: 700,000; mileage of road: 1449.659) and you wanted a “QUIZZY” plate, you are SOL. To get around these letter-restrictions though, people substitute numbers, like 1 for I as in “W1NNR”, or zero for O, as in “L00ZR”.
Graphics are being allowed more and more on custom plates. The first graphic to show up on a plate was a potato, in 1928 (in 1DAH0). Some jurisdictions have begun allowing emojis into the alphanumeric 8 character space. One place anyway: Queensland, Australia. (OZ L♥️VE)!
Vanity plates have caused some problems. A man in LA innocently registered ….
CONT’D: SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND THE FINAL POEM STORY IN THE “SUP BABY” SET HERE: SUP BABY IRON LADY IMAGES
