vanity plates

Up here in the traffic that is Northern Virginia and DC, we can pass the time wondering what people are thinking putting vanity plates on their cars... most of the time it's trying to figure out what they mean. Design Observer has a wonderful rant on the situation:

The ubiquity of the vanity plate makes for a discordant kind of poetry: it’s a function of brevity and bad spelling, a terse kind of haiku that’s oddly self-referential. Sometimes, the message being transmitted is merely a reflection of the car itself: “ITS EASY” for a Porsche Boxster or “BIG ENOF” for a Ford Explorer or “DEAD LEG” for a 1973 Wolkswagon minibus. Yet this is just the tip of the vanity-plate phenomenon — a custom that, come to think of it, seems ideally poised for the short attention span of the American public.

(I really have no idea what the above IRPOSTL plate means... things like this haunt my drive every day, but it does make the time go by)