Hopefully the next cars license plate was NCC1864A.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Unfortunately, you can have a maximum of seven characters on a license plate in Maine. Or fewer, in the case of some of the special designs. For example, DX (disability) plates can only have up to five, because the ♿︎ icon* takes up two letters' worth of space by itself.

--G.
* officially the International Symbol of Access, I kid you not
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Around the greater Bangor area, we seem to get people who think the badges on the car itself saying what kind of car it is are not sufficient, so you get, for instance, Corvette owners with license plates that say MYVETTE. Well, thanks for clearing that up. For a second I thought you were driving a Gremlin.

(There is also the subset of this clade, the classic car owners who do a variation that involves the model year, e.g. 67VETTE. This is marginally more informative, except that in my experience, anyone who would conceivably care that it is specifically a 1967 Corvette could already tell.)

I do have to take a moment here and acknowledge that my father had an amusing variation on that when he had a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide. He had a vanity plate for that which said GZRGLD, which at least required the observer to know that an Electra Glide dresser with the soft touring suspension package and (this is the official name for it) "reduced effort clutch kit" was known in the trade as a Geezer Glide. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I think my favorite of this group of plates is the VW Beetle with the plate "FEATURE"

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

I think my favorite among the more recent ones is the pic of a Tesla with the license plate "NIKOLA".

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

They've had IPV6 for like 20 years, too, but have never put it on a car.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I haven't seen it in a while; perhaps they moved away.

I forgot about that until you mentioned ipv4.

DaemeonX

See, now, that makes me want 24008N1.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Or at least I -think- it was that plate? Because, well, all the "I" and "1" and "T" kinda blend together...

Some states will quite rightly tell you to get bent if you try to get a plate that does that.

(See also: City of Heroes characters whose names deliberately played on the fact that lowercase L and capital I looked the same in the game client's standard font. Although I did once see that used very cleverly, in the case of two identical-looking heroes whose names were some variation on "Parallel". They were always together, so I think the GMs gave them a pass on the "you shall not try to obfuscate which character you are" rule. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, I'll be dipped, that was actually available and legal.

Four to six weeks for delivery, just like ordering a record from K-TEL.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

------
Fearless creatures, we all learn to fight the Reaper
Can't defeat Her, so instead I'll have to be Her

Came in today's mail!

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Really, it is. And the bird and stuff was Purdy.

But, I have to ask..."vacationland"? This is not quite what your general descriptions ofthe state of Maine has conjured in my mind. Not that I have thought badly, but perhaps not that.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

If anyone's curious, those are a black-capped chickadee and Eastern white pinecone with tassel; they are, respectively, the state bird and (I kid you not) flower of Maine. (I guess botanically that is accurate, it just seems a bit weird. But, you know, Maine is the Pine State, so...)

>But, I have to ask..."vacationland"? This is not quite what your
>general descriptions ofthe state of Maine has conjured in my mind. Not
>that I have thought badly, but perhaps not that.

Maine's license plates have said VACATIONLAND since 1936. At the time, that was trading on a tradition dating back to at least the Gilded Age, Maine as playground for the well-heeled. The state used to be known as a place where movie stars, big-time athletes, and the like came to Get Away From It All. Rich families had summer estates on Mount Desert. Hunting and fishing camps up here in the woods attracted some very-well-heeled clientele, such as the young Theodore Roosevelt (who came from a wealthy New York family and first learned to appreciate the out-of-doors not very far from where I am now). The boxer Jack Dempsey had a cabin up in Oxbow, near where my grandparents later had their hunting lodge. That kind of thing.

As it happens, the family that built my house was connected with that period of the state's history. From sometime around the turn of the twentieth century until the mid-1950s, they owned and operated Camp Phoenix, a major fishing/hunting/guiding establishment up on Nesowadnehunk (pronounced "sowdyhunk") Lake near Baxter State Park. They lived in town during the off-season.

Those days are long gone, of course. There were still a few echoes of the old days around when I was a kid—I remember bread commercials (of all things) that involved Ted Williams, the baseball player, fishing in the Maine woods, like he used to do back in the '40s, for instance. But nowadays the party is long over. Rich folks don't summer in Bar Harbor any more. Ted Williams is a frozen head in a jar. (Seriously.) Camp Phoenix is condos for retired dentists. It's all just much less impressive.

Still, the Maine seacoast remains a destination for a certain rather-less-glitzy sort of tourist, and people do still come to the woods to Partake of the Wonders of Nature (though they're generally not people whose names you would recognize in a newspaper these days). And the license plate slogan remains, because clinging to the past is something we do really well here in Maine.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

<raises hand>

We like being on the water, and seafood, and we're New Englanders (albeit more inland) so we don't have to fly to get there.

Also, we are definitely not glitzy.

dbrandon

I was really disappointed when my division was sold and I had to turn it in, but apparently "it would give you access to things you shouldn't have access to" despite there being a chip in it that had to be presented to a badge reader for every single door in the building, both in and out (except the bathroom).

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Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn!