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Thanks to the excise tax and ridiculous registration timeout laws (The law is that there is no grace period when you move here. If you come from a particularly litigious state such as the Empire one, you do not realize this means "we aren't paying attention either, just try to do it before your old registration expires"), Mass has the best License Plate Bingo around. I've seen two Nebraskas (Nebraskae? Nebrasse?) in the past two weeks. On the way to New Hampshire on Saturday I saw British Columbia. On the way back, I saw my favorite Florida one with the sea turtle popping out of the sand.

So yeah, I was driving to work today when I got to staring at license plates. I got to missing the plethora of vanity plates we had in New York. NYS has no excise and lots of open land Upstate. This means you may have a car half-lifing into the lawn or on blocks but the plates are still valid. There are 17 million residents. There are eight character spaces on the license plate. If they used random combinations for all the plates, cops would still have a hard time keeping everyone straight. Therefore, vanity plates are cheap in New York. It's easier for the cop to write "ASSMAN" or "IX XII" and it's easier to remember your plates. ( How would that contrast with the Comm of Mass? )