Here’s a list provided to me by my friend Miss Fipi Lele showing the combinations that you’re not allowed to get when applying for a vanity license plate in New York State.
The reason many of these are banned is obvious to me, but some I just don’t get. For instance, why isn’t 157A allowed? Is it New York State penal code for a crime, the way “187″ is the California penal code number for murder? Or does New York State have a beef with some organization called “ISTA” (Indiana State Teachers’ Association? International Safe Transit Association? ISTA, the opthalmic pharmaceutical company?)?
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
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My guess about 157A is ###A is reserved for state vehicles like fire marshals or other civil servants with special parking privileges. They also have a problem with ##C, ##S, and ##JNY. The J may be for Justice.
Oh, and I so wanted to go buy a car, register in New York and get the vanity licence plate “kotex”. Dammit, I guess I’ll have to do Kleenex or something!
I’m wondering about “MEDAL”, “HLLYWD99″, “MCQUINN”, “PLAY”, and “QUEUE”. Those all seem pretty harmless to me; am I hopelessly naive?
By the way, I like that your auto-smart-quote mechanism assumes I mean a double-prime at the end of 99 instead of a close quote.
They banned FIREBUG? What’ve they got against my favourite web development tool?
Someone must have had so much fun making this list.
They missed some alternate spellings, though (4nic8 seems to be allowed, for example, even though they went through tons of variations there.)
What are all those short numbers? Are they bus lines or something, and are they afraid people would get confused?
157A and kin look like New York state highway designations, though this doesn’t explain why such strings must be prohibited: I hope (naively assume, even?) that every licensed driver is capable of distinguishing other vehicles from the roads themselves.
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