The Week in Pictures

For friends who claim I don’t reveal much truly personal, pfffft. End of month, I’m getting a colonoscopy. So there. That’s personal.

It’s not my first and afterwards, like Poe, I bought a pallet of bricks and walled up the bathroom remains in an attempt to protect future archeologists from planetary collapse.

Those so-called flavor-packs… what are they thinking? Brake fluid would taste better. At least this doctor, a gastroenterologist, allows Gatorade in the prep. And he has a sense of humor. Note this sign in their parking lot:

But what really prompted this article was a license plate on a nearby car. As I snapped the photo, a lady came strolling up, nicely, not aggressively. I explained why I was taking pictures of her car.

Nancy didn’t mind and explained it was her husband’s. He’s a writer, a real one, not merely professionally published, but award winning. Peer closely at the license tag and notice the frame around the plate. He’s a winner of the Bram Stoker award for Best First Novel and a Stoker award for Lifetime Achievement. Pretty damn cool.

Obviously he writes in the horror genre. He goes by Owl Goingback and happens to be the only other non-romance fiction writer I’ve come across in Central Florida.

Computer programs that generate tag numbers are designed to weed out certain combinations. Obscenity is an obvious category, whether automatically generated or requested by a car owner. Florida rejects about 500 request a year, not counting those manufactured by the state in the format of XYZ•123.

But vulgarity isn’t the only filtered category. You won’t see plates with certain combinations:

• FBI-123     CIA-123     IRS-123
• DEA-123     ATF-123     IBM-123
• and so on…

IBM? True. It’s among the many forbidden combinations. Thus I was surprised to pull up behind a vehicle bearing a tag certain to outrage Florida’s book-banning obscenity police.

As I returned home, a traffic light caught me at Lee Road (they misspelled my name) and I-4, I noticed a license tag.

I can’t wait til the governor discovers this affront to book burners across the state. It must be a conspiracy. Its left part is as pornographic, lascivious, lecherous, licentious, libidinous, and scabrous as the right. Our governor will clutch his wee pearls. Surely, that cannot be an accident.

Will the governor’s appointees plan a plate burning? Or bonfire the entire car? Or torch the hapless party who allowed this… this… this lewd, rude, dirty, filthy, vulgar, foul, coarse, crude, gross, vile, nasty, disgusting, offensive, shameless, immoral smut to sully America’s roads?

That’s personal.