You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Blog is About You

I've never been a big fan of vanity license plates.

For one thing, they make you instantly recognizable. People know where you are and where you've been, all the time. Unless you actually enjoy being approached by people with whom you're only mildly acquainted, who will say things like, "I see that you were at the pizza shop three times yesterday. You must really like that stuff, don't you fatboy," I would strongly recommend avoiding vanity license plates.

Another problem with vanity license plates is that they might seem clever at the time, but eventually, they might just become annoying, obsolete and stupid, leaving you to wonder why you thought it was a good idea in the first place. I guess it's sort of like getting a tattoo.

Finally, I seem to have a mental block of sorts when it comes to these things. In other words, I see these plates, and I completely miss the point.

Something like that happened to me yesterday. I saw a car with a New Jersey plate, which read "STK WIZ."

Immediately, my mind was flooded with questions:

Is this person a whiz at preparing steak, or eating it?
Or, perhaps he/she is a beef jobber, who is particularly skilled at selecting only the choicest cuts of steak for his/her wholesale clients.

Eventually, I realized that this had nothing to do with steak expertise. Rather, the owner of this license plate was proclaiming himself/herself to be a stock market whiz of some sort. This really bothered me. Even if someone had a decent run in the stock market, would it make sense to get a license plate which arrogantly declares him/her to be a "stock whiz?"

Even worse, the stock market has a way of humbling even its most arrogant practitioners. Perhaps the owner of this plate generated some solid returns in 2006 and 2007, when everyone was making money in the market. Then, like everyone else, he got creamed in 2008 and early 2009. At that point, such a license plate would only add insult to injury. Imagine leaving the office on a particularly brutal trading day, where the market exacted a terrible toll on the trader's P&L (and ego). Making his way to the parking lot, he sees his car, with the vanity license plate, "STK WIZ" mocking him, torturing him. "Stock whiz my foot," he mutters, as he climbs behind the wheel.

A sad scenario indeed. But he's got no one to blame but himself.

As far as my issue with properly interpreting vanity license plates is concerned, this is not a new issue. A couple of years ago, while driving around my town, I spied a license plate which read "ILVJRSLM."

Two questions formed in my mind:

(1) Who is Junior Slim?

(2) What makes him so beloved?


I'm still searching for the answers to those questions.