IIEII (vanity plates)

Vanity plates are . . . interesting. The easy ones to figure out (SOCOOL, KEWPIE, AOLWME) just make me wonder about the person driving and why they wanted to promote that particular description of themselves via pressed metal tags.

I really enjoy the vague ones, though, the tags that seem to have no meaning at all to anyone but the owner. . . a seemingly random moving puzzle placed in my line of sight for however brief a time we share road space. My mom's mom used to enjoy figuring those out, too, and if the family was traveling together she'd offer a quarter to anyone who could figure out a meaning for a particularly difficult letter combination. Not that you can do anything with a quarter (and we just could not get her to raise her offers to meet current monetary standards), but the competition was fun.

My sister always won.

Case in point: "IIEII" on a dark SUV stopped in front of us at a red light several years ago, gma trying hard to work it out into some meaningful sentence, me just people-watching out the window at other stopped vehicles while running my mouth, and my sister occupied with something or other. Gma calls out "I give up; a quarter to anyone who can figure out the license plate in front of us!" I scramble to come up with something, seconds fly by, any moment the light will turn green and I'll have lost my chance! I can't think of anything that makes sense. Pam (my sister) is not paying attention, so I bump her, thinking Wheel of Fortune Whiz here can figure something out . . .

And she takes a half a second to glance up, then back down to whatever she was doing before and calmly says "Is It Everything I Imagined."

Freak. :)

So here's another one I saw on the highway the other day and maybe you all can come up with something equally good:

EILIS

GO!!

(Everything In Life Is Simple)
(Even I Like Ivory Soap)