When coughing, one generally tries to be productive and get whatever is caught in your throat out of your throat. I’m not sure if this guy next to me is aware of this. I may be mistaken, but he seems to believe that coughing is merely an excuse to produce some very loud and unnerving moaning noises that are strikingly similar to something like a goat’s bleat. Maybe he really likes to hear his own voice, but doesn’t yet have the courage to talk to himself in a very loud voice. Maybe he has repressed childhood memories of him being neglected when he needed to be burped, so this incessant pseudo-cough is a desperate attempt for someone to go over and smack him repeatedly on the back.

But, enough about the bleater. Let’s transition into a rant about stupid California vanity plates, primarily being that some car owners, a) tend to forget what kind of car they drive, or b) want to make sure other drivers know their name.

The category a drivers like to use vanity plates such as “BMW525I”, “YELO Z06”, or “ML320” which don’t make any sense. I can clearly see from the original car tags that the vehicle in front of me is, in fact, a BMW 525i or a Mercedes ML320 – does the driver feel that we’re so stupid that we need 2 labels instead of 1 to recognize the make of the car? As for the yellow Z06, anyone who would know what a Corvette Z06 even is, certainly would be able to spot it on the road. People who don’t, have no idea what the Z06 is in reference to, so that plate is also useless. Maybe the plate is to remind the driver that his car is not blue, but yellow.

Category b drivers like the idea of sticking their name on the vanity plate, as if to suggest that we actually care what the person’s name is. How pretentious. I wouldn’t be surprised if the owner of “ROBS BXR” has one of those labeling machines and labels his stapler, “ROBS STPLR”, at work.