Typography shouldn't make you giggle

Thomas Auto Rebuild

I've been meaning to get a photo of this place for months. I understand that you want a vibrant sign for your business, but when you choose a font, I'm not so sure Galactica says what you want it to say.

Unless what you want to say is, "We secretly do 'bodywork' for Cylon Centurions, if you get my drift."

License Plate #1: That's not me, and I'm sad.

I'm not so vain

I spotted this license plate at the local park'n'ride, where I catch the train into downtown. I have to admit to being a little jealous; I wish I'd gotten something like that. Still, I wonder what kind of person gets an "ELF" license plate? (What kind of person has a name of "Elf?")

License Plate #2: Mr. Galt and Mr. Long.

Back away slowly

There's an old Far Side cartoon, the caption of which says something like "How nature signals 'stay away.'" It shows all manner of animals in threatening poses, except for the picture of the human in the clown suit, inner tube, and other absurdist paraphernalia.

That's how I feel about this license plate. When you're young and stupid, Lazarus Long is about as admirable a role model as Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggart, or Howard Roark. I don't say that with much venom: sometimes a clear authoritarian message dolled up in anti-authoritarian blather helps a young person power through their own stupidity and make it to adulthood alive.

But just as, eventually, you begin to see just how creepy the whole Randian enterprise is, so too must the mature reader come to the hope and prayer that Long wasn't some Mary Sue for Bob Heinlein. The nihilistic narcissim of cloning your own sex-changed twins and then sleeping with them only shows just how far along poor old Bob was into the kind of angsty loss-of-vitality story that so plagued the later fiction of Bellow, Updike, and other writers who wrote through that national quasi-male-menopausal period known as "the 70s." Ultimately, Lazarus Long deserves to be left behind.

I used to think something like this was hot. Now I know better.