License to Obfuscate.

• Author: RUNDLES, JEFF
• Position: Brief Article

When I was a kid, my family used to take a lot of car trips, and during those endless hours in the cars one of us kids' favorite pastimes was the license-plate game. We would search the other cars and see how many states we could amass before our pushy siblings -- usually with the better seats because they were girls -- could amass more.

Somewhere around 1960, I think, some smart game manufacturer began to market a board of some kind that would help. It had pictures of the 50 states' license plates, which could aid in finding the offbeat ones, and it also helped to mark them off so an accurate count could be taken. One can't take too many chances with some siblings whose addition left something to be desired.

The fun was finding people from far-flung places, and also to discover the different mottoes displayed. "Land of Enchantment" (New Mexico); "Live Free or Die" (New Hampshire); "Land of Lincoln" (Illinois); "The Keystone State" (Pennsylvania); "Winter Water Wonderland" (Michigan); "Land of 10,000 Lakes" (Minnesota); and, "Buckle Up" (Ohio). While we always wondered about the creativity of Ohioans, we at least had certain expectations. One Minnesota license plate looked like the next one and was duly checked off the list.

Not today boy. Oh no. Like everything else in this crazy modern world, license plates have gone ga-ga and become so complicated that they must have to arrest a better class of criminal so they have people smart enough to figure out the manufacturing schedules. These days, if you want to play the license-plate game with your kids on a car trip, you'll have to take along a telescope and a lap-top computer.

I was wondering about all of this because I just couldn't figure out what the heck Colorado was doing with its license plates. There are the green ones with white mountains, of course, and the white ones, and the denim ones, and then just lately there are the new green plates with some sort of mountain scene on them, and then the classic plates done in white with green mountains. I thought perhaps that the state might have as many as 10 different license plates, what with all the "Disabled Veteran" and "Purple Heart" styles and the like, and I was thinking that 10 was about nine too many.

Silly me. I couldn't find an actual human being down at the Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles to talk to me about this, so I visited its web site...