I was diagnosed as Autistic last year (aged 54) so I’m still in the early stages of making sense of it. I can totally relate to your enjoyment of number plates. When I travel, one of my favourite things is observing the different street signs and typographies. I’m always in the grip of one obsessive interest or other - fragrance being my current passion but geology, football, music, knitting and art history have also had their moments of tunnel-visioned single focus.
Walk down Chelsea Embankment heading east from Chelsea. If you're very lucky, you'll see two cars parked next to each other in a double-garage on the left. The plates...?
663 CLE. The number plate of the first car my family owned. A baby blue Morris traveller complete with the external timber decorations. I still remember the smell of those cracked leather seats.
It is estimated that ~20% of the population is neurodivergent. To me, this means that we are getting closer to viewing cognition as yet another realm that is characterized by diversity (and diversity = resilience). I have no evidence (but also no doubt) that most of the people that I have admired and learned from at one point or another (present company not excluded) have likely been neurodivergent. Glad to know that the kids are hip to it and the stigma is receding.
PROVA means TRY in Swedish, so sounds appropriate for a test drive. Whilst I have autistic traits I'm not sure I have autism - I do however have ADHD and perfume is one of my current hyper fixations. My nose hopes it will last, my wallet hopes it won't.
Got curious and looked this up as Swedish indeed has very few Latin based words, and according to wikipedia it seems to be from _both_Middle Low German prôven, and from Late Latin probō, which is interesting in itself.
Ooh now I looked up Norman French to see if it's influenced by Old Norse (I don't speak French at all so I wouldn't know), but seems only a few words survived. "Trier" definitely not from ON as far as I know. Oh well; a mystery.
UK number plates. In the early 1970s our first family car was SET 69J. The ET told anyone that the car came from the town of Rotherham. And J indicated the year it was registered (August 1 1970 to July 31 1971). US license plates: just the other day, turning around in the parking lot of our local train station, I noticed three plates that indicated the cars had come from afar—cross state, and cross country. Three in about a dozen cars. Noticed in the time and space it took me to do a three-point turn. I’ve always noticed car number plates. I’m wondering about testing myself. Not for the first time.
OK, I also read all the license plates and signs outside and remember them... but actually I'm happy with it. I'll somehow live the rest of my life without a diagnosis, I don't think I need a ticket to any new club.
Ad license plates: in my country for several years now we can buy license plates of any wording (about the price of 4 bottles of Chanel No. 5). The condition is to have at least 1 digit.
Folk creativity is unlimited! Inventing an original brand and being proud of it is truly a national pastime. There are discussion groups on social networks that take photos and rate license plates on the street.
Some drivers have their own name - VER-0NICA, some have a boring cluster of signs (XXX-7777), some are bursting with humor: SEX-B0MBA; D0B-RYDEN (Good day); XXL-B00BS; SEM-H0DNY (I am a good person)...
Someone goes to the edge - in front of my son's school I meet a father in an expensive BMW with a sign "MIL-UJU69" (I love 69).
I like those who talk about hobbies and professions: IAM-RYBAR (I am a fisherman); RUM-VODKA, S1J-UBOTY (I do shoes), etc.
So: I have one too, based on my scent hobby. :) Whoever meets my car in Milan next week, you will definitely recognize me, I am sure - please say hello to me! :)
I don't think I am even mildly autistic but I tend to read 5 books in parallel and my husband is used to me uttering apparently random words when we drive around, which I actually generate as the shortest possible word incorporating all the letters from the plate of the car in front.
I used to drive a small Autobianchi with the MI plate from Milan; many times when visiting my relatives in Piedmont I found my parked car with the tyres slashed (as they assumed I was there for the weekend searching for their precious porcini, and apart from that, all non Milanese Italians hate the Milanese!).
Who cares if it isn’t about perfume. Such an interesting and entertaining writer! (Who just happened to stim an ancient memory: I learned how to drive a car in a rickety red Simca in the northern reaches of Minnesota (US) where the temps regularly dipped to -20°F in winter.)
I once read an article on the incredibly wide spectrum of autism and figured that fit me perfectly. My younger brother, the family doctor found it somewhat less humorous!
As for licence plates……. my home Montreal, Quebec, the bottom below the plate now reads “Je me Souviens” changed in 1977 with the election of the separatist “Parti Quebecois” from “La Belle Province”…… Some wise nostalgists put one plate on top of the other in such a way that the plate now reads….
“Je Me Souviens La Belle Province”. (translates to “I remember the beautiful province”) A gentle reminder hearkening better times.
Personalized license plates in Virginia cost just $10 per year, so you can imagine the proliferation.
One can also choose from a range of backgrounds. The most popular or visible is a bold yellow plate with the Gadsden flag, unfortunately coopted by the Right-wing/Libertarian Tea Party movement. Although as someone on reddit noted, this is paying the state extra in order to tell the state how much you hate the state. $10 seems like a bargain, but it's year after year and must be a nice cash cow for Virginia.
This guy could write about watching paint dry and I'd read it -
In the old days a diagnosis of autism explained the behaviour of what my mother called 'the fairies' children,' who, as she'd explain were 'a curse for their poor mothers' ... and in the 70s a job I had in an arm of a hospital for 'the mentally subnormal' (I kid you not) which catered to the educational needs of children with autism led me to believe all such 'types' wanted to bite my face.
We're a way from then now and from the top-down triumph herald my parents drove from French campsite to campsite (awful loos) - the tent on the boot rack with me whining on the wooden seat my father had crafted to cover the brake between the two front seats.
I am stubbornly uninterested in cars. In my world, they basically exist to either inconvenience me or potentially kill me, though every once in a great while I'll need a taxi to Grand Central. I never even learned how to drive—extremely peculiar behavior for someone raised on Long Island—so the closest experience I have to operating a car is playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City a lot twenty years ago. Can't tell you which pedal makes the car go and which makes it stop, can't distinguish a sedan from a hatchback, and now that I think on it, can't even begin to describe any of the cars that take up residence on my Manhattan block, not even their color or size.
But there used to be an Airbnb here, one that only made its presence known by the many different license plates that'd appear in front of it, ones from such exotic lands as British Columbia, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alabama, Ohio. Plates are pretty much the only parts of a car I have ever paid attention to. Especially when they're vanity plates with extremely common words—finding a POP or STEAK or OOF fills me with the kind of glee one gets encountering a rare Pokémon in the wild. And I remain sentimental about New York's orange-field/blue-letter plates I knew as a child. I was dismayed when they switched to red-white-and-blue ones in 1986, especially since they featured a Statue of Liberty element to stand in for a dash separating two sides of the license number, an element that would be inelegantly shunted off to the right side for vanity plates.
I have Asperger's, ADHD, dyspraxia. They go hand in hand 😀
And over here they only recently started to asses adults for Asperger's.
Anyway, the brains of people on the spectrum is just wired differently.
I felt a big ease when I understood I am on the spectrum and could explain my quirks.
When I have a new "obsession", I have to learn everything there is on earth about it.
I have to split it to the tiniest details and study then to really understand well.
This was the case with Japanese, programming, perfumes, jewelry and gems, Zen and Buddhism, alchemy and esoterism and more recently ballet.
Weird mix, but now I can say I understand most of them in depth.
Of course I work remotely as a programmer, to stay away from human interaction 😀
The love of my life are dogs. I get along with them perfectly.
I was diagnosed as Autistic last year (aged 54) so I’m still in the early stages of making sense of it. I can totally relate to your enjoyment of number plates. When I travel, one of my favourite things is observing the different street signs and typographies. I’m always in the grip of one obsessive interest or other - fragrance being my current passion but geology, football, music, knitting and art history have also had their moments of tunnel-visioned single focus.
Walk down Chelsea Embankment heading east from Chelsea. If you're very lucky, you'll see two cars parked next to each other in a double-garage on the left. The plates...?
2B
NOT 2B
Nice! Arguably the most expensive pun ever.
663 CLE. The number plate of the first car my family owned. A baby blue Morris traveller complete with the external timber decorations. I still remember the smell of those cracked leather seats.
It is estimated that ~20% of the population is neurodivergent. To me, this means that we are getting closer to viewing cognition as yet another realm that is characterized by diversity (and diversity = resilience). I have no evidence (but also no doubt) that most of the people that I have admired and learned from at one point or another (present company not excluded) have likely been neurodivergent. Glad to know that the kids are hip to it and the stigma is receding.
PROVA means TRY in Swedish, so sounds appropriate for a test drive. Whilst I have autistic traits I'm not sure I have autism - I do however have ADHD and perfume is one of my current hyper fixations. My nose hopes it will last, my wallet hopes it won't.
Interesting that Swedish should have gone for a Latin word there...
Got curious and looked this up as Swedish indeed has very few Latin based words, and according to wikipedia it seems to be from _both_Middle Low German prôven, and from Late Latin probō, which is interesting in itself.
Looked up "try" which comes from Norman French "trier" to sift, quite a different meaning. I wonder what the proper germanic root is.
Ooh now I looked up Norman French to see if it's influenced by Old Norse (I don't speak French at all so I wouldn't know), but seems only a few words survived. "Trier" definitely not from ON as far as I know. Oh well; a mystery.
UK number plates. In the early 1970s our first family car was SET 69J. The ET told anyone that the car came from the town of Rotherham. And J indicated the year it was registered (August 1 1970 to July 31 1971). US license plates: just the other day, turning around in the parking lot of our local train station, I noticed three plates that indicated the cars had come from afar—cross state, and cross country. Three in about a dozen cars. Noticed in the time and space it took me to do a three-point turn. I’ve always noticed car number plates. I’m wondering about testing myself. Not for the first time.
My plate features the seal and the motto of Virginia, which happens to be Sic Semper Tyrannis. Hopefully that phrase is prescient.
OK, I also read all the license plates and signs outside and remember them... but actually I'm happy with it. I'll somehow live the rest of my life without a diagnosis, I don't think I need a ticket to any new club.
Ad license plates: in my country for several years now we can buy license plates of any wording (about the price of 4 bottles of Chanel No. 5). The condition is to have at least 1 digit.
Folk creativity is unlimited! Inventing an original brand and being proud of it is truly a national pastime. There are discussion groups on social networks that take photos and rate license plates on the street.
Some drivers have their own name - VER-0NICA, some have a boring cluster of signs (XXX-7777), some are bursting with humor: SEX-B0MBA; D0B-RYDEN (Good day); XXL-B00BS; SEM-H0DNY (I am a good person)...
Someone goes to the edge - in front of my son's school I meet a father in an expensive BMW with a sign "MIL-UJU69" (I love 69).
I like those who talk about hobbies and professions: IAM-RYBAR (I am a fisherman); RUM-VODKA, S1J-UBOTY (I do shoes), etc.
So: I have one too, based on my scent hobby. :) Whoever meets my car in Milan next week, you will definitely recognize me, I am sure - please say hello to me! :)
I don't think I am even mildly autistic but I tend to read 5 books in parallel and my husband is used to me uttering apparently random words when we drive around, which I actually generate as the shortest possible word incorporating all the letters from the plate of the car in front.
I used to drive a small Autobianchi with the MI plate from Milan; many times when visiting my relatives in Piedmont I found my parked car with the tyres slashed (as they assumed I was there for the weekend searching for their precious porcini, and apart from that, all non Milanese Italians hate the Milanese!).
Who cares if it isn’t about perfume. Such an interesting and entertaining writer! (Who just happened to stim an ancient memory: I learned how to drive a car in a rickety red Simca in the northern reaches of Minnesota (US) where the temps regularly dipped to -20°F in winter.)
I once read an article on the incredibly wide spectrum of autism and figured that fit me perfectly. My younger brother, the family doctor found it somewhat less humorous!
As for licence plates……. my home Montreal, Quebec, the bottom below the plate now reads “Je me Souviens” changed in 1977 with the election of the separatist “Parti Quebecois” from “La Belle Province”…… Some wise nostalgists put one plate on top of the other in such a way that the plate now reads….
“Je Me Souviens La Belle Province”. (translates to “I remember the beautiful province”) A gentle reminder hearkening better times.
Personalized license plates in Virginia cost just $10 per year, so you can imagine the proliferation.
One can also choose from a range of backgrounds. The most popular or visible is a bold yellow plate with the Gadsden flag, unfortunately coopted by the Right-wing/Libertarian Tea Party movement. Although as someone on reddit noted, this is paying the state extra in order to tell the state how much you hate the state. $10 seems like a bargain, but it's year after year and must be a nice cash cow for Virginia.
https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/vehicles/license-plates/search/dont-tread-me
This guy could write about watching paint dry and I'd read it -
In the old days a diagnosis of autism explained the behaviour of what my mother called 'the fairies' children,' who, as she'd explain were 'a curse for their poor mothers' ... and in the 70s a job I had in an arm of a hospital for 'the mentally subnormal' (I kid you not) which catered to the educational needs of children with autism led me to believe all such 'types' wanted to bite my face.
We're a way from then now and from the top-down triumph herald my parents drove from French campsite to campsite (awful loos) - the tent on the boot rack with me whining on the wooden seat my father had crafted to cover the brake between the two front seats.
BRX 400B - Berkshire 1964
:-) Next column: Paint Drydown
I am stubbornly uninterested in cars. In my world, they basically exist to either inconvenience me or potentially kill me, though every once in a great while I'll need a taxi to Grand Central. I never even learned how to drive—extremely peculiar behavior for someone raised on Long Island—so the closest experience I have to operating a car is playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City a lot twenty years ago. Can't tell you which pedal makes the car go and which makes it stop, can't distinguish a sedan from a hatchback, and now that I think on it, can't even begin to describe any of the cars that take up residence on my Manhattan block, not even their color or size.
But there used to be an Airbnb here, one that only made its presence known by the many different license plates that'd appear in front of it, ones from such exotic lands as British Columbia, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alabama, Ohio. Plates are pretty much the only parts of a car I have ever paid attention to. Especially when they're vanity plates with extremely common words—finding a POP or STEAK or OOF fills me with the kind of glee one gets encountering a rare Pokémon in the wild. And I remain sentimental about New York's orange-field/blue-letter plates I knew as a child. I was dismayed when they switched to red-white-and-blue ones in 1986, especially since they featured a Statue of Liberty element to stand in for a dash separating two sides of the license number, an element that would be inelegantly shunted off to the right side for vanity plates.
" “Riz’m with your Tizm”,
Lmao