The Way Cool License Plate Book

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Summary: Every fun thing you ever wanted to know about license plates
Review: In this travel book for kids stuck in the back of the car without modern conveniences like DVD players, Leonard Wise does for the license plate what Aristotle did for all types of human knowledge in his day, to wit, provides a detailed taxonomy (okay, he classifies them into discrete categories, but I am trying to go with the flow here and also be way cool). "The Way Cool License Plate Book" contains both a brief history of the license plate, which began as simply the initials of the owner of the car, and a list of games for everyone from kids for cannot yet read to those who read Aristotle in the original Greek. But most of this book is devoted to vanity plate categories, with dozens of examples of real license plates: occupations (K9TUTR, ISU4U, TV NUS), animals (2NAFISH, MEOW, EEGL), car terms (THEJAG, FASTNUF, EAT DUST), exclamations (OIMSOL8, CHILOUT, CYAH), sports terms (1STBASE, RDWINGZ, 4MULA1), and sayings (NOSMOX, 2 DY4, H82BL8). These examples indicate the wide range of what you will find in these pages and the general rules for license plate shorthand, which can help inspire you to come up with your own vanity plate for some where down the road. I have never had a vanity plate, mainly because I could never really come up with anything prefect enough; but my mother has had MOMSCAR for years. Some of these examples are totally obvious (YANKEES, ADIOS, MS PIGGY), but others require to wrap your warped brain around them (XCAV8R, IW84NO1, FNOMNL). Likewise, the games go from beginner to challenge level. As you go through the hundreds of way cool license plates there are also dozens of plate facts (first state to have license plates, last state to have license plates, etc.). The bottom line is that this travel book, which has color photographs of all of these license plates, is both distracting and informative. You can even try to figure out if all of the states and Canadian provinces are represented (What? After all that work you think I am going to tell you?).