My friend is driving across country with her two sisters, and she called me this afternoon on her way through Tennessee to ask where she should stop to eat in Nashville and also, why do so many people in the South have vanity plates? I asked her to tell me about some of the ones she had seen, and she said they were all BRIAN7 or HALLE2 or 5CHRIS5, names and numbers shoved together, none of them very clever like the one someone on my high school football team had on the back of his Mustang: LV2SCRU.

Maybe because they want to make sure that if they ever forget what name to sign on the credit card receipt at Waffle House, they can just run out to the parking lot for a reminder? That's why I had one.