Vanity Plate Proves Costly

Posted by Johnny Cat in Car & Vehicle, Odd News on October 18, 2009 at 6:55 pm

Scottie Roberson with ticketsThat’s Scottie Roberson, whose nickname is “Racer X” and favorite number is seven.  He combined the two for his vanity plate: XXXXXXX.

Turns out that decision flagged his car for over $19,000 in parking tickets.

When Birmingham parking patrols find cars without license plates parked illegally or at expired meters, they enter seven X’s in place of the plate number, city officials said. The parking citation form calls for a plate number, and the practice is to use X’s when no number is available.

City officials are working to change the entry system to keep Roberson from receiving any additional tickets, Odom said.

“Maybe we need to go with nine X’s, or maybe we just need to leave that part blank altogether,” Dawkins said.

Link via The Obscure Store & Reading Room.

 
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Saudi Arabia: Cheeky License Plates Banned, Child Marriages Still OK

Posted by Alex in Car & Vehicle, Politics, Religion on April 12, 2009 at 5:10 pm

To protect public propriety, Saudi Arabia has recently banned license plates whose Arabic characters spell out lewd words:

Saudi plates normally have three Arabic characters and three numbers, but the growing fashion is for auto owners also to display a version using the Latin alphabet and some buyers of personalised "vanity plates" deliberately choose Arabic letters which turn into words like "SEX", "ASS" and "NUT".

The authorities in charge of issuing vanity plates have released a list of nine prohibited three-letter combinations, and ordered all branches to stop renewing plates that include them, according to Watan.

Link (Photo from The Geekiest License Plates at Geek24 – lots of fun stuff there!)

In other news, a Saudi judge reiterated his decision that the marriage of an 8-year-old to a 47-year-old man is valid and refused to annul the marriage:

The issue of child marriage has been a hot-button topic in the deeply conservative kingdom recently. While rights groups have been petitioning the government to enact laws that would protect children from this type of marriage, the kingdom’s top cleric has said that it’s OK for girls as young as 10 to wed.

"It is incorrect to say that it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger," Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom’s grand mufti, said in remarks last January quoted in the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. "A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she’s too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."

Al-Sheikh reportedly made the remarks when he was asked during a lecture about parents forcing their underage daughters to marry.

"We hear a lot in the media about the marriage of underage girls," he said, according to the newspaper. "We should know that Sharia law has not brought injustice to women."

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