I am glad I do not serve on that review board. I suffer from committee rage rather than road rage. When I feel that a committee is getting goofy I sometimes lash out and then walk out in a huff! The reasons given are really absurd, political correctness carried to absurdity, as the article points out reality often imitates satire so that satire becomes impossible.
Licence to stifle plate expression
Nov 29, 2007 04:30 AM
Jim Coyle
If there's any cosmic justice, the devil himself will be firing up a special ring in hell for the Ministry of Transportation.
Only a body called the Personalized Licence Plate Review Committee, after all, could have so lost touch with goodness and decency as to object to a United Church minister from Whitby – Rev. Joanne Sorrill by name – having the vanity plates REV JO on her car.
That the objection has been made almost 20 years after Sorrill got the plates as a 50th birthday present, shortly after her ordination, takes matters from the merely absurd to the utterly bizarre.
As the Star's Carola Vyhnak so delightfully reported yesterday, satire is rarely a match for reality.
Evidently, the ministry refused Sorrill's recent request for fresh REV JO plates to replace her rusted ones on the grounds that (a) the term REV might be taken as an incitement to dangerous driving or (b) could incite road rage among those construing it as government bias toward Christianity.
1 comment:
Hi Folks,
For any of you who have ever questioned the rationale behind the internal workings of government bodies, wonder no more.
Have a read and a listen ... and enjoy!
Cheers,
Mikey.
http://files.mikeysboomercafe.com/bnb2.mp3
You say, "Tom...ah...to" and I say, "You're an idiot."
“Hey, Johnny. Long time no see. How’s it going?”
For the next five minutes I am inundated by a torrent of invectives spewing out of John’s mouth. He criticises, chastises and scolds me for every single one of my personal imperfections, real or imagined. Rasputin would resemble a saint in comparison.
He stops his rant, I look at him and ask, “Are you done? Thanks for telling me how you feel about yourself.”
“Thanks for listening,” he replies. “I needed that.”
Life is often like that. We sometimes criticize others at the spur of the moment, highlighting to them the fault that we actually perceive in ourselves.
Such is the case with Ontario’s Department of Transportation. In their continuous desire to keep the hearts, minds and souls of Ontario drivers pure and focused on the task of … well …driving, to their credit, they have become more vigilant than ever in order to ensure that those behind the wheel not be distracted by license plates sporting messages that are sexist or racist either blatantly or through tangential inference.
Case in point #1.
The Ministry sought to ban a plate displaying the words REV JO. The reasoning? REV is an alcoholic beverage and REV is what some people do with car engines. The obvious conclusion is that these two words .. one on tope of each other .. in the particular order that we find them would encourage a driver to go out, get immediately stumbling drunk and careen over the streets of Ontario at triple digit speeds.
The person to whom the license was to be issued, in this case, is a Reverend Jo Sorrill who has actually owned that particular plate these past 19 years. The reverend Reverend happens to reside in Whitby, Ontario. Based on the learned assumptions of the Ontario DOT, one would presume that the neighbourhoods of her hometown would be filled with bleary-eyed wastrels wandering aimlessly, picking their desperate way through streets strewn with the abandoned rusting carcasses of mangled vehicles.
Well, it just so happens that my family and I reside in Oshawa and my son plays soccer for the Whitby Iroquois. I visit Whitby at least once a week and I have yet to witness this phenomenon.
There is only explanation to this discrepancy between what I see and what the DOT purports to know as fact. Either the entire population of Whitby, which numbers 120 000 people has colluded in hiding the sordid details of an evil priest who has engendered such mayhem and carnage within its town limits borders or the Ontario Department of Transport has idiots working for it.
To help clarify the above, consider Case in Point #2. The selfsame Ontario government ministry mentioned above has banned the three-letter combination BMB, claiming that it is too easily misconstrued with the obligatory decree to, “Bite My Butt!”
Such thinking has led me to realize that I, too, not only could, but also should work for the Ontario Department of Transportation.
Being part idiot, I come more than adequately qualified for the task at hand. As an example of this, let me start by stating that I feel that the DOT should actually be casting their net much wider when it comes to protecting Ontarians from being transformed into mindless zombies by completely overt and subliminal manipulation of mind, body and soul by perversions of both the highest and lowest order as those displayed on Ontario license plates.
However, not all is lost. The following is a list of letters of the alphabet that should NOT be expunged from the database of the DOT. It is no way meant to be exhaustive.
Let’s see now …
B is actually okay as it can stand for ‘bitch’ - a female dog
C is for ‘cock’ – a male rooster who crows, “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”
D – is for ‘Dick’; I used to work with a guy whose last name was Head. And it still is, as far as I know.
G – ‘God Dam’ – something that God built to help Moses escape from Egypt
H – ‘hooker’ – the guy between the two props in a rugby scrum
J – ‘ju’ such as in jujubes
M – ‘Master Bates’ - Norman Bates’ great uncle from Ipswich, England
N – ‘nymph o’ maniac’– an Irish entomologist who loves to study the larval development of insects
P – the vegetable ‘pea’ - as in the sentence, “The Princess squeezed his pea in his pants.”
T – ‘tit’ as in the word titmouse
U – such as in the sentence, “Whenever he has a cold, every vowel sounds like ‘u’ to Russ.”
X – ‘X-rayed it’ like in the sentence, “Marcus broke his arm and the doctor x-rayed it.”
Y – ‘yank’ such as in the sentence, “The Yankees yanked their pitcher before thousands of fans.”
And why stop at letters? Why, just the other day I saw one of those license plates with a number, the word ‘TO’, and another number like in ‘5 TO 8’. However, the difference between the numbers of the plate that I saw was 47; add 4 and 7 and that makes 11; 1 and 1 make 2, there were 2 World Wars. Conclusion? Employing the same amount of DOT intelligence, one can conclude that the owner of the plates is obviously a Nazi sympathizer and a blatant racist.
Yup! I think I’m ready to work for the Ontario Department of Transportation anytime.
All they have to do is contact their Buddy Mike Bolotenko – or BMB.
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Arbitrati est optimus modus volare.
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