Joseph Annaloro was 0-for-3 after a recent visit to the Lewiston Department of Motor Vehicles to secure a vanity plate for his new 1989 Chevy Eurosport.

GBLIES. Nope.

GBLIED. No go.

GBSKS. No way.

After the clerk learned GB stood for George Bush, she and a supervisor rejected all three.

Annaloro, 34, an independent from Lewiston, says the president lied because “there’s no weapons of mass destruction.” He claims the clerk admitted: “Bush is my man.”

So he bit his tongue and left the Lewiston DMV last week unhappy with a random license plate.

Deputy Secretary of State Doug Dunbar, whose office has DMV oversight, said it sounds like someone was being “overly cautious” on the first two requests.

“GBLIES is available,” he added. He wasn’t sure about GBLIED.

And GBSKS wouldn’t have flown, anyway – no plate with a variation of “sucks” gets printed.

The law outlines certain parameters for which the secretary of state may reject vanity plate requests: Profane, contemptuous, prejudicial or those that “promote abusive or unlawful activity,” among other things, won’t be approved.

A computer system is programmed to catch obvious profanities. From there, clerks consult “Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Ethnic Slurs, Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Drug Talk, College Lingo and Related Matters” by Richard A. Spears.

If it’s in there, and it means something undesirable, the request is turned down.

Dunbar said there are between 85,000 and 90,000 vanity plates on the road in Maine. The system doesn’t track how many requests are denied. “I was told they’re actually very rare, unless (the license plate) is already on the road,” he said.

– Kathryn Skelton
No go

The mood at the crime scene was tense. Cops were crouched in bushes with guns drawn. A voice floated from a bullhorn, strange and unsettling in the night. I sat in my dark car straining to hear the words being shouted into the quiet neighborhood.

Then a call came over the police scanner. A pickup truck had been seen circling the area several times. An officer was needed to stop the truck and to determine why the driver was so interested in the developments.

It was a dilemma. Most officers had left their cruisers on nearby blocks as the standoff unfolded. Others were placed strategically and could not slip away. The one officer closest to the truck was on foot and he took off at a trot as the suspect truck drove toward another block.

The officer dashed by the open window of my car. I hollered to him that he was welcome to commandeer my wheels to go after the truck. The officer paused. He peered from one end of the Kia Sportage to the other. Thanks anyway, he said. Then he started running again.

The shame. The indignation. I thought it would have been cool to have my ride taken over by a cop like you see in the movies. But, no. The cop believed his new Nikes would probably get him where he needed to go quicker than my Sportage with its puny, 130-horsepower engine.

He was right. The business with the pickup truck was taken care of before I could even get my engine started. And even if there had been gunplay just up the road, it would have taken me forever to get to the scene. There was a small hill on the way, you see. The Kia really has problems with small hills. Or particularly steep speed bumps.

– Mark LaFlamme