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[Facts] Re: License plague 313
You're right about the Unca Donald number, Weslyn, but I think you mean license "PLAQUE", altho here you'd say license "plate" or "tag".Don't know what "PLAGUE" is in Danish, but in German it's "die Pest". (That well describes the people you've gotta see to get em, but not the thing itself).Two other well-known license plate numbers in popular culture are "28 IF" and "THX 138". Do you know the origin of either of those?
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Ooops!!!I feel so silly.
I meant to write "plaque" and NOT "plague".
But even if I had gotten that right I see that it had still been wrong!So what I really wanted to write (without knowing it) was:
"License plate 313"About 28 IF and THX 138 I have no idea whom they belong to.
Hmm... Who do they belong to?
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Selwyn ,Don't you EVER feel silly about a minor mistake in English! I'm in AWE of people who handle a foreign language as competently as you do. Both my French and German are pretty pathetic, even though I grew up in a household where everyone else is fluent in French (guess I was out torturing flies...).I did run across a weird error today. I was back from the hospital going through about 60 new e-mails, and one was from a guy who does the same job as me at our Mexican plant. He's Mexican, of course, but his English is usually excellent. Today, though, his memo gave me a series of lame excuses as to why he couldn't buy some excess parts we have until September , and he ended it with the conciliatory(?) sentence "Thanks for your compression."We were all baffled. Did he mean comprehension (understanding, even if wrong sense)? Compassion (puh-leeze!)? Constipation? Cooperation (he KNOWS I'm gonna bitch to his boss)? Is a puzzlement!Re the license plates:You're probably far too young, but many of my generation recognize "28 IF" as the license number of the parked Volkswagen on the cover of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album. It was part of the "Paul is dead" mythology: Paul would be 28 (at the time of the rumor) "IF" he hadn't died. A quick-thinking friend of mine at college managed to get this same number for his shitty VW as a very early vanity plate. It's about the only reason we ever consented to ride in that 1957 deathtrap.THX 138 was the license plate of the character John Milner's hotrod coupe in George Lucas 's second film, "American Graffiti". It was a sly reference to his first movie, a slight sci-fi thing titled "THX 1138". I didn't really expect you to get that one, altho the "THX" should be a tipoff to any Lucas fan.Regards,Dave
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