Grace & Knowledge Blog

Some license plates that I have seen recently:

GIG 7578    That's a lot of gigs!  That person is keeping busy.

GOY 7090   There are a lot of Gentiles out on the highway these days.

EPH 6104   Ephesians 6 only has 24 verses, except in one very late manuscript, where this chapter is much longer with a very detailed description of the whole armor of God.

Tags: license plates

Several days ago I was driving behind a car with a license plate something like 

ERA 6828

It reminded me of "earned run average", the baseball statistic that measures how many runs a pitcher gives up every nine innings, on the average.  

How good a pitcher was this driver?  It depends on what baseball league we are talking about and where the decimal point is located. 

Tags: license plates

A few weeks ago I was driving somewhere and a car ahead of me had a license plate reading

GTA 1530

This caught my attention.  In the old Worldwide Church of God in the 1970s, GTA stood for the church's radio voice, Garner Ted Armstrong. 

I first heard him on the radio in 1970 on a 50,000 watt radio station WCKY in Cincinnati, which was located at 1530 on the AM dial.  So that license plate brought back memories.

Tags: license plates

A few weeks ago I was driving behind a car whose license plate read

EZK 4321

Was this driver advertising Ezekiel 43:21?  Probably not.  Ezekiel 43:21 says

"You are to take the bull for the sin offering and burn it in the designated part of the temple area outside the sanctuary."

Tags: license plates

The other day I saw the license plate

ETA 2586

So who, or what, is expected to arrive in 2586?  Is this when Cleveland finally wins the World Series? 

Whatever it is, the prediction won't be too controversial.  No one can really prove it wrong. 

Tags: license plates

Today I walked through the local hospital lot and saw a license plate with a number something like

CPR 3439. 

That sounds like an impressive amount of CPR, even at a hospital.  Another plate I saw had something like

FHA 9091.

Was this person an employee of the Federal Housing Adminiistration back in 1990-1991? 

A third one said something like 

DIY 9797.  

Did this person make license plates (or construct cars) by himself?   There was a fourth one with something like

FIB 9461.

What was important about that particular fib, I wonder?  Finally, there must be lots of economists in town, given the number of GDP plates with a variety of different numbers.  

Tags: license plates

There are so many abbreviations that most random combinations of three letters of the alphabet probably represent multiple things.

Today I saw a car with license place GCD 5850.  In mathematics, GCD stands for the greatest common divisor of a pair of numbers, the largest integer that is a factor of both numbers.  For example,

GCD(30,48) = 6

because 6 is the largest number that is a factor of both 30 and 48.  (30 is 6 times 5 and 48 is 6 times 8.)

While I drove along, I tried to decide how to interpret the license plate.

The value to assign to the license plate number depends on how we split up 5850 into two numbers.  GCD(58,50)  is 2, while GCD(5, 850) is 5 and GCD(585,0) is 585.

 I  would not feel safe phoning or texting while driving, but a little bit of factoring is no problem. 

Tags: license plates

A few days ago I found myself driving behind a truck with license plate

JMY BUFT

At one point the truck turned right and pulled into a Kroger parking lot.  Presumably the driver had run out of salt and was stopping off to pick up some.  (Was a woman to blame?  I doubt it, despite what some people claim. ) 

Tags: license plates

When I'm out driving, I will sometimes see messages in the license plate numbers of other cars.  Usually the messages are the ones intended by the owners of the cars, but occasionally I'm not sure. 

Today I saw the license plate number EZK 1818 and wondered, "Is that meant to be a reference to chapter 18 and verse 18 of the book of Ezekiel?"

When I got home, I looked up Ezekiel 18.  I knew that the main point of Ezekiel 18 is the principle that people are accountable for their own sins and not the sins of others.  I could see someone wanting to emphasize that principle.   

It turns out, though,  that if someone wanted to make that point on a license plate, the verse to reference would be verse 20, which summarizes the argument:

 "The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. " 

Verse 18 is part of this discussion but isn't especially memorable in isolation from the rest of the chapter:

 "As for...

Tags: current events, license plates

With many students in town, lots of states are represented in the license plates in Oxford.

Walking across Vine Street this morning, I noticed a Connecticut plate that read

CCCCC.

Apparently CCC and CCCC were already taken. 

Presumably the owner's transcript looks better than his license plate might suggest.

Tags: license plates

Walking across campus yesterday, I noticed two Copper Minis parked near Bishop Woods. 

One had a pair of reindeer antlers attached to it.  The other had a license plate reading "TINY SUV". 

Tags: campus life, humor, license plates