Practice voting

If you live in Kansas City, you're probably "all set" to vote in a week on city council and mayoral candidates, to advance two of them in each district/office to another election in March.

Today and for 13 more days you and everyone else in Missouri can vote on which dorky license plate we'll have if we live here in 2009.

There does not seem to be a one-driver, one-vote rule enforced. Feel free to battle my preference with your own.

I think #3 - "Reflection" - looks too 1980s Florida, #2 is a good attempt at "river," but the font is bad and the sun-ball is stupid. Also it's called "Ribbon," not river, so that's dumb.

The motto at the bottom on both of these is blocky and ugly like it is now.

In the FAQs, you will learn that putting the motto on the plate is state law. Wow, they really know how to use legislation for important things.

Choice #1 is blue-ish like the current one, too, which I prefer to bland, blank white. It's also "educational," with the shape of the state and that bird no one ever sees.

The FAQs will also tell you that indeed, it's true that inmates make our plates (another state law) and that they are aluminum. What they don't cover is how many miles of roadway might be repaired with the money from cashing in all that scrap metal.

Why do I have to turn my old plate in? Can't I make a buck off recycling it? And what are all those license plate artists supposed to do?

I miss the maroon-on-white style from 1979 that made it look like you just might be from Arizona, if you didn't look too closely for the little cactus in the middle. In fact, a park ranger in Texas once got into an argument with me and a friend of mine about where we were from based on that similarity. Like lots of law enforcement, he was looking so hard to "catch" us in a lie of some kind.

When he stopped being angry, he turned paternal on us girls and said to be sure not to photograph the "mules" or anyone who randomly was going through the desert.

"You don't want to make the drug runners angry," he said.