Taking License with State Government
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Noel Oman had a nice little story on Thursday about the state Department of Finance and Administration (DFA) pulling some 981 license plates from circulation following a complaint from a ridiculous nitwit concerned citizen.
Alice Kunce of North Little Rock, a middle school teacher, was issued a license plate with the randomly generated sequence 018-NGR. Kunce, possessing as she does an exquisitely sensitive soul, objected to the series of three consonants, which she believed contained a secretly coded racial epithet.
While apparently no one else—not the employees of DFA nor the 17 other Arkansans who were issued plates with the NGR designation before they were pulled from circulation—picked up on the potentially offensive and inflammatory epithet, Kunce saw it immediately: “My mind is trained to think in different ways,” she helpfully told the reporter. Indeed.
So, as a result, the state pulled 981 plates, at a cost of $1.46 per plate, according to the newspaper, for a total loss of $1,432.26, to ensure against a possible imagined offense to a single ridiculous nitwit concerned citizen.
For an encore, Kunce announced that she would be filing additional complaints with the National Grape Registry at UC Davis, the Northgate Radio project at UC Berkeley and NGR Producciones, an event planning firm headquartered in Spain.
