I recently learned two lessons the hard way.
First, the State of California means it when it requires car owners to attach two license plates to a car -- one on the back and one on the front. Arguments that a front license plate would interfere with the whole design aesthetic of your car's front end, or that there's an unwritten exception in the vehicle code for sleek sports cars, or that drilling the necessary holes for a front license plate would void your car's warranty, or that a front license plate would increase your car's coefficient of drag and thereby cause it to waste precious gallons of gasoline, or that front license plates are a drag period, fall on deaf ears when directed to representatives of the Los Angeles International Airport's parking authority.
Second, even if you think a $35 ticket for not having a front license plate is an affront to your dignity and your sense of style (not to mention your sense of justice), and even if you've just re-read Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" and have civil disobedience throbbing and coursing through your veins, you really should just pay the fine and be done with it. Tearing the ticket into tiny pieces and then tossing them out your car window as you do donuts in the parking lot in front of the LAX parking authority's central adminstration building may seem like a good idea at the time, but spending a weekend on trash patrol alongside one of our major interstate highways during a record-breaking heatwave quickly transforms those momentary pleasures into haunting memories you'd rather banish forever.
Anyways, now I'm tanned, tired and ready to resume my blogging duties, a little older and a lot wiser.
P.S. I hope you enjoyed the steaming pile of prose my grandfather deposited on the blog during my absence. My grandfather has requested that his blog buddies (you apparently know who you are) correspond with him as follows: (1) send an email to "elderouterlife" at "yahoo" dot "com", (2) I'll retrieve the email, print it out, stick it in an envelope, find out from his traveling secretary which residence he is currently occupying, write that address on the front and affix postage stamps representing the proper postage in the upper right-hand corner, and drop the whole thing in a mailbox, (3) gramps will, if he is sufficiently moved by your entreaty, dictate a response to his secretary, who will then type said response, give it to him for proofreading, retype it and then insert it into an envelope, write my address on the front and affix proper postage in the proper place and mail it, and (4) I will then scan the response into a text file, quickly read the response against the text file to ensure its accuracy, copy the text file into a reply email at the elderouterlife account and hit the "send" button. Gramps requests that you then print his response on bond paper with at least a 25% cotton content (please, no recycled paper) in order to ensure the proper reading experience. The whole process should take no more than 6-8 weeks.
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