May 2006
My birthday! Guess what I'm doing? Driving down to VA to check out the plates myself!

March 2006
Check out this NPR On the Media for more on VAnity license plates (see WEENME below)–freedom of speech or foolishness?

January 2006
Happy New Year!

September 2005
On the heels of National Banned Books Week (9/19 – 23), censorship is always threatening to raise its ugly head in interesting ways:

A Lawsuit Darkly
Out in Seattle, WA, author Anne Mini had jumped through just about every hoop a writer can over the long years of crafting before the carrot of publication finally was dangled. The result: A Family Darkly, her memoir of her friendship with SciFi writer Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – aka Bladerunner; Minority Report; A Scanner Darkly – see the publisher’s tie-in now?) is officially set for release from Carroll & Graf on February 9, 2006 (available for pre-order from Amazon). The carrot has been offered but the cart has got a rock under the wheel: Namely, Philip’s kin (who claim Mini herself isn’t as the daughter of PDK’s second wife and her next husband, and therefore has no right to her POV of PDK) trying to ban the book. See Anne’s blog at PNWA for all the darkness (and some good tips on writing too)!

WeenMe from The Man!
In Charlottesville, VA, musician and technologist Tom Rose, longtime fan of the band Ween, and holder since 2002 (with first expiration of 2004) of a WEENME personalized Virginia license plate, now gets the VA DMV on his case because of “a sexual connotation” the Division is apparently reading into the denotations, according to any reputable dictionary, of both “wean” as “to accustom” or “to take an animal or person from nursing to another food source” and “ween” as “to think, charm or imagine.” One can only ween how the DMV came to such a loaded conclusion. Maybe it’s because those Old English words just all sound so titillating…then again, so do the Latin ones - sic semper tyrannus anyone?

© Tom Rose