This is kind of a “classic” as far as traditional white trash bumper stickers go. I saw this one the other day on the back of an old beater Ford pickup with a camper shell on it. As I passed by the truck, I considered the real meaning of this bumper declaration.

On one hand, it totally makes sense. Why keep getting pissed off at the jackasses who tailgate you every day when you can spend $2.95 and have a sticker present your feelings to the other drivers? Perhaps it might have a reverse effect and cause you to be singled out as a target to be tailgated. It’s like you’re asking to be tailgated because you’ve identified that it does, indeed, press your buttons.

On the other hand, the wording leaves one to ponder the possibility that the bearer of this message is, in fact, inviting any hemorrhoids who may not already be on his or her ass to do so. A simple flip/flop of the two clauses reveals the alternate meaning:

“Stay off my ass unless you’re a hemorrhoid”

It’s like you’re practically begging for hemorrhoids! Is that what you want?

So to those drivers who have this bumper sticker or to any that might be thinking about getting it, I caution you to consider the real message behind this particular sticker. Deep down, you probably don’t want to start inviting hemorrhoids to be on your ass.

Unless you’re a hemorrhoid, stay off my ass! is a post from: holySmith!

As I continue my award-winning reporting on the state of bumper stickers in our world, I humbly submit: UNMARKED POLICE VEHICLE as my latest.

holySmith! The Wife and I encountered this on the way home from bowling Wednesday night. We both laughed at it when we saw it on the back of some kid’s Scion or whatever little car it was, thus the joke. This is a perfect example of what a great bumper sticker is and what one should be. It doesn’t pick sides or try to be too daring. It just makes a subtle, yet hilarious joke that brings quick pleasure to those who get to drive behind the car sporting it.

I would have to rank it up there with such greats as “What if the whole world farted at once?” and “What if the Hokey Pokey IS what it’s all about?”. I want to be entertained by your bumper stickers, not preached to, insulted, or provoked politically. I still get a kick out of people who are still showing John Kerry presidential stickers and stuff like that. holySmith! is pondering the need for legislation on bumper sticker content. Perhaps holySmith! can be the new Bumper Sticker Czar?

Unmarked Police Vehicle is a post from: holySmith!

So we went over to the Costco Home store today to check out rugs for the townhouse. In the parking lot, I saw a big two-tone Lincoln Towncar that had two bumper stickers. One was “Bush-Cheney 04″ and the other was “W – Still the President”.

Hmmm.

I thought about that for a second and I guess that’s about the ONLY positive thing you can say about him. . . “Yep, he is still the president”. No arguing that.

Naturally that should be on a bumper sticker. Karl Rove is probably proud of that one. That’s a brilliant retort to all the mocking of the president, like “W – Still and Idiot” and stuff like that. Political arguments via bumper stickers are very much like arguments between six-year-olds that include such jabs as “my dog could beat up your dog” and “I know you are but what am I?”.

I only wish I could have seen the people who owned the car. I still have yet to meet anyone who A) admits they voted for Bush and B) openly supports him and his actions. We live in a country where the first public reaction to anything is “who is to blame” for anything that happens. Why can’t Americans just admit we fucked up and move on with a better solution? It doesn’t matter who you voted for…we win as a team and we lose as a team.

Our country is completely jacked up because we have nationwide mourning and candle light vigils when 32 people are tragically murdered, but we could give two shits that 500 people were killed a few days later in the Middle East due to our president’s actions and choices in that whole mess. Lots of innocent kids died there, too, and it is equally tragic in my humble opinion, but nobody is holding a candle light vigil for that. Nobody is discussing how those people are trying to put the pieces back together. It’s a shame that those things happened, but it is disturbing how little we care about things that aren’t happening here, even when we are just as responsible for tragedies outside our borders.

But hey, W is still our president.

Bumper-ology continued: W is still president is a post from: holySmith!

I’ve been around. I’ve lived in a lot of places. One thing that I can’t ever seem to get over is that people with Illinois vanity license plates are dumb. I have never seen a single creative vanity plate from Illinois. Almost every single one you see has the person’s name with a number. Most of the time, the person’s name doesn’t fit and it is some random number, like 12.

Now, the point of a vanity plate is to make a statement or to be creative (CRE8IVE as long as we are speaking license plate here). I can understand wanting to put your name on the car (well, actually, I think that is stupid), but when hundreds of other people have the same name, you have to get your name and then some number. That means if your last name is something like Johnston, you probably have to abbreviate and leave room for the number. So now that means that not only are you NOT the first person with that name to get that tag, but you have to publicly state that you are the 12th person named Johnston (or whatever name/number it is) to not have the creativity to come up with something unique to bolt onto your vehicle.

Retards. Don’t forget that I live in Arizona, which may as well be another suburb of Chicago since half the people who moved here are from Chicago (myself included, although I prefer to clarify that while I have lived in Chicago and other towns in IL, I am FROM St. Louis). Anyway, I just saw another dumb example on the way home today (an IL tag) advertising WLD SYD 9. I assume that means “Wild Syd” and that Syd is probably short for Sydney because it looked like a chick who was driving. I don’t know why it pisses me off every time I see a dumb IL vanity plate, but it does. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you have to PAY EXTRA for the custom plate, so why would you settle for something unoriginal and otherwise stupid? Maybe it’s just me.

Thankfully, Arizona has some pretty creative vanity plates that are fun to figure out as you drive. And since all the people here from IL wait several years to change their plates over to Arizona plates, there are still plenty of chances to be creative without having to append your name with a number. Unfortunately for me, the example vanity plate for AZ is JSMITH, so it looks like I will just have to be more creative I suppose.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that this happens in Illinois. After all, all those same retards are Cubs fans

UPDATE: Somewhere in here I mentioned that people have to pay extra for the vanity plates. In a recent trip back to St. Louis, MO (it’s right across the river from IL, dummy), I was told that people don’t have to pay extra for vanity plates in Illinois. THAT’S STILL NO EXCUSE!

Secondly, in the same trip back to St. Louis, I saw literally hundreds of examples of stupid Illinois vanity plates, thus solidifying my theory. We’re done with this one. Write it into law.

People from Illinois have the Dumbest Vanity Plates is a post from: holySmith!

I enjoy the philosophical advertising on the back of the countless cars that have driven in front of me for all the years that I have been a licensed road-smith.

Bumper stickers are so clever sometimes. No Jesus, No Peace. Know Jesus, Know Peace. Total crap as far as I am concerned, but clever. The endless war of the Jesus fish (the line in the sand story for all you Bible thumpers), which suddenly grows legs and has Darwin’s name in the middle, but more recently, a larger Jesus fish with teeth eating the Darwin fish. Totally messed up, but symbol re-appropriation at it’s best.

This sticker caught my attention the other day. It clearly advertises that God is not Republican or Democrat in terms of “his” political views. I sat behind this person waiting to turn left onto Baseline Road and it gave me time to think. I thought, maybe I will get a “God is not a Republican, he’s a Whig” bumper sticker, just to be different. But then I remembered that I don’t believe in any particular sort of god, so it would be lying. I may not be godly, but I certainly am not a liar.

Then I thought more about it and wondered what kind of person this was in front of me. What was this bumper sticker saying about this person? Was this person religious? Probably. Was this person on the left, right, or in the middle of the political spectrum? Not sure. Was this person educated or not? No clue. I don’t remember what kind of car it was, so I couldn’t even make a guess as to the level of affluence. It’s all very interesting.

Political bumper stickers pretty much piss me off. Neither side is really that clever. With every new president comes the same bumper sticker messages: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Mondale”. “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Kerry.” Are these really better than the alternative? There is clearly no way to prove that the person who did not (or who actually DID get elected, as it were) would have been any better than the douchebag in office now. What’s the point? We all have to live with it all the same, so why point fingers and fight about what might have been. I have always thought less of people who advertise via rear bumper that they, in fact, voted for the loser.

Hang up and drive. Now that’s something I agree with, in part. The funny thing is, those are stickers that usually appear on the bumpers of the kind of people who are just now starting to think that “Who Let the Dogs Out” is cutting edge hip-hop music. These are the ones who never had a cell phone until recently because they refused to get on board the cell phone craze like all the other “damn liberal yuppies” until they realized that it is an essential piece of communicating technology that everyone should have. Before they had the phone, they sat in the glass house pointing fingers at cell phone talking drivers because they either didn’t have a cell phone or if they did, nobody called them. Easy to not talk on the phone while you are driving if you don’t have one.

But when they finally get the cell phone, they are the worst offenders. I have seen someone driving (swerving) over the lines like a drunk, talking on the phone, WITH THAT STICKER ON THE BACK OF THE TRUCK. Yes. Hippocrite. Asshole.

That sticker was made for a certain type of driver — usually about 23 years old, female, hot, driving a small import car with 14,000 beaded necklaces hanging from the rear-view, and completely oblivious to the driving public around her. She has a cigarette in one hand, her elbow propped up on the door so the cig hangs ever so slightly out the window, seat moved up so close to the wheel that she can use her chin to steer, knee on the wheel, and phone in her right hand. Good thing daddy got her an automatic. These are usually the ones who cut people off, tailgate, or just plain are wreckless, like the rest of the Earth is revolving around her. But whatever, at least she’s hot, right?

So, bumper stickers. I will start a gallery of stickers that I like, that I hate, that provoke me in some way, or that are actually funny. I actually aspire to be a bumper sticker author and perhaps I will start trying a few out on the site over time. Years ago I realized that only the truly brilliant can generate deep philosophical ideas that can be stated in so few words and such readable fonts.

You can really tell a lot about someone just by the bumper advertising they do. You can tell what degree of redneck they are by the combination of the kid peeing on one brand of truck or another, the NASCAR driver number they sport, the complete Dale Earnhardt tribute, the number of support-the-troops stickers, cheesy American slogans, “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student”, and W in 04 stickers. I enjoy these stickers most because they almost always indicate that the driver is sporting a classic MULLET hairdo — from the old Tennessee Tophat to the Kentucky Waterfall, the ’87 Camaro Mullet to the ’87 IROC Z-28 Camaro Mullet (it’s faster than the regular Camaro Mullet), from the classic “7″ to the Barry Melrose hockey helmet flowing locks mullet. Mullet sightings are indeed priceless.

Actually, the people who advertise religious and political messages are usually the ones most likely to piss me off while driving. One good thing is that it helps me target the type of profane name I will use as I pass them. I think people open themselves up to harsh criticism with their backend advertisements. As a rule, I do not place bumper stickers on my cars. Wit the exception of my small Sig Ep letters in the corner of my rear window of my old car, I never advertised via my car.

Part of that stems back to my father going ape-shit (and rightfully so) when I attempted to place a bumper sticker on the back of our 1973 Javelin’s chrome bumper. I recall that my mom had won a radio contest and received the radio station schwag, including a bumper sticker for “Morgan in the Morning” – the show from which she won whatever contest. So I slapped that puppy on the back of the Javelin and when my mom saw it, she threw out the old “Dad’s gonna kill you,” and sure enough. Well, within an inch of my life at least, and I had to watch him try to remove it from a polished chrome bumper. It wasn’t pretty.

Since that beating, I don’t do bumper stickers. I think they are tacky on cars, so I pin them up in my office or stick them on the side of my computer. The other reason I do that is so people can read them and comment to me directly. On the back of cars, you can’t really strike up a conversation with the person in order to determine just how far up the dipshit chain they really are. At least when I put one on the corkboard at the office, I can count on good conversation as a result.

I guess if I want to be a well known bumper sticker author/philosopher, I should start coming up with some material. But that will have to wait for another blog entry.

The study of bumper stickers is a post from: holySmith!