Well, since the secret's out already ...

... about my love of license plates, I thought I'd share one more that I saw today that I really liked. Today Karen and I drove up to Maine, the easternmost state in the US (if you don't get technical about the Aleutian Islands in Alaska being further east). Maine is famous for its seafood, especially its lobster (read: lobstah), which is probably the best in the country (but their clam chowder (read: chowdah) comes a distant second behind Boston's). One of the license plates offered in Maine is this one:



It doesn't say "save the lobsters" or "enjoy Maine lobster" or "support lobster research" (which the license fee goes toward), it just says "Lobster". I love it.

By the way, when the Pilgrims first landed in Massachusetts, lobsters were so plentiful that they were literally crawling on the beaches. The Pilgrims, however, were fairly unadventurous eaters and, despite the natives showing them how to eat them and how good they were, they shunned everyone's favorite crustacean. The Pilgrims simply preferred their grain based diet. They considered lobster tasteless, were embarrassed to be forced by hungriness to eat it and considered it peasant's food. In fact, the most likely use for a lobster in the early days was to ground it up and use it as fertilizer for corn. Some claim it was even fed to the pigs. And there is at least one account of indentured servants ensuring in their contract that they would only be served lobster a maximum of twice a week. The fact is that today's delicacy was shunned by Americans until at least the 1880s.

If you want to read more about "homarus americanus", this book: "The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean", seems to be getting very good reviews.