Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 10, 1992 TAG: 9203100162
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You are being duped once again into believing that maybe things aren't so bad after all.
Forget about it.
I am here to tell you that we are still bound headlong for ruination.
Virginia's new license plates serve us well as an example.
In May of 1990, Lauren Velander of Blacksburg and Claire English of Roanoke and 170 other Western Virginians designed colorful new license plates for Virginia to replace the insipid, dull plates we've endured since 1973.
Well, a pair of new license plate designs for Virginia cars and trucks were unveiled in January, and darned if they don't look suspiciously like Lauren and Claire's artworks.
Does the Motor Vehicles Department graciously admit that the idea of changing tags sprang from a grass-roots Western Virginia movement? That two of its citizens - Claire and Lauren - spiced life in the Old Dominion?
No. Big state government shrugged off the contribution, ignoring Lauren and Claire and denying they had anything to do with new tags.
Lauren, incidentally, was 9 years old when she designed her license plate. It took the state 19 months to swipe her idea.
Daffodils? A renaissance of hope? Ha! You should live so long!
In January, a van creamed the fiberglass, red-eyed, one-eared rhinoceros that for 14 years stood at the intersection of U.S. 460 and Wheatland Road, just west of Bedford.
The rhino had become, in 14 years, an important local lodestar.
Now Danny Johnson, who owns the shattered rhino, has commissioned repairs.
He has instructed fiberglass sculptor Mark Cline of Natural Bridge to include two ears.
Sacrilege! A boot heel in the face of gentility!
Would you put arms on the Venus de Milo? Fix the nose on the Sphinx? Straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
Daffodils! Bah!
by CNB