License Plates

Certain members of my immediate family are obsessed with license plates.  

I think it started with a "slug bug"-type game where the first person to call out the state of a license plate from a car not originating from the state that we are currently in, gets to punch one or two other passengers playing (or sometimes not playing) the game.  This particular license plate game was retired around the time that we drove as a family from Charlotte, NC to Florida, and then back again.

When I got my car in California, I was randomly assigned one of the best license plate combinations ever, which I will not post here because it's the internet.  Samantha was particularly amused with this assignment, and started a downward  lateral spiral into interpreting the three-letter codes that lie in the standard CA license plate.  There are several three-letter combinations that portray some kind of meaning, so taking note of the three-letter codes is a little bit mesmerizing.  I have to admit, I have been sucked into the quest for unintentionally meaningful license plate numbers. For example, just today I saw "CAL" and "NBA" fixed in the middle of a couple standard-issue CA license plates.  

First in Flight, Y'all!
Apparently someone is selling this license plate on the internet, because
of it's limited availability.  Buy it here. Just kidding, don't.

One or two years later, on the other side of the US, my mom got a new car and with it, a new North Carolina license plate.  While the new car was a happy addition to the garage, it came with the experimental red lettering on the license plate, rather than the traditional dark blue.  Once the license plate designers from the state of NC came to their senses, the red letters/numbers were abandoned for the reliable and more clearly visible blue.  My mom, Christy, has a list in her car where she has nearly narrowed down the first and last red license plate numbers of North Carolina, by observation of license plate numbers and letter colors.

Last month, I came upon a legendary moment in my family's license-plate-obsession history.  I saw a car with a license plate whose number differed from my own by only the last digit.  In theory, the likelihood that a given car with a standard license plate has a number that is so close to my own is 5.7 x 10^-8 (does anyone know how to use superscript in Blogger?).  In reality the probability is much larger, but I won't go so far as to research license plate distribution patterns, when 0 and O are used, etc.

Question: is blogging about license plates more or less interesting than blogging about nail polish or the color pink?  Feel free to leave comments below.