Spotted in the wild, a real live Reagan Republican. I love that exclamation point:



Bumper sticker taxonomy has always held a certain fascination for me. I still remember the "I'm Pagan and I Vote" car in B-town, and yesterday I saw an honest-to-goodness Constitution Party member ("Get the U.S. out of the U.N.!") in downtown St. Paul.

This is apart from the Twin Cities' usual sea of Kerry and Wellstone bumper stickers, some of the latter looking positively ancient. (I haven't seen a Gore sticker in a while; presumably they've long since reached the end of their bumper span.) Is the lifespan of bumper stickers from the previous presidential election correlated with national partisanship? I haven't been paying close enough attention to know.

However, I do know exactly what bumper stickers I want for my car — they're "apolitical" by most definitions of the term, albeit not mine — but those are luxuries. And this is, or at least I've been calling it, the Last Tight Month.

In related news, about a month ago I saw a guy in a "Punks Not Dead" (sic) shirt on the Midway. I've never seen a more appropriate omitted apostrophe: very punk. There's absolutely nothing wrong here.

All in all, having once been a rather pointy-headed (code for ignorant, among other things) prescriptivist, I find a descriptivist reading of public writing to be generally both more humanizing and more amusing. Less snickering and more deep, hilarious truths.