Positive talking

I do notice the negative tendency of everything I say here and most other places, it's something I used to do and stopped, only to be revived years later. Apart from the cathartic effect of letting it all go free, it is a downer for people having to witness it as well, so I must retrain myself. There were various very sensible reasons for originally getting on that track, but it's become habitual, and as the major event that may have got me out of it may never happen, only I can fix it myself.

So it may slip back, but I'll try to leave out all the dismal stuff when I notice it and see if I start to feel better as well after a while as a result. I will try and focus on todays positives then, or leave out the negatives. As it happened I only started this as it was raining as I was going for a walk, and as a result I caught a phone call I'd have missed, did a few trivia quizzes and discovered a pile of new trivia in the trivia archive I rarely check out. Did anyone else know the video game Mario brothers was named after Nintendo's landlord? That's the sort of crap I thrive on, and the bonus is though many people regularly hear these sort of facts, like jokes, they forget them. Not me, a few go astray but the majority go into the infinite mental hard drive, to join every other I've picked up. What else did I do today worth mentioning? OK, I'll have to look elsewhere for data... I did look up a totally weird car number plate I saw the other day, it had a British format plate made on a German style with all the spaces in the wrong place, and the country ID was EU. I am a member of Europlate, the world plate collectors club, and have their books on world plate IDs. EU plates are all prefixed with EURO or similar, not mangled British formats. This, in a few months is apparently the third of a fairly new phenomenon. Following the flood of fake UK style plates that started to avoid paying the London congestion charge, there are now people making plates on foreign formats, vague Eastern European types with imaginary character layouts, and apparently having no problem when they register the cars to enter the country.
Terrorism, international crime and all the rest of activities flooding the country are going to be made a lot easier when people with fake IDs are able to enter Britain with cars impossible to even connect to a particular country let alone someone in it. I am hoping the EU one may be an unrecorded new format, but I do know special plates rarely reach many characters as so few people use them. So a 4 letter 3 number job is hardly likely to replace the previous 4 number jobs the EU staff use currently.

Anyway, at least you can see wherever I go, I've always spotted cars and car numbers, and when you consider how boring a trip round the North Circular is (especially when it was closed all afternoon, I was lucky to be just beyond the chaos) I can see a duff plate before the figures are legible. I saw a Smart car at the lights today with white Dutch plates front and rear. Apart from Luxembourg and bits of Southern Africa The Netherlands use yellow on both, except their new lorries. Why anyone over there would be able to get one put on a car is a mystery, as I don't think a country can issue any other format except its own. You get a good deal of idiots who come here from abroad and think it's really clever to go to Halfords and get them to make them on our style, thus appearing not to be a target for the occasional xenophobic policeman. But as far as I know you can only make a Dutch style plate there, and if their laws are the same as ours, it's now an offence to make an incorrect one as well as display one. So, that was a quick lesson on car number plates, the most interesting events in the last few days. Positive or negative? Depends if you're reading or writing about it...