I remember the last bumper sticker I put on a car. It said, "This is a MAD bumper sticker". And yes, it was my parents' car.

There are few others places in America where the liberal temptation to preen oneself publicly via bumper stickers is so widely indulged. The California granola belt certainly, and Minneapolis, Mad City Wisconsin, the two Portlands, the more pretentious parts of the Bos-Wash corridor, Denver, and Austin Texas. That's really about it. Sad thing, too. The looneys are adorably predictable in their delusional thinking.

It's a wonderful source of entertainment that the bumper sticker ratio corresponds so closely to the age and dilapidation of the car and the sheer in-your-face ugliness of the usually lesbian and/or manhating female driver.

When the driver is a male, he is without exception a too-thin and too-earthtoned college professor or wannabee who's terrified that someday he'll leave the seat up and his better half will chuck him into the recycle bin. Notable only for his complete lack of testosterone, he bends over any available barrel to accept blame for everything from slavery to fluffernut sandwiches.

If Seattle were not ringed about with aircraft assembly towns, fishing and farming areas and suburbs full of pickup trucks, wolf-hybrid dogs and ski-doos, it would blow away in a pink fog on the prevailing pacific westerlies.

And the bumper sticker crowd would love it.

I've always wanted to put this on a bumper sticker:

"LOOK AT ME!
I HAVE A BUMPER STICKER
ON MY CAR!"

But I can't even get jazzed enough to bother printing that one up.

I just don't know how to appraise these people any more. There is a certain level of rationality, an ability to see things for what they are, rather than what you wish they were, that is really lacking in our world today. And no matter what your politics, that is not a good thing.

I remember the original version of the first bumper sticker you showed. It read, "Nuke A Gay Whale For Jesus". I was 15, maybe 16 when I first saw it.

Then there's the ever popular "I (club) Baby Seals" and "I (spade) My Dog" (with the words in parentheses replaced by the card suit). (I read the first for the first time in the window of the car of a man who wears orange on Saint Patrick's Day. Just to be different. (He a doctrinaire dissident.))

Though I must confess some favorable bias for the bumper sticker that reads, "The Meek Will Inherit the Earth, The Rest of Us Are Going to the Stars"

I actually saw the one about the whales on the road but it went one better. "Nuke a gay whale for Jesus".

My all time favorite was one I saw in DC: "Keep honking, I'm reloading"

Most curious pairing: Toyota Prius with Bush/Cheney '04.

I always thought that if your philosophy of life could be summed up on a bumper sticker, well, it could only be very shallow. Or it may be the usual 'Look at me!' narcissistic tendencies of modern life.

Gee, and I always thought it was "Nuke The Gay Whales For Christ" -- !

That last one is more fun when it's "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me."

We have a comment about "how many bumper stickers crazy" somebody is. If you can say it in one, that's okay. If it's "My child is an honor student at — ", that's annoying, but okay. I'm sure it makes the kid happy anyway. Band stickers are also pretty safe.

But beyond those freebies, bumper stickers are a good gauge of how rabid somebody is. Once you get past three you're getting into billboard fanatic territory.

I have to give credit for originality, however, to people who subtly alter their bumper stickers in ways that completely change the message - it gives one a far more clear picture of their individual mentality.

By way of example, I recently saw a truck bearing one of those "COEXIST" stickers that Mark Steyn has fulminated so admirably about; it had been defaced with a Dymotape labeler so that it read, if you got close enough to see it: "[HOW CAN WE] COEXIST [WITH PEOPLE WHO] [WANT TO *KILL* US?!]"