Bullets to Balls

I did a bit of traveling by car with the family recently and thought I’d  mention seven things people put on their vehicles which mystify me.

1. Bullet hole stickers. I tend to see these on older,  more, ‘lived-in’ vehicles. In addition to a fine patina of rust, duct-taped tail lights and t-shirt seat covers, the owners have thoughtfully added stick on bullet holes. According to Amazon,  “Realistic bullet hole stickers instantly give your automobile a rugged, bullet hole riddled appearance for instant street-cred.” So, I guess they’re designed to make up for the fact that your car is a piece of crap. Thankfully I don’t need to resort to stickers to give my 15 passenger handicap accessible van street-cred, at least not for a few more years anyway.

2. Hubcaps that keep spinning after the car stops. I get motion sick just looking at these while sitting at a red light. I’m also perpetually afraid a car whose wheels never stop moving is going to cut me off.

3. Decals of Bill Watterson’s Calvin peeing on things. Calvin and Hobbes is one of the greatest comics ever. Watterson never licensed his images to be used on anything, so every time I see a rip off of his iconic character urinating on a logo I contemplate grabbing a dirty diaper from the van and throwing it at the offending vehicle and driving off. (Oh yeah, like you don’t have a dirty diaper hiding somewhere in your van right now. A rancid sippy cup would work too.)

4. Stuffed animals tied to the front grille of a large truck. Seriously, this has to stop people. ( I’m talking to you neighborhood recycling truck!)  It totally freaks out my toddler to see a dirty teddy bear, covered with smashed insects, flopped over, with a rope around his neck on the front of your truck. No, he’s not waving to get you to honk, he’s trying to get you to slow down and rescue the bear you ran into; which, as far as he knows, was casually picnicking before your showed up.

5. Ovals with letters. This started as a neat trend; a fun way to document your favorite places. ‘OC’ stood for Ocean City. ‘CM’ stood for Cape May. But then people had to get ‘creative’ with the letters and create an oval for every nook and cranny and interest. Some cars look like they’re covered in goose eggs that read “CRP’, Centre County, PA and ‘WVR’, West Virginia Rotary Club. There’s actually a website ovalcarstickers.com where you can buy one that says “Your Mom for President”. I think that means it’s officially time to send these stickers off to wherever fads go when they die.

6. Stick figure families. Again, I didn’t start off disliking these. And I still think for the newlywed couple, or young family with a couple kids, it’s no big deal. It’s when the big families I know start covering their windows with stick babies and dogs and soccer playing kids. A dozen stickers later they’re trying to explain to the officer that pulled them over, “I’m sorry officer, I didn’t mean to cut off that driver but they fell in my stick figure blind spot.”

7. Ornamental Testicles, a.k.a. Truck Balls. There’s no nice way to describe a metal scrotum that someone chooses to hang from the back of their truck. What struck me the first time I saw them, was that they weren’t really in proportion to the trucks they were strung on. I mean, if God had designed super-duty-Hemi-3500 trucks to have genitalia, wouldn’t it be bigger than what He had bestowed upon, say,  a horse? It also bothers me that there a people slaving away in a hot factory on the other side of the globe for minuscule pay, so that dudes in America can pass my van on the highway and flaunt their chrome packages in front of my children. That was not a health lesson I was prepared for!

Did I miss anything?