Vanity

Want to express yourself on a license plate? Go ahead. The state will gladly take your $50 per year. You can't say any old thing, though. The Motor Vehicle Administration has cataloged more than 4,000 words, phrases and letter-number combinations it won't put on a tag. The agency's Objectionable Plate List, as it's called, is a compendium of vulgarities, obscenities and other no-no's aimed at keeping tags out of the gutter. The Baltimore Sun requested the information last week, hoping to share what the MVA doesn't want you to see on the road.

IT IS not often that one can see naked professional self-interest on display in public. But the current battle over whether the Food and Drug Administration should ban breast implants made of silicone gel is about as close as you can get.At least 2 million women in the United States have had silicone-gel breast implants. More than 75 percent of them just wanted biggerbreasts. A large number of American men find women with large breasts attractive, and women know this.It is important to add that a smaller but growing percentage of women have had implants for other reasons.

Havre de Grace. -- It's hard to be a yuppie. Not only do crusty old coots ridicule you as you struggle up the ladder of life in your dress-for-success clothes, but now your own ungrateful children are nipping at your heels.The old people don't like the way you've changed the country, and the young ones wish you'd drop dead so they can have your jobs, or at least your money and your toys. You're exposed and vulnerable, and you're beginning to feel the sting of discrimination. Movies mocking you and your values are now all the rage.

THE ERUPTION of revolution inside Britain's Conservative Party resulted from what Margaret Thatcher was, rather more than from what she had done. What she had done created the political condition in which revolution became possible. The implacable fact was that the Tory Party appeared likely to lose the next general election had Mrs. Thatcher remained its leader.For months now, the polls have indicated a Labor Party lead. They have indicated that if Michael Heseltine were to lead the party into a new election the Conservatives probably would win.Whether such forecasts would actually have been borne out in election-day behavior is open to question.

It was a few days after Christmas when 16-year-old Amanda Custer and her mom made a rare stop for a takeout burger. The indulgence ended badly for Amanda. Soon after, she said, "I felt real nauseous. Food was, like, gross. I got really bad cramps, a whole bunch of heartburn and an upset stomach. " And it didn't go away. "I would feel OK and try to eat something, and then I'd regret it," she recalled. "The pain afterwards was horrible. A couple of hours after I ate, I'd be going to the bathroom, feeling nauseous.

WHILE LIVING in another state, I used to see this woman driving around in a red sports car with vanity license plates that read: 2COOL.With her tinted aviator shades and frosted hair, I thought she looked, well, fairly cool. But not too cool, or even 2COOL, although I tend to be somewhat conservative about these things.What intrigued me is how the woman arrived at the conclusion that she was too cool. Did someone tell her she was too cool? Was she at a party, for instance, doing a hilarious send-up of Madonna when one of her friends, giddy from a couple of screwdrivers, cried out: "Margie (or whatever her name was)

"Ol' Strom," by Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson. Longstreet. 359 pages. $24. South Carolina's Strom Thurmond has been a U.S. senator for more than 43 years, longer than anyone else in history. But if you want to see his monument, don't look around the Senate or in the U.S. Code. He twice has been voted the "least effective" senator. That was long before old age overcame him in the 1990s.In 1986, he was more or less a spectator as the Armed Services Committee revamped the nation's military establishment, even though he was the senior Republican on the committee.

Ash Wednesday, by Ethan Hawke. Alfred A. Knopf. 220 pages. $22.95. Some novels sprawl ambitiously over the whole social fabric, others nestle within a single consciousness. The latter kind, focusing inward after a fashion perfected a hundred years ago by Henry James, takes the individual interior life as a favored site for exploration, a vast microcosmos rife with curiosities and prone to interesting revolutions. This is the type of novel that Ethan Hawke has written in his earnest, searching Ash Wednesday, where he attempts to trace the workings of a quiet transformation within an ordinary man. Trying to get inside a different person's skin and show the world from his point of view is a fitting artistic choice for someone whose primary work is acting -- which might be seen as the art of getting someone else inside one's own skin.

Despite complaints about the new Maryland license plates that have a War of 1812 theme, sales of vanity plates increased after the design was introduced in mid-June, the Motor Vehicle Administration says. MVA spokesman Buel Young said that from June 14 to June 30, the state sold 454 vanity plates with a design evoking the image of the 1814 bombardment of Fort McHenry. He said that compares with 334 vanity plates sold during the May 14-30 period, when the old black-on-white design was in use. The 1812 design is scheduled to be used as the default template for regular and vanity plates through 2015, when the state would revert to the former design.

When Minnie Driver first read the script for the Irish period romance "Circle of Friends," she immediately fell in love with the central female role of Bernadette."