A black sedan to take you to the nearest star

License plates are bargain-basement syncs, and at first I wasn’t going to bother posting this one. Last night, I stopped at a red light behind a black BMW sedan with the license plate AMU 6666.

Repeating digits always feel significant, but they aren’t really in this case. Series of sixes or eights are considered lucky by the Chinese. Vanity plates as such aren’t available in Taiwan, but you can pay more — sometimes a lot more, occasionally more than the value of the car itself — to get a lucky series of digits. People who do this are the same kinds of people who drive BMWs.

AMU appeared in the "Igxuhp zvmwqfb Jack dry stolen" post, and Bill identified it as Elvish. In "Ascending to the black star," I said that the AMU was leading to the black star in the center of a Scrabble board.

I saw the AMU license plate on a black sedan. In the Ides of March song "Vehicle," which has been back in the sync stream as Roy Jay’s theme song, the singer introduces himself as “a friendly stranger in a black sedan” and offers to “take you to the nearest star.”

In the black star post, I also note that Wm, an abbreviation for my name which I have used since childhood, appears, written backwards, intersecting AMU. The brand name BMW also contains a backwards Wm. Furthermore, XU and MW together form a square divided crosswise, blue in two opposite corners and white in the other two. This is the same color scheme, though in mirror image, as the BMW logo.

I wasn’t going to post the above, but this morning I got a reinforcing sync. I stopped at a red light again, and in front of me was a scooter with the plate "888 BWM." That’s another repdigit, and three eights are equal to four sixes. Yesterday’s sedan had prompted the thought that BMW contains a backwards Wm. Now here was BMW with the Wm written in the correct order. It seemed to be saying, "Hey, don't forget that other license plate you saw yesterday!"

Both 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 and 8 + 8 + 8 add up to 24. Does that number have some significance here? It's the total number of letters in my full name, but that's about all I've got so far.

Update: The number 24 turns out to be directly relevant to AMU. Bill wrote this in a comment on "Ascending to the black star":

Incidentally, I scored the word, even though I know diagonal words aren't allowed. With the triple and double letter scores, combined with the double word score, AMU gives us a solid 24. Not bad.