Chicken-Fried News: Playing tag

Everywhere Jimmy drives in the city, the others watch him. He is a marked man, an outlaw. Jimmy slinks around police cars with growing anxiety. His family and friends make fun of his status. He is an untouchable, a relic from an erased past.

Don’t be like Jimmy. Update your state license plate today.

The hard deadline to get Oklahoma’s new white-and-blue, scissortail-adorned license plate (or available alternatives) on your vehicle was Jan. 1. Anyone who still has one of the old bison plates will not only stick out like a sore thumb on the roads but will be easy pickings for ticketing patrol officers.

There are a lot of reasons someone might not have a tag yet: misinformation, procrastination, lack of time, personal hardship, shortage of funds. It costs just $5 for a new plate, plus the taxes and fees usually associated with renewing tags, which might not seem like a lot but can be cumbersome under certain circumstances.

Another reason someone might not have a new plate yet is that they simply do not care for the new design. We here at Chicken-Fried News can’t say we blame them. The cartoonish scissortail flycatcher silhouette is highly reminiscent of the Twitter logo. And all license plates fall comically short of Oklahoma’s vintage shield license plate of yesteryear, one of the greatest looking tags of all-time (in our humble opinion).

Oklahoma Tax Commission is offering a grace period through the end of the month to get your tag changed without financial penalty. The police, however, are ticketing defunct plates right away. So if Jimmy wants to renew his plate and ditch the hindrance, CFN suggests that he be strategic and stealthy when he drives to the tag agency.

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