Baking Purple, Gerald Became Oblique

Factual Questions
1

I saw the above on a licence plate in San Francisco.
Does anyone have the slightest ides what it means or refers to?

2

This was on a license plate? California? Was there any picture or anything with it? Did you mean bumper sticker?

3

This is interesting. My guess is that it’s an anagram of something.

I even downloaded some anagram tools but… ugh.

Here are a few of the “better” ones :smiley:

Bugger! No able equipped blackmailer!
Crap! unequalled, improbable, big geek.
Queer rampaged pub-like, angelic blob.
Pimp unequalled, barbaric geek globe.
Prime quick bleed probable language.
Beggar ill-equipped backbone mauler.

4

No it was on the frame around the plate, like this:

       ______________________
      |         BAKING PURPLE,         |
      |           CALIFORNIA              |
      |           \/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/             |
      |           / \/ \/ \/ \/ \/\             |
      |                                            |
      | GERALD BECAME OBLIQUE. |

My thought was that it could be some kind of mnemonic,
like Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain or similar.

Or maybe the driver had been to too many Grateful Dead gigs,
if you know what I mean.

5

Huh. Bizarre.
I’ll see your anagrams and mnemonic and raise you some synonyms. I’ve seen puzzles where old sayings or movie titles are replaced with synonyms or definitions, like “The penchant for discovery resulted in the death of the feline”. Problem is I can’t think of anything reasonable for this license plate frame. Maybe it is a Grateful Dead thing (Gerald == Jerry?).

6

The first thing that popped into my head was “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Except that this plainly isn’t colorless. It’s purple. So you’re on your own.

7

I don’t know if it helps, but google the whole sentence withouth the " and got this site:

http://www.shanetracey.com/txt/Overdrive_en.doc

Being that it is based on a Gibson book, I would be surprised if it appeared there as a sentence. :wink: :smiley:

XicanoreX

8

Yeah, I tried that. All the words are in there, but not as a sentence. A shame because it did seem a promising lead.

9

Did you get a good look at the construction of the sticker, or plate holder, or whatever it was? I have a wild-assed guess that it might be that magnetic “refrigerator poetry”? You know, the set contains a whole bunch of different words – nouns, verbs, adjectives – and each word is on a separate magnet, and you scramble and re-arrange the magnets to form sentences at half-random? Maybe the driver doesn’t like them on his refrigerator, he likes them on his car, and maybe he has them a certain way for a while, then when he gets tired, constructs a new, but not necessarily meaningful, sentence?