We can get a message for the day from the first vanity plate we glimpse on a car in the street, as recently discussed in this space.. So why not from the first crazy T-shirt spotted in a day?

Here’s the one I am looking at right now, on a young man seated opposite me at John F. Kennedy airport, where I am changing planes en route to the Baltic. I haven’t seen too many T-shir designs on home turf so far this year, as we slowly emerge from a long winter.

This one isn’t quite as crazy-funny as it might be, since it casts my mind back to a really weird instance of zombie-weird synchronicity back in 2008, on the eve of the stock market crash. I was driving to an advanced class, listening to NPR on a local public radio station. NPR’s “Marketplace” show came on and I half-listened to the summary of business and economic news.

“Now we’ll do the numbers,” the announcer said. But instead of the daily stock market prices, what followed was a strange and creepy skit involving an entrepreneur who had supposedly come up with a product called Zomb-E-Gone, which he hoped to turn into a mass cellar by mass-producing zombies in the bayous of Louisiana and turning them loose to create a market for a zombie extermination product.

There was no explanation of why this skit replaced the second half of the regular NPR program.

When I got to my class, I recounted the bizarre incident and discussed what it might mean as a message from the world. “Maybe it means that the guys running Wall Street are zombified, and we should sell all stocks in our pension funds,” I half-joked.

I considered it, but didn’t do it. That weekend, we learned that Lehmann Brothers had been allowed to fold, and the Big Crash began…