The mystery of the Twitter vanity plate

I have spent too long this week trying to reason with people whose sense of reason was long ago bartered for an evening's supply of chardonnay and crepes.

So I went for a relaxing drive the other night, just to clear my head.

Suddenly, there before me was an odd sight: a car with the license plate TWITTER.

I know that some people enjoy having a license plate that attracts attention. You know, things like POOK4U and 3RDWIFE. My favorite in my neighborhood is the Prius with the license plate SMUGCAR.

And yet here was a car with TWITTER.

You might conceive that some rich, vain individual had bought this license plate to adorn his BMW or Aston Martin. You might also expect to see it adorn some very worthy (and pricey) planet-saving model like a Volt or a Tesla.

And yet, as LA Weekly reports, quite a few vanity plates appear on Saturns and other cars of little description.

As I began to focus, I realized that this TWITTER-bearing car was an extremely careworn Saab 900 SE. Its primary color was dirty. Beneath that, there appeared to be the remains of charcoal gray.

It could have been worse. At least it wasn't a VW Microbus.

I tried to catch up to see who was driving, to no avail. But I did manage to park and take a shot of its rear, displayed above.

Twitter associated with a Saab? Twitter associated with a company whose best fortunes seem behind it and whose cars were often symbolic of, well, not all that much?

Is the owner, or the universe, trying to tell us something about Twitter? Is this some strange form of subliminal propaganda that portends Twitter's ultimate fortunes?

There again, perhaps it's Jack Dorsey's car. But he says he rides the bus every day.

Please elevate me from my confusion. Who this person might be? The Saab was traveling from Marin County into San Francisco. Is it a modest Twitter employee? Or merely someone who thought it might be fun to have the license plate on a beat-up old car?

Or is it some conniving entrepreneur who believes that he can make a killing with this rather fetching plate?

Some mysteries -- such as the machinations of certain minds -- will remain so forever. This one, however, needs an answer.