Goes Round and Round and Round

N ow that I'm on with the more serious and alert segment of my morning (up next, summing up c.1 of H. White's Tropics of Discourse), I have to point you to a bit I landed via Metafilter on proposed legislation to fine drivers of spinner-adorning autos in Iowa.  Spinning hubcaps can be misleading, you know; they give off the appearance that the vehicle's wheels are moving when they aren't. When the vehicle stops, the wheel covers keep moving.  When the vehicle's moving, the wheel covers could be rolling in reverse motion. They're perceptually dishonest.  Unethical.  Basically, expensive lies. And so to curb rampant wheel-cap mendacity among Iowa drivers, the fine would charge ten bucks for the offense.  I'm sharing this just because the comments are a riot, from comparisons of spinners to moonwalking (which also should be banned, yes?) and rear-view mirror danglers.  And definitely scroll down to the Jetta collapsed under the load of wood (in the linked entry, not the MF comments).

Open in a different tab:  Slate's Ed-in-Chief on "Blog Overkill." Gist: you be careful fetishizing new media, and journalists are s l o w e r than bloggers:

The biggest difference between me and conventional bloggers is that I usually pause between first thought and posting. Inspired by the slow food movement, I like to think of myself as a slow blogger. Sometimes I'm so slow--as this Wednesday dispatch from a Friday-Saturday conference proves--that I resemble a conventional journalist.

And

I'll send a U.S. dollar to the first who writes "Shafer doesn't get it."

For a dollar? Shafer doesn't get it.  If not getting it means overgeneralizing about the thoughtfulness and care girding most writing in the blogosphere or, in another spot, suggesting that new media merely mimic the work of old media, then it deserves more nuance.  But subtleties aside, the essay offers insight to the tensions between clashing info-economies--the flows and mediums and controls and values tangled together.  And that's worthwhile, especially if such attempts bring about dialogue that pushes any of us beyond revolution/stagnation cliches.