Slate: Kind of awesome (Updated with more awesomeness!)

Slate is all kinds of awesome today. Darren Rovell has a piece up about Ken Griffey Jr.’s 1989 Upper Deck rookie card, and what its continued popularity suggests. Anyone who collected baseball cards back in the glory days of the early 1990s remembers that card, and if I had to guess you could trace the trajectory of the baseball card industry with the price of that card in back issues of Beckett’s guide to cards.

Then we have Jack Shafer on his back and forth with Michael Crichton over the collapse of the media. I read pretty much everything Crichton writes, struggling through the stilted dialogue and the cardboard characters, because his ideas are kind of fascinating. Shafer seems ready to concede that the old media is dying, and Crichton seems ready to admit that the web is a viable entity. Check out the sidebar as well, especially Crichton’s take on the reaction to his global warming thriller, State of Fear.

Finally, there’s Seth Stevenson on the Wii Fit. I find the Wii Fit to be an incredibly intriguing development in the world of American video games. I kind of want to pick one up for myself and see what it can do–the $90 price point is kind of off-putting, though. And it is apparently sold out all over the place. (As is the Wii itself–I cannot believe Nintendo is still having trouble keeping these systems on the shelf. With the way we’re headed it could be the first product ever to be the hot Christmas gift three years in a row. Not bad for a system with no great games.)

Awesome Update: Make sure to check out the “hot document” about the teacher who allowed one of her students to get voted out of the class by the other kids. It’s fantastic stuff, even moreso because of the whining by the parent making the complaint. You don’t like the way your kid was treated? Maybe you should teach your little brat to be better behaved. Nobody disputes that the child would “kick students, throw crayons, eat crayons, crawl under the table, kick the table of other students, and [would] disrupt the class.” Autism or no, bad behavior is bad behavior and perhaps a little embarrassment will whip him into shape. Good on the police for not recommending punishment against the teacher.