One Lap of the Web: Let's get dynamic

Car news and videos from all corners of the Internet
 Mercedes-Benz 
The Mercedes-Benz C-class Estate has "dynamic-agile handling," whatever that means. 

How do New Yorkers get by with cars? One way is to drive around in a Baja Bug. Another way is to dive into the strange subculture that is alternate-side street parking, as The Awl explains, which features its own robust cast of well-meaning street urchin characters.

-- The word "dynamic" used to mean something, man. It used to stand for something, something important, ya know? But decades of automotive obsessives started using the word so much that it is the most grating of buzzwords, like all those "synergy" jokes we made in the early 2000s. "Dynamic" jumped the proverbial shark when Audi, one of the affable Germans that overuses the word, released an RS7 "Dynamic Edition." The press release for the Mercedes-Benz C-class Estate used the word five times. Soon we'll have entire cars powered by dynamic synergy, and the world will belong to the Germans.

-- The mysterious, rocky substance known as "Fordite" doesn't refer to Henry Ford's kidney stones; it's actually chunks of automotive enamel paint, baked solid from years of dripping into the tracks leading out of factory paint booths. Fordite hardened into gorgeous, trippy layers of colorful swirls, giving it a near-geodic quality prized by artists and collectors. You can even wear it around your neck, if enterprising Etsy sellers are to be believed. Enamel paint and hand-spray painting both phased themselves out decades, ago, so there's a finite amount of the stuff -- if you ever wander around, say, the Packard plant, you might even find some yourself.

-- The most self-deprecating thing you'll see today doesn't involve David Hasselhoff, but rather Han, the Asian dude who dies in "Fast and Furious" and is notable for being the only character who stays dead through the entire timeline. Sung Kang, who plays Han, takes director Justin Lin through his own resurrection in his YouTube series, "Car Discussion," which also features Vin Diesel and the late Paul Walker. Spoiler alerts: 1.) that's not Justin Lin; 2.) that's not his real hair.