I really don't have anything constructive to add to the discussion. Instead, I'm going to tell a vaguely relevant story about a poem I wrote.
So first you should read my poem. It's very short, and doesn't have enough words to actually get confusing.
So, the story:
Princess Diana died when I was a senior in high school. The next day at school, my AP English teacher decided that everyone in the class should write a poem to "help you come to terms with Diana's death" that night for homework (And I'm positive she's having a whole class of kids write a poem about todays events tonight). So feeling a little put off by the forced nature of assignment, I wrote my poem in five minutes during my class the next hour. I didn't even look at the poem that night. I turned it in on the same sheet of binder paper that I'd written it on the day before. I wanted to make it apparent to her that I didn't like the assignment and that I'd intentionally put no effort into it.
The day after I turned the poem in, I walked into class, and my teacher approached me immediately.
"Benjy, I want to talk to you about your poem. Could we go over to my desk?" she told me.
"Uhh... Sure?" I wanted her to know I'd done a half-assed job, but I didn't want to be confronted about it.
"Your poem was wonderful! I made copies for the whole class, and if you don't mind, I'd like to share it with the class this period!" she gushed.
"Uhh... Okay, I guess." I said, more than a little confused.
"Do you mind if I make copies of it for all the other English teachers?"
"Uhh... I guess not." I felt like a deer in headlights.
So I wandered in a daze back to my seat, and sat there for an hour as the class analyzed the dickens out of my poem. They spent more then twelve times as long analyzing the poem as I did writing it. And they came up with all kinds of meanings and details about the poem that I hadn't intended. And in that very surreal hour, I came to feel very sorry for those exquisite dead guys whose words high school students analyze year after year. "If they're reading this much that I didn't intend into a 30 word poem, how much crap is it possible to make up about a 300 page novel?"
And what was the single meaning of the poem? Well, I had been chatting with some friends on the net when the news of Diana's death slowly spread. Curious, I attempted to load a few news sites, but to no avail. The net was clogged up, and the whole thing was grinding to a halt as everyone tried to read about it. And the poem was drawing a parallel between the packets crashing in the internet and Diana's car crashing in the tunnel. And that's all.
And the reason I told this story is to hilight how clogged and slow the news sites have been today, as everyone tries to read about "Red Tuesday." CNN.com was text only for awhile, and even Yahoo! is running adless at the moment.