Amber Taylor is seeking to promote the UK's National Kissing Day into an event celebrated worldwide, or at least here in the US... Some of her commenters even have some novel and amusing ideas for ways to promote the holiday (or not)... Sounds fine to me, although I probably won't be participating... just thought I'd spread the love in whatever way I can...

After Phil Mickelson won the Masters, the title of "best golfer to never win a major" has now officially passed to... Kim Jong Il? The North Korean despot apparently plays a mean game of golf... From the article, it looks like he's ready for some primetime action... maybe he'll be in the next Battle at Bighorn?
Nevertheless, I could still kick his ass at Mini-Putt...

One of the best parts of writing this blog is keeping track of who's visiting, from where, and sometimes what they're looking for... You see, in the stats compiled by SiteMeter (which you can peruse, if you like, via the link in the credits), you can take a look at the page someone was looking at when/if they clicked through to OMB... and on occasion, people find me from Google or Yahoo! searches. Some of my most-referred search terms include "green forest churrascaria" and "entenmann's outlet stores" - two things on which I am clearly an authoritative source...

Sometimes I even get a few curious references from people searching for things I haven't exactly written about, even if I did use one or more of the terms in a post... For instance, one person who checked me out was apparently looking to buy some crack... wrong place, buddy...

Today, I got another one of these amusing little referers: a google search for "pitt law sucks"... While I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about the law school experience and Pitt in particular, I think I can without a doubt say that Pitt Law does not actually suck... let's not forget, we're a top tier school now!

But it also got me thinking... where in the Google search results was I? Sure enough, I'm the fourth main site listed for "pitt law sucks"... I'm keeping some interesting company in the results, however... Right below OMB in the listing was a discussion board thread titled "Halle Berry vs. Harvard Law"... As you might suspect, the question being discussed here is:

What would you rather have, one night with Halle Berry or automatic admission into Harard Law.

Now for the author whose spelling and grammar might make admission to any law school questionable, perhaps I can see how this would be a question to pontificate... but I think the rest of the participants choosing Harvard are all I need to illustrate why I'm perfectly satisfied without being a Harvard grad and why Pitt Law doesn't suck... 95% of us wouldn't have to think twice... I mean... c'mon guys! It's Halle Berry!

It's mine! Check out the details... it's pretty nicely equipped...

To make things even better, I managed to get the car for about $600 under the invoice price. How did I manage that? I had a little help from the folks at FightingChance.com, who provided me with a bunch of good info on getting a good price on a car. I highly recommend talking to them before you buy a new car...

Tim Seibel is taking a tour of all 30 major league ballparks this summer and he's blogging the trip, complete with pictures and descriptions from each park. Check it out...

WTAE's website seems to post random quizzes from time to time... One of their latest is entitled "Do you know your 80's hair band lyrics?" Naturally being a child of the 80's (if not a child of the hair bands), I thought I'd give it a whirl... Sure enough, after taking the test and getting 7 out of 10, my results said that I was a head banger... and I suppose that I also know 80's hair band lyrics better than current news... so it goes...
Take the quiz... post results!

In what's become a theme this week, I'm once again mixing up things that don't seem to go together... One response I got to my "unusual" recipe for corn on the cob, was the suggestion of another strange pairing: vanilla ice cream and balsamic vinegar...

OK... once again you're probably thinking, "Ewwwwwww! Who on Earth would even think to do something like that???" Personally, I don't know... but this guy seems to like it (see question 6)... So always the curious one when it comes to counterintuitive stuff, I just couldn't let it pass without a sampling... The official review: not so bad... I can see why people would like it. I think I used a little much vinegar, but it definitely was unique... not as acidy as you might expect, given the presence of vinegar, which is actually very greatly tempered by the ice cream... That said, I wasn't blown away by it... in fact, I might go so far as to say that it's an acquired taste. Certainly, it would be better if you spring for the good vinegar, which I've just now learned is the only real balsamic vinegar...

Apparently what we buy in the grocery store is just an immitation. For a more extensive background on balsamic vinegar check out this overview (which also includes the suggestion of drizzling real balsamic vinegar over vanilla ice cream) courtesy of the folks at Google Answers (a fascinating site to browse every now and then).

ESPN's Buster Olney recently wrote an awful and easily refutable column about "productive outs"... While the flaws in Olney's argument were large and easy to spot, Larry Mahnken recently revisited the issue and further debunks Olney's claims...

In a similar theme of putting seemingly random things together, I present you all with Guess the Dictator or Television Sitcom Character. Oh, and don't be surprised if you're thinking of Mallory Keaton from Family Ties, and the computer tells you that you're thinking of 'Melanie'... That and other minor typos seem to be a glitch in the machine...

It's been awhile since I posted a top ten list, so in honor of this recent thread on Baseball Primer, here's my top ten stars visible from the northern hemisphere, pallindromic surnames of major league baseball players, and peninsulas:

10. Procyon
9. Michigan (UP)
8. Harrah
7. Capella
6. Baja California
5. Nen
4. Antares
3. Iberia
2. Spica
1. Salas

Jeremy Blachman recently posted him impressions of a churrascaria that he visited... Fortunately for him, he didn't quite have the same experience that I did last time I was at one (but oh, that beef tenderloin! one day it shall again be mine!)...

Ken Nordine's Colors album is definitely a fun little listen that's unlike anything you'll hear anywhere else... but the one nit I have to pick with it is that I think he's making up some of the colors... I mean really... Ecru? Russet? Nutria?

I'd never really heard anyone refer to the color puce either, and I may have lumped it in with the other questionable choices, but I just ran across a Crescat Sententia post where Will Baude actually refers to puce in an appropriate context!

That got me thinking... where else might one find puce prominently featured on the Internet? A quick Google search revealed the answer... not too many places... Limiting the search to English language results, the second site listed in the search is... the dictionary.com definition of "puce"... Also in the top 20 hits were this useless site and this one too... Weather for Puce, Ontario is listed... and then there's the puce blog, apparently written by someone who hates the USA in extraordinarily succinct, broken English as well as the puce blog critic, who seems almost redundant given the nature of the blog he's watching... links this useless will not show up on OMB again...

Given the lack of relevance of puce, based on Google results, I'd like to start a movement to demote puce from official color status... I don't know what exactly that would mean, but if we can have "primary colors" and "secondary colors", there should be a level of color that is so far removed from relevance that it doesn't deserve to be dubbed as if it were... and that color might just be puce...

So Josh wants to hear about the upcoming car purchase... Naturally, I'll give you all the low-down once the deal is done, but in the meantime, I thought I'd elaborate on the thought process going into the choice...

Basically, I'm going with the 2004 Honda Civic EX Sedan... One person whom I asked to talk me out of this lamented the boring choice... He wanted to see me go for something more stylish, perhaps something that would help me out with the ladies a little more... Perhaps he also might have suggested something from American Woman Road & Travel's 2004 Sexy Car Buyer's Guide...

While I don't mind a little bit of style, it's clearly a secondary concern... Much more important to me are 1) long-term reliability 2) safety 3) price 4) power and 5) fuel economy... the number of fancy little features and extras are always nice too... JD Power surveys and general public opinion say that Honda has an excellent reputation for long-term value, and the safety ratings from both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety the Civic are also very good...

With an invoice price of $16,504, the Civic won't exactly break the bank, even when you go for the souped up EX model, with the 127 horsepower engine (as opposed to the 115 of the DX and LX models)... Admittedly, I know precious little about what makes a car powerful and not, but more horsepower has to be better than less, right? Finally, the gas mileage of the regular Civic isn't bad at all even if it is only about 60-80% of the mileage of the hybrid model... given the low difference in gas costs between the two, the relatively low availability of the hybrid, the problems some people have had getting that fuel efficiency from the hybrid, and issues with the current hybrid technology becoming obsolete and the batteries dying as fast as you can say "133 megahertz", the choice to go with the traditional powertrain was pretty easy...

Now the only outstanding questions are what kind of deal can I get on the car and will the chicks dig it? Answers soon forthcoming...

You probably thought I was going to write something this week, didn't you? hmmmm... not so much... but in the meantime, check out Josh's new website (a work still in progress) and feel free to heckle my lack of prolificness in the comments...

Over the Edge, a book chronicling all of the deaths at the Grand Canyon, is sold at all of the Park's gift shops. It inspires a morbid curiosity (as well as a cautionary tale) for all the visitors who approach the rim of the Canyon to calls of "don't fall in!" While a number of types of deaths are reported in the book, from the mundane to the exotic (such as the man who died when someone near him was struck by lightning... and the person who was hit survived!), I don't remember finding anything like this while I was leafing through the pages... time for an update!

A new survey out lists the Pirates as the 9th most popular team in baseball... who'd have guessed?!

Few things motivate me like fear... and I'm trying to use that to help me prepare for the upcoming bar exam. As the Bar/Bri class has moved along, I haven't done a whole lot of work to keep up yet... Sometime - hopefully this week - I'll start to totally freak out about falling behind and hit the books with a vengeance...

Fortunately for me, most of the stuff that we've gone over in class has felt very review-ish (as it should) and I've been able to fill in some of the blanks on our lecture handouts before being told what the answers are... also, the fall behind, then catch up thing worked for me on more than one occasion in law school...

I'm fairly confident that I'll pass... roughly two out of three testers pass in PA and I tend to test well... any words of wisdom from the gallery?

UPDATE: So I was just working on some practice questions, and the results were somewhat miserable... 21 right out of 50... I think the fear is starting to kick in!

I spent maybe an hour or so yesterday watching the end of the National Spelling Bee. It's an amazingly unique event, as it gets coverage from just about all circles... the "news" people cover it, the sports people cover it (it is actually broadcast on ESPN), and the winners become minor celebrities for their 15 minutes, doing tours of duty on the talk shows and whatnot...

But perhaps most extraordinary of all, the kids involved are freaks... and I mean that in the best way possible. The top performers spend hours upon hours poring over the dictionary and studying word lists... and these kids are between fourth and eighth grades. The devotion that they possess is quite admirable, but watching the competition I can't help but wonder if it may not be counterproductive in the end.

So many of them came up to the podium with a joyless, nervous look in their eye... the pressure of competition only magnified by all the aforementioned coverage (complete with a row of cameramen in front of the competition MC)... For one contestant whose brother had won the championship two years prior, the pressure was no doubt the cause of his literal collapse onstage while spelling "alopecoid."

How much pressure are their parents (or siblings) putting on them? Why are they even doing this? The extreme devotion to dictionaries that many top contestants have is pretty unnatural (although I suspect that some really do enjoy it)... I was pretty happy to see that Pittsburgh's local representative approached the competition with an eye to having fun as opposed to the fear of failure... it's a much healthier, more positive way to be...

When the brother of the prior champion only managed to come in second place, I didn't quite know what to make of it. On one hand, it's a shame that he couldn't achieve the only result that would seem to have satisfied him. However, just having the pressure of the competition behind him may have been enough. On the other hand, I think the winner - David Scott Tidmarsh - enjoyed winning more than the runner up would have... so I'm happy for him...