Frank

Immediately following a stunning microeconomics lecture the Thursday before fall break (and my adventure-soaked voyage to our nation's raw expanses of land), my friend and classmate Ben brought to my attention a Web site he had recently found. It's called StumbleUpon.

"But watch out," he said. "If you're bad about procrastinating, this will only exponentially increase your struggles." Yes, he phrased it like that. He's an Organic Chemistry major.

Gravely considering my self-diagnosed ADHD, I immediately resolved not to look at this Web site until after midterm week was over.

Now that it's the weekend, I had nothing better to do during the afternoon than reading for First Amendment class. So I cracked open my yuppy-chic MacBook and checked out StumbleUpon.

It's pretty dang cool. The premise is StumbleUpon helps you not search and find sites that you would normally search for, but rather it helps you discover sites you didn't know existed. Within my first twenty minutes, I read news about a particle accelerator that will be used to test string theory, discovered fascinating artwork from about seven different artists, one of whom cuts ingenious three-dimensional scenes out of single pieces of paper, and found a map of what Europe would have looked like if the Nazis had won World War Two.

Considering all the ways I've procrastinated in the past, including playing a pop-up Orbitz miniature golf game until I could get a hole-in-one on every hole, StumbleUpon is relatively productive. Well, sometimes. I just got distracted from writing this post by discovering animals in Halloween costumes.

So, StumbleUpon is a double-bladed dagger. It seems like a stimulating place to discover anything from brilliant new ideas and art to the downright strange. There is a category listed as bizarre, but I'm afraid to click it, fearing most of the links would be to CNN headlines.

I don't know what advice to give you about StumbleUpon. Just click it at your own risk.