Lisa Gabriele at Nerve.com would rather give up. In a piece titled, "Without Ceremony: How I've Managed To Avoid Getting Married for Forty Years," she observes:

For an institution associated with a 50 percent failure rate and bad sex, marriage still has surprisingly many takers -- not me.

The Burgh Report (burghreport.blogspot.com) is not pleased with the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority:

PWSA sashayed into council [on April 24] and dropped one of those last-minute bombs council is so very fond of. Seems PWSA has been delving into ways they might come up with a few mega-million dollars needed to update their plant and BEGIN to comply with a consent decree regarding federal clean water mandates.

Once again an entity comes before council for their legally required approval on a weighty issue at the 11.999th hour, providing council with little or no information, leaving council little or no option to do anything except affix their rubber-stamp. Once again timing is the bomb. Timing and a complete disregard for council's legally required participation in a process we call "government."

Fortunately, TBR says, the "council did not give into the pressure and got all the information they demanded" last week.

At Slate.com, Daniel Gross calls the production of annual reports "corporate America's most-overlooked environmental crime."

It's spring, which in corporate America means it's time for the annual reports ... Many are beautiful. Most are banal: full of jargon, vague mission statements and feel-good pictures of smiling customers, spotless manufacturing facilities and diverse employees ... Those thuds you hear are hundreds of thousands of [these] meticulously crafted marketing documents being dumped into the garbage can. Given that every American corporation is trying to be greener and save money, it's astonishing that annual reports are still produced.

The fix? Post the reports and other key documents on Web sites and let stockholders know where to find them.

Jim Russell at Burgh Diaspora (burghdiaspora.blogspot.com) addresses a Kauffman Foundation report that found immigrants far outpacing native-born Americans in entrepreneurial activity, with .46 percent involved in startup businesses in 2007, a rise from .37 percent in 2006. The rate for native-born Americans remained constant at .27 percent.

Mr. Russell goes on to point out that "two states with some of the lowest (bottom 10) entrepreneurial activity rates are Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Greater Lake Erie economic region is ripe for an experiment in immigration policy that would attract foreign-born entrepreneurs to the shrinking cities in the area. Some sort of H-1B visa reform is one strategy. I think we could also leverage some effective network migration strategies that would include domestic-based talent."

Carbolic Smoke Ball (carbolicsmokeblog.blogspot.com) takes the pulse of the community on plans to revitalize Market Square Downtown. Here are the results of its most recent survey:

• Hide it under a tarpulin (11%)

• Turn it into a giant Orange Julius stand (13%)

• Get better dressed winos (18%)

• Move it to Mellon Square (24%)

• Flood it, pretend it's Venice (34%)

It turns out that each of your sweat glands is a tiny radio antenna. Several scientists at Hebrew University of Jerusalem recently discovered that human skin is essentially an array of low-frequency emitters. They figured out a way to remotely sense the physiological and emotional state of human beings, which could theoretically help to remotely monitor medical patients, evaluate athletic performance and diagnose disease. This also could lead to remote detection of excitation -- which could help identify terrorists, liars, suitors or nervous airline passengers.