A couple weeks ago, Stephen Dubner over at the Freakonomic blog posted a contest: suggest a six-word motto for the US.  The reponse was pretty solid; there’s 1,291 comments in the thread right now, pretty much all of which feature one or more suggested mottos.

Among those was mine: “You Should See the Other Guy”.  It didn’t feel golden, exactly, but I liked it well enough to drop it into the (already monstrous, at that point) thread with a grin.

But I just hopped over there this afternoon to see that they’ve opened voting on finalists, and, hey, neat: my motto is one of the five they picked out:

1. The Most Gentle Empire So Far
2. You Should See the Other Guy
3. Caution! Experiment in Progress Since 1776
4. Just Like Canada, With Better Bacon
5. Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay

Judging by the voting so far — there’s been 160+ comments in the first three hours since they made the new post – motto number 5 is the likely winner.  Numbers 1 and 3 are both doing well, too, while number 4 and my own number 2 are both tailing badly.

I voted for myself, natch.  No sign of the other authors, yet; I may be the first finalist to have noticed the thread.

The voting holds for 48 hours; while I expect there’s a rush right now and that voting will slow down after the first few hours (with perhaps an upswell tomorrow morning?), there’s still a lot of time left here, so who knows how the race could evolve over time.  Will my (verbose, in a thread consisting mostly of single-numerals-as-votes) comment draw any contemplation from voters?  Will a real campaign shape up here?  Any chance of an underdog movement, rejecting the nominal leader we have now in motto number 5?

Or have I just been reading too many primary/caucus blogs?