To give you an idea on how ridiculous some things can get out there with the little green bar - there was at one time a paper written that investigated the little green bars beside site listings in the google directory
Ex page :
http://www.google.com/Top/Adult/Comp...Sites/Variety/
Note to the left of each listing is a little green "PR" bar - the paper (which doesnt seem to be available anymore for some reason) - looked at the width of the little image and concluded it was a total of about 40 pixels wide - if you then viewed the source of the page you would find this in each link - img src="/images/pos.gif" width=22, height=4
By taking that width (22) and dividing it by 40 or whatever number he came up with you had what your REAL PR was
Note - this was long before the advent of the google toolbar and was the first attempt at people trying to reverse engineer the scaling factors - and amazingly - this became the SEOs favorite tool for figuring out who to link to/with - now Im sure youre sitting there shaking your head that a ton of people were that stupid to follow that advice???