I've been lulled into Letterman-land, leading to lazy, brainless late nights.

In case you missed any Late Shows with Dave in the last month, I've written a summary of the last 15 shows.

• Dave comes out smiling and gives a monologue ripping into Gore and Bush.
• Since Clinton is "going to be around for the next couple years", Dave tells a Clinton-Classic Joke involving Monica Lewinsky on her knees.
• That freaky, short, fat albino-looking guy with the thick black glasses comes out and Dave tells him to "get lost".
• Dave introduces Paul W. Schaeffer.
• Dave sits down and tells us he's trying to look Presidential, that's why he's got all the flags behind him.
• Then there's the "What's the Deal with Old Guys and Big Glasses?" segment where they show the same old guys with big glasses every night.
• Fluff.
• Top Ten List.
• Filler.
• Boring guest who's on TV but who also happens to sing... and has a new CD out!
• Boring guest sings.
• Good Night from Dave

A Harvard Neurologist says she's figured out why Mona Lisa's sfumato smile works. Basically, there are two areas of perception in the eyes, the central fovea where detail is picked up and the periphery which is sensitive to light, shadow and motion. When looking at Mona Lisa's eyes, your eyes pick up the shadows from her cheekbones, which makes her smile. When looking directly at her mouth, your central vision sees less of the shadows and her smile fades.

It makes sense. Gaze into a woman's eyes to see her smile.

Haha. No, I don't think Mona Lisa is hot.

Uh-oh. Here comes the backlash against Gore. Now the press is jumping on the "Who-is-to-blame?" bandwagon. "Donkey Doofuses" blames Democrats, who made up the Palm Beach Country canvassing board, the Florida Supreme Court, and the Miami-Dade canvassing board. Theresa LePore was the democrat who designed the Palm Beach Country ballot.

"How Florida Democrats torpedoed Gore" says that Nader is not to blame in Florida, that winning over a couple seniors and white women in Florida, which Gore should have done, would have made the difference. But, what really, really hurts is 308,000 Democrats in Florida voted for Bush! And 191,000 self-described liberals voted for Bush! Ouch.

Greggman has a good point about the new Asian language domain names that are now available:

If the whole point of the internet is that it connects people then Chinese/Japanese/Korean domain names are a bad idea. Why? Because anybody that can't enter Chinese, Japanese or Korean cannot access any domain using one of those languages.

What happens when they open up 暑い郵便.com ?

For you people that can't read that it's says HOTMAIL in Japanese. Then lots of people sign up for it. They decide they want to talk to somebody outside their country, maybe to get a more open mind about the rest of the world. But wait, nobody outside their country can type that address. Not even Chinese and Koreans can enter Japanese or visa versa. In other words, Korean, Japan and China will effectively shut themselves out from the rest of the world. Nobody outside those countries will be able to access their websites or their e-mail.

Sounds like bad news to me.

This election thing is getting stale. I have to admit, I was playing devil's advocate by supporting Bush. Actually, I'm pretty much non-partisan. These Democrats are pissing me off though. With their f*ckin' dimpled ballots and their lawsuits and the ridiculous footage on CNN of ballot counters holding the ballots up to the light, squinting, turning it over, showing it to five other people, talking it over... if you can't figure it out after all that, THERE WAS NO INTENT. What the hell are you looking for?

Statistically, how can there be huge net gains after counting dimpled ballots? Given the almost 50/50 split of voters, neither Bush nor Gore should have many more dimpled votes than the other. So Palm Beach, with a difference of 7 votes is reasonable. How the hell does Broward County get 536 votes for Gore? OK, that might include non-dimpled, hanging chads, etc... I don't know. I've lost track of what exactly they're counting in these recounts. My point is, dimpled ballots should not make the ultimate difference in this election if several hundred votes separate the two candidates.

"But Republicans are suing too!" It's true, they could certainly claim a higher moral ground by not contesting and just sending their representatives to insure that the count is "fair" and "accurate" (read: free of fraud). That would really highlight the morass of empty political rhetoric, crap, that keeps spewing forth from the mouths of the Democratic spokespeople. Read Salon, half the quote will be about the recount, then mid-sentence, the Democratic spokesperson will switch into "the nation" and "the people", and it's all junior-high BS. Please, at least learn to segue into the BS. It's not right for the Republicans to drag this sh*t through the courts any longer, but the way I see it, the Republicans are taking a defensive position, while the Democratic Party's actions are indefensible.

Which is why there are no Democratic fire-breathers ready to do battle for Gore. Only the liberal press is left to whine and moan on Gore's behalf. It's sickening how biased the press is.

Of course, Gore has to win now. He's dragged it out this long, it wouldn't be right if he didn't win. He needs to justify all this spent time and energy. He cannot lose face. Desperation sets in. So it will continue. I thought the Sore/Loserman signs were funny at first, clever even. What's scary is those signs are turning out true.

Let's just split the country right in two, why don't we? Gore should attack the vote in Florida and try and have its electoral votes thrown out. I'm staying in Hong Kong if that happens.

I really didn't care before who won the election, but now, I realize Gore is not fit to be President.

Everyone talks about how if Al Gore loses this election, the electoral system should be abolished. But they haven't thought about why the system is the way that it is. Here's an article called Math Against Tyranny that explains mathematically, what comes intuitively to GeorgeW. Voter power is generally increased when the main contest is split into smaller contests.

The best analogy of this kind of system in action is in sports, where teams compete to win divisions and then, in the finals, compete to win games, not the overall point score. That is why, in the 1960 World Series, the Pittburgh Pirates were considered that year's championship team by winning four games to three, even though they were outscored by the Yankees 55 to 27.

As GeorgeW gets closer to winning the election, he's starting to make more sense in his weblog:

...Given that states are effectively "mini-countries", with laws that deviate slightly from the Federal norm and constituencies that have similar interests relative to the rest of the nation, it makes intuitive sense that the Presidential candidate with an effective majority should get all the electoral votes for that state. That candidate is the one that best represents that state.

Let's take the extreme example where the bastions of the predominately liberal media, concentrated primarily in California and New England, are able to coax 100% of the voters in California and New England to vote for the Democratic candidate. Now, even if every other state in the Union were to vote primarily Republican, the Democratic candidate would still win the popular vote. All the states without shoreline would all of a sudden have no voice.

What is my point? I have three points.

1) The liberal media is bad. They offer a skewed view of public opinion. Their influence is concentrated in urban centers, which, in a popular vote, gives too much control over the outcome of the election.

2) The example is not that extreme. California was a sweep for the Democrats, in spite of the fact that most of the population live outside San Francisco and Los Angeles. The liberal media influence is strong.

3) The Electoral College system is effective in balancing the needs of the states with the needs of the people. A popular vote would not be.

My cousin Sam showed me the ultimate (meaning cost-effective) driving range. On the new MTR line to the Hong Kong airport there's a stop called Olympic Station. If you want a super-cheap place to hit some golf balls, this is the station to get off at. It costs HK$50 for non-members, the balls are free and you can stay there all day from 9:00AM to 6:00PM.

After shanking/slicing/hooking/whatever (WAAAAY off to the right, what is that called?) 100 balls, I decided to actually aim (I had forgotten all about that), "Hit the McGregor sign...", and I finally got off one really good, PGA style, perfectly straight, good trajectory hit. Happy with myself, I look down at my hand: Blister City. That's enough for one day.

What do Mike Tyson, Willie Nelson, Jim Morrison and Bobby Brown have in common (well, three of them sing)? They're all baseball players. I discovered this while rummaging through my long forgotten baseball card collection meticulously kept in an old Boggle box. The Boggle box contains the cards I had deemed worthless, mostly because I didn't know the players.

My cousin Sam, an avid collector, lent me his Sportscard Market Report book so that I could see if I had any gems collected from childhood, squirreled away in my old room in Hong Kong. I have long since taken my favorites back to L.A. (various Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt, George Brett cards and my Mark McGwire Olympic Rookie), so I didn't think I'd have anything worthwhile left in Hong Kong.

These are the cards I found.

The best condition cards, given a 10 rating by PSA, fetch the big bucks. You must get your card rated (appraised) and sealed, otherwise you'll get at the most, the equivalent value of an 8 rating card. After seeing some of Sam's pristine condition cards, I'm pretty sure the ones I found wouldn't even garner a 7... Since it costs anywhere from $10 to $15 to rate each card, I'd be losing money getting these cards appraised by PSA. At most, $28 is the value of this childhood collection.

Unlike most kids, who used to jam these cards into the spokes of their bicycle wheels, I thought I kept them in pretty good condition. Where do these 10 rated cards come from?

When I get back to L.A. I'm getting the McGwire card rated. Even with an 8 rating, it's worth $140. With a 10 rating, it's worth $6000.

With Thanksgiving coming up, Allen forwarded an e-mail to me about The Hunger Site which donates food to needy children. I was skeptical at first, but I visited it out of curiousity, clicked on the donate button and voila! I just donated 1.0 cups of food. Takes no time at all!

Where does the food come from? Well, after clicking the donate button, you get hit with three or four advertising banners from corporate sponsors who pay for the food. You're allowed only one click per day. Great idea. Let all the soon-to-be-bankrupt-Internet-companies do something good with their remaining cash.

Haven't seen a single movie since coming back to Hong Kong and you know how much I love movies. But I did just come back from a "rave party" that Carmen, Voon San's girlfriend, had tickets too. We went to Club Ing. Guess where it is? It's the Manhattan, redone with smoke machines and a dance floor.

It began typically enough (for Hong Kong), with most of the people Prada-ed out, sneaking off the the Karaoke rooms. Zero people dancing. But as soon as it hit 12:30, the dancing scene arrived, and it was like any club in L.A. Some ravers, but mostly the club crowd. Everyone trying to dance. I didn't see any Taiwanese head nodding. I did see plenty of cell-phone to cell-phone interaction at this party. And if I were only technically savvy enough, this cute girl maybe would've beamed her phone number to me. Damn.

Still, it feels good to get out.

I saw this fake Aibo in a Hong Kong magazine.

I saw this in the same magazine. Will the real Daniel Chan please stand up, please stand up?

...got shot at close range with an AK-47 while wearing a bullet-proof jacket.

Chinese love pork. Any excuse to get some swine on the dinner table. So it's no surprise to me that reading the South China Morning Post I come across an article about bullet-proof fiber manufacturers in China testing their vests on pigs. Take Babe, strap on a flak jacket, tie him down, aim...

BANG! BANG! BANG! A couple rounds and a couple squeals later, strip off the jacket. Look, no blood. No broken bones. Let's be really sure though...

...slice open Babe's belly and check. Nope, no internal bleeding. The jacket works! Time for dinner. Roast him up, baby!

Election 2000. You can't escape it. It's everywhere (except in Austria and Israel). Are you sick of it yet?

So I figured I'd share the dialectizer with you instead.

The following links don't work while "dialectized".

Here is [danchan] if I were born in Oklahoma.

Here is [danchan] being a jive turkey.

WORD!

I'm watching a CBS Special on Election 2000 and it turns out in New Mexico, Gore leads Bush by 4 votes! In differences like 4 votes, there is a high statistical probability that the loser might actually be the winner, based on human and/or machine error. In others words, a recount would probably change the result. It seems like small differences like this should result in a tie for the state.

A CNN correspondent was saying a manual recount is much more accurate than one done by machines. I think this is BS especially since the people doing the recounting are judging the ballots for the "intention" of the voter. If the hole is half punched or punched incorrectly, they judge who the vote is for. In addition to any bias that might creep into the result, there's human error. People can't keep numbers straight all the time. Ever misdialed a phone number? Considering they're working hours on end, there's bound to be mistakes in counting and simple addition, especially since some people in Florida are too stupid to figure out the butterfly ballot...

...Like this one guy on CBS who was literally a rocket scientist from Palm Beach County who was confused with the ballot. He probably designed the O-ring on the Space Shuttle Challenger.

What does all this come down to? Everyone's fighting for Florida. I said before I thought this is just what was needed to get people interested, but it's gone on too long now and more importantly, it's gone too far. At this point, it's a scandal. Whoever "wins" is not going to have the mandate of the people. Not after all the legal wrangling, recounts and picketing. So something tells me maybe the winner should demand a revote. While this won't give the next President an overwhelming majority, it seems like the only way to clean up the mess.

I'm sorry. I must apologize again. I couldn't help it. I encoded another subliminal message in a news title. The message was encoded in the daily news item titled."SubLIMINabLE MESsagES MaR cAmpaIgn".

SLIMINLEMESESMRAI

reorganized spells

EMINEM IS REAL SLIM S.

Sorry, this is obviously wrong. No one really knows who Slim Shady is. Nevertheless, it turns out my subliminal message seemed to have an effect on Joe, my most avid reader, who couldn't help but proclaim in two separate instances:

"...please stand up, please stand up..."

By pointing out the subliminal message, I'm hoping to stop its effects on our Collective Unconscious, lest we all start quoting Enimem.

The rest of the world finds the U.S. elections confusing and laughable.

France, Serbia and Russia should talk... Fix your own damn country first!

There's an article on Salon titled "The coup" whose last page says Democrats designed the Palm Beach ballot, Democrats OKed the ballot, Palm Beach Country is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and confused voters are stupid and/or paid for their votes anyway. Oh yeah, and Gore is not fit to be President.

Just to be fair, here's an article that says Palm Beach Country is not a Pat Buchanan stronghold. This article is not nearly as fun as "The coup".

And here's a scenario that's interesting. If Gore wins Florida, but ends up losing Oregon, New Mexico and Wisconsin to Bush on recounts in those states, they would both end up with 269 electoral votes and the House of Representatives picks the next President.

There's a television ad running in Hong Kong about a crashed web-site that is costing a company $100,000 an hour. A meeting is taking place where the database guys blame the network guys, the network guys blame the server guys, the server guys blame the database guys and the web designers are snowboarding. The woman in charge of the meeting asks, "And who the hell is responsible for keeping all this working together?" Her assistant whispers in her ear, "That would be your job."

"And that's when it hits you, you're sooooo ready for... IBM."

Ready for what? Ready for a web-site that is broken half the time? Ready for a web-site where if the page does load, it often takes many minutes? Ready for a web-site with information buried within cyclical links and PDF files? No thanks.

I was wrong. The ballots are confusing! There is a potential cultural bias in the use of arrows to direct our attention.

Give me a f--kin' break! These people are not only too stupid to vote, they should have their driver's licenses taken from them. And they should get a swift kick in the ass.

"It all starts with the peanuts!" - J.R.

I am outraged at the situation in Palm Beach County, Florida where voters were confused with the ballot which had Presidential candidates in two columns!

We need to set up an independent committee to investigate this voting irregularity and determine who voted for the wrong candidate.

We need a complete list of these confused voters.

Have you seen the Palm Beach County ballot?

These mis-voters are so stupid they should be barred from ever voting again.

They should not be allowed to participate in determining the future of America.

What's more, voters bringing lawsuits to Florida courts should receive a swift kick in the ass from the Judge.

Senator Bob Kerrey proposes a runoff in Florida.

That would be like Overtime in Game Seven. Cool...

I've been watching TV non-stop since early this morning, Hong Kong time, when the results from the voting were already coming in. After the initial Florida debacle, I would never have thought that Florida would reverse, giving Bush the Presidency.

Of course, the networks, not learning from their previous mistaken prediction, had jumped the gun again and then caused more confusion when they retracted the new Florida result. Bush is not the President-Elect, after all.

Gore had called Bush to concede and was on his way to make his concession speech to the world when he was told that the Florida results were "too close to call," again.

Crazy. What is this? All the networks clamoring to break the latest news? Who cares if it's wrong?

So now we wait for the recount that is stipulated under Florida law. It all depends on Florida.

At one point the Florida results were within less than 1,000 votes, to Bush's advantage! The general consensus is that the absentee ballots, which numbered around 2,300 in 1996, would favor Dubya.

But wait. There seems to be some controversy with ballots in Palm Beach that mistakenly had Pat Buchanan in place of Al Gore. So up to 3,000 of Pat Buchanan's votes might be Al Gore's.

On top of all this, Gore is winning the popular vote against all analyst predictions. If he loses the electoral vote, then it is exactly the opposite scenario suggested by the political pundits.

I think this is exactly what was needed to get people interested again.

Footnote:

What's the deal with the dead guy who got elected to the Senate? His wife gets to go in his place?

Hilary Rodham Clinton's win doesn't impress me even though her lead over Rick Lazio was 750,000 votes. There are 2 million more registered Democrats in New York, meaning 1.25 million Democrats did not show up to vote, or around 600,000 Democrats voted for Republican Rick Lazio, or some combination of both.

The predominately liberal press that greggman talked about posted Florida, with 25 electoral votes, as a Gore state before the polls were even closed in the conservative Western half of that state. And then CNN retracted the result, changing Florida's status as "too close to call".

While this may not affect the outcome of the Florida vote, the "momentum" that CNN intended to generate for Gore could end up backfiring, as Democratic voters stay at home, comfortable with Florida in the pocket, and Republicans show up at voting booths to help turn the tide. By the time the Florida result was retracted... Sorry, the voting booths are closed.

After electing the electors today, the actual voting for President occurs in December. The results we get after the November election are an estimation, because during the month of November, the electors can change their minds. This has happened nine times before, but has never affected the election results.

How do you hold your elector accountable if he doesn't vote for who he promised? After all, that one vote could mean the Presidency this year.

Once a military man, always a military man. Colin Powell talks to Bush supporters about the election: "Don't be distracted by the sniping from the flanks..."

Al Gore says to African-Americans: "It's time to take your souls to the polls!"

I'm watching Discovery Channel, one of the five English cable channels in Hong Kong, and there's this show on chimps. Did you know chimps eat their young? What is the world coming to when monkeys start behaving like... well, like animals!

The commentator states, "It is logical for the male monkey to eat the young when the baby chimp is not his child. This protects the male monkey's bloodline."

What's real scary, and I'm sure I'm taking this way out of context, is Jane Goodall talking about female chimps that eat their young for no logical reason, "Chimps are so much like humans in so many ways. This is the rarely seen dark side that all women have." Well, she said something like that.

Damn. Talk about men and women coming from different planets! Venus must be one wild motherf--kin' jungle!

What have I started? Back during the first debate I thought Bush would gain some momentum and make this race interesting. But we all knew at the time that Gore was supposed to win.

Was he really?

What is it about goofy characters that make them so endearing? How can George W. Bush be viewed as an idiot by so many people and still run for President? Why is the "dummy" a lesser evil when compared with the "liar"?

David Letterman was the first key. Look at him. He's goofy. As a result, he has an inate ability to make the audience feel real comfortable (sometimes at the expense of his guest). Does goofy equal popular?

Get George W. on the Late Show and then the similarities between these two goofballs become fairly apparent. Make no mistake though, Letterman is no dumb-ass.

Then realize Letterman's uncanny resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman. Including the gap in his front teeth. Didn't we all love Mad magazine as kids?

The article in Salon with all the Bush gaffes brings it full circle. The story image is Bush rendered as Alfred E. Neuman. The funny thing is, it didn't hurt Bush's image. So we have the trinity of goofiness: Letterman = Bush = Neuman.

Is this the winning formula for the Presidency? If you think Letterman should run for President, think again. All the sites supporting this idea: gone.

You see, Letterman didn't go to Yale. Yes, "The Skulls" is not just some throw-away teen flick about secret societies in Ivy League campuses.

I'm watching the latest CNN Perspectives on Al Gore and it's real direct in praising the man, and less obvious as it pokes little holes in him.

Who owns the news? Because while the drunk driving charge is an example of a democratic "dirty trick", Gore is labeled a "liar". Do the Republicans just have better Spin Doctors?

If Bush wins this Presidency, then there's a conspiracy afoot...

...you think Ralph Nader is in on it?

Evan told me about the Monster Massive you guys went to recently... Then I read this in Salon. Drew Barrymore manages to connect the idea of a bikini wax with a rave:

"...I felt kind of sacrilegious removing them but I just thought, you know, they should remain under my bikini rather that acting like they're in a line to get into a rave, but they're never really getting in."

I'm sick of this legacy that follows us from generation to generation. I'm talking about computers here. Serial, Parallel, PS/2 - they should all just give up the ghost. They won't. Try and find a decent USB keyboard. The Microsoft ones pretend to be USB keyboards, but really they're just USB "Y" cables, two-port unpowered hubs. You still need a PS/2 port to be able to type. What the hell?

And we still use VGA cables when hooking up an inherently digital LCD monitor.

Then there's the realization that we can rid ourselves of the legacy of old browsers. What I said in the Times New Roman article about making this site so that everyone using any browser can read it? Forget it. 216 web-safe colors? Forget it. It stops here.

Not many sites are Yahoo and need to be accessible to everyone. So who cares if the five people out there with Netscape 2.0 or the seven people with WebTV can't view this site?

Look at my site statistics.

Well, out of the three people that come here, everyone uses IE4.0 and up. Which means Cascading Style Sheets can be used.

Really, even if your site is more popular than mine (not hard to imagine), most likely you'll get the same distribution of browsers. In fact, most people have IE5.0!

How many people do I know have 256 color graphics cards? Zero. Forget about the web-safe palette.

Then there's Netscape. Which no one uses (well, OK, a couple people do) and is total crap. Try making a web page. IE does half the things the way you expect, while Netscape does things in some pseudo-random way. Netscape doesn't even behave consistently. And where is the correct support for first generation CSS in Netscape 4.75?

Forgedahboudit. Throw most legacy web-design rules along with Netscape out the window.

I uploaded the beta-version of a weblogging service that I wrote. Using this, anyone can make a site like [danchan], post their daily thoughts and have other members comment on them. I wish I made [danchan] like this to begin with since the new system is much more flexible.

The weblog home page is a message board open to all members. Post whatever you think other people will find interesting.

If you create a weblog of your own, only you can post messages to your front page. Other members can then comment on your front page messages. You can customize the look of your weblog using standard HTML plus some simple programming constructs.

I need a name for this new service. Any ideas?