As soon as I heard old Howard Dean melt down after the Iowa caucuses, I knew I'd found my candidate. Sure enough, my faith in him has been rewarded. David Letterman used one of my Crazy Howard jokes on “The Late Show” last week (Thursday, January 22).

Click here to hear the audio (format: MP3, size: 126kb), or go to my Late Night Joke page.

Happy Super Sunday!

Despite their “winter storm warnings” and dire predictions of another bad “nor'easter” for last night and early today, I can see from where I'm sitting now that we have a grand total of (drum roll please) ONE inch of snow on the ground.

One inch.

This after they once again got me all hot and bothered yesterday with predictions of potential school closings, a nightmarish morning commute and – pardon me while I mop by brow – potential workplace closings! So I got up early this morning, expecting to have to fire up the old snow blower and found 10 inches of nothing on the roads. Screwed again!

Why do we continue to put so much trust in these people who tell us the weather? Your average television weatherperson is about as good at predicting the weather as Britney Spears is at choosing a husband. They surround themselves with all sorts of computers and radar-looking machinery and try to confuse us with all the talk of dew points, Doppler radar, barometric pressure and other such useless nonsense all in an effort to make it look and sound like they can actually predict the weather.

I say it's time to stop the lies! Enough of these charades! To all you people who run television (or radio) newscasts, it's time to take a fresh approach to weather forecasting. Lucky for you, I have the solution. Bring on the nerds!

Think about it: top-notch science and engineering schools like MIT and Cal Tech are pumping out brilliant nerds at an alarming rate each year. Not all of them can work on the Mars rovers or missile defense systems. Let's take some of the leftovers and put them on the weather forecasting problem. If I owned a TV station, the first thing I'd do is hire an MIT graduate as my weatherman. In hiring my weatherman, I'd put a heavy emphasis on looks: namely, a complete lack of them, since we all know that brainpower is inversely related to beauty. Then, I'd lock this nerd in a closet with instructions to “write a computer program or something” to predict the weather. I'd only let him out for bathroom breaks, the occasional Star Trek convention and to give the forecast during the news.

Think about it: if you saw one station with a good looking babe giving the weather and another station with a slovenly nerdlinger-type with the words MIT NERD at the bottom of the screen giving the weather, which station's prediction are you going to be more likely to believe? Talk about a no-brainer. Predict the weather accurately and your newscast will be the talk of the town. If I want to look at beautiful people, I'll watch the OC. If I want a scientific prediction, I'll take a nerd any day of the week.

Why aren't any of the presidential candidates discussing this issue?

Now that the Iowa caucuses are over, it seems like as good a time as any to handicap the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. I'm not sure yet which of these fruitcakes I'm going to vote for in the primary, but here's my current thinking:

Wesley Clark – This guy looks and smells like he should be a good choice, what with his stellar military record and leadership skills and all but I don't know about him just yet. There's something about him that says brown noser. Plus, he's got a pretty bad haircut. Hey Wes, you're not in the military anymore; if you want to be president, you gotta have a smooth 'do (see Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton).

John Edwards – Now this cat has some stylin' hair. Other than that, though, I'm not sure what else he brings to the table. I understand that before going into politics he was some sort of personal injury lawyer. That's no plus in my book, unless he can help yours truly score a settlement large enough to retire off of. Also, the guy just seems boring. So, to summarize, good hair – lawyer – boring = not getting my vote (see Al Gore).

Joe Lieberman – Poor old Joe seems like a fine fellow, he really does. Which is basically his main problem. If he's elected president, what kind of jokes am I going to be able to write about him? Sorry, dude. If you want my vote, perhaps you should consider acquiring a serious drinking problem to make it worth my while.

John Kerry – On the surface, he looks to have the whole package: he's tall, a war hero, a Senator. But as soon as opens his mouth, he loses my vote. Talked about a stuffed shirt! He's Al Gore with a little less starch and a few more medals. That motorcycle stunt he pulled on Leno was particularly lame. Who thought that was a good idea? On the plus side, he is good at hooking up with wealthy widows. However, unless he can find a widow with enough dough to cover the federal deficit, that skill won't come in real handy for the next president.

Dennis Kucinich – Now we're starting to get to the candidates who spark my interest. On the surface, Mr. Kucinich appears to not bring much to the table. He's got really bad hair, not much useful experience for the job, and very little support amongst the people (I need to back to winner). However, this is the guy who brought a pie chart to display during a debate on the radio. That alone shoots him up near the top of my list. I'm not planning on voting for him now, but if he keeps pulling boners like that, I may have no choice but to volunteer for his campaign.

Al Sharpton – Crazy Al is really pretty close to my perfect candidate: smooth hair, a good talker, possibly insane. But that little Tawana Brawley incident from a few years back is a bit much to swallow. Perhaps if he had smeared feces on himself instead, I might feel differently.

Howard Dean – He's short, he's angry, he's completely nuts – I think I have found my man! So far, there's not much not to like with this guy. As David Letterman said, if he's president and he's on TV, you're always going tune in to see what he might do. Go Howard go!

As always, I will reserve the right to change my mind as events warrant.

If you're like me and you live the northeast, where the temps are once again at or below zero and it may or may not have snowed last night, you've probably come to the same conclusion that I have: you're a loser.

That's right, L-O-S-E-R, a failure in the game life, just like your parents predicted. I'm sorry to be the one to break the news to you.

Really, if you're living in this god-forsaken part of the world and you're not (a) being held against your will or (b) being paid gobs of dough to live here, there can't be any other explanation for your failure to live in a more hospitable climate. Clearly, if you can't afford to pick up and move someplace where it's warm more than three months out of the year, you've struck out big time. Plain and simple, you're a loser. You either didn't work hard enough in school, you have really bad breath, or there's a dark cloud of bad luck hanging over your head. I've come to grips with this, and you should too.

There are parts of this world where it's warm and tropical year round. Why would any sane person want to live anywhere else on a regular basis? Winter sucks! It's nothing but a waste of quality life time. If you live in a cold climate, time is wasted doing things like: shoveling snow, brushing snow off the car, scraping ice off the windshield, waiting for the car to warm up, setting up space heaters to keep the pipes from thawing, unthawing your water pipes so you can take a shower and chipping ice off the front stoop so your mailman won't slip and break his neck and sue you penniless, among other things. If you live in a perpetually warm climate, time is spent … uh, let me think, oh yes, being warm and happy. Hmm, let's see, being warm and happy versus cold and miserable. Tough call.

What's that? You say you'd love to move to Hawaii but it's just too darned expensive? It wouldn't be if you made more money, in other words if you weren't a loser.

What's that, you say like the change of seasons? You like seeing the leaves change color and going skiing and sledding? Well, good for you. But facts are facts. If you weren't a loser, you could live by the beach and see and do that stuff during your vacation, and then go back home to paradise, like a successful person would.

Thankfully, though, even losers like you and me can still enjoy the entertaining goodness that is American television. That way we can watch one of the great new shows on the air, The Apprentice, tonight on NBC. If you haven't seen it yet, do check it out and behold The Donald and his hair that just won't quit, humiliating 16 perfect strangers desperate to escape loserville and get a high paying job working for a winner. After all, us losers need something to cling to.

In the midst of all the celebration over this NASA's probe successfully landing on Mars, some people out there are wondering why we're spending all this money on sending a jazzed up golf cart to Mars to take pictures of rocks. It's a valid question. This project, which includes a twin rover set to land on Mars later this month, is costing us taxpaying folk over $800 million. That's a lot of coin and people want to know what exactly we're getting in return for that money.

Personally, I believe space exploration is important. It's a big universe out there, and the big rock we're all riding on ain't gonna last forever. It'd be nice to at least make an effort to prepare the human race for the inevitable and see if we can eventually spread out a bit.

Oh sure, it may seem crazy to believe that we'll ever be able to colonize another planet, or that, at best, it'll take hundreds or thousands of years to achieve. But you've got to start somewhere. Besides, we humans have become pretty smart. Think about this: 66 years after the first powered flight of any kind, men were golfing on the moon. GOLFING ON THE MOON! Not bad considering the human race spent the first million years (or whatever) or so of it's existence not doing much more than picking its nose and scratching its armpits.

Anyhow, even if you don't think space exploration is worth squat, I've got a much better reason you should still support these kinds of projects – it gives the nerds something to do!

There are lots of nerds in this country. Nerds are smart. Nerds can also be downright annoying. Without something constructive to do, nerds can be real trouble. Ever work with a “genius” who didn't have enough to do so he decides to do a little “optimizing” on your file server and the next thing you know – BOOM! – an entire set of deliverables for a client are gone? Now imagine a whole army of PhD nerds (the higher the degree, the more dangerous the nerd) with no space program to work on noodling around with the infrastructure of the Internet. See where I'm going with this?

Ok, so we all agree it's good to keep the nerds busy. But why an $800 million dollar space program? Simple. You can't give nerds the usual kind of busy work that would keep the rest of us occupied. Nerds, by definition, are smart. Real smart. Meaning they'll take whatever task you give them and figure out the fastest way to complete it. And you can't give them repetitive tasks, cause they'll write a computer program or build a robot to do it over and over real fast.

Now, to keep a nerd busy, you have to give him a real HARD task. Going to Mars is hard. REAL hard. Even going to the moon wasn't challenging enough. Our nerds figured that out in less than a decade. But going to Mars, now there's a problem even the nerds will need some time to figure out. They've been building and lobbing stuff at Mars for 30 years and most of it still doesn't make it there. It could take the nerds quite some time to get a man to Mars.

So, I ask you, isn't it worth a measly $800 mil for a little peace of mind? It is to me. In fact, I may make an unsolicited donation to NASA to get a Pluto exploration project going.

It may be a new year on the calendar, but the Saddam Hussein capture is still paying off. David Letterman used one of my Saddam jokes on “The Late Show” last night (Monday, January 5).

Click here to hear the audio (format: MP3, size: 147kb), or go to my Late Night Joke page.

Have a good one.