I really enjoy Late Night with David Letterman. I must, to keep watching it when I really should be in bed. I've tried to think about what it is about him that keeps me up late. It probably isn't the guests; all of the late night shows have the same guests, often on consecutive days.

To me, Letterman is at his best when he interacts with the audience during "America's fastest growing quiz sensation, Know Your Current Events." His broad knowledge of trivia means he can almost always find an interesting question to ask of any audience member.

"Will It Float" is a very strange phenomenon. Conceptually, it is a stupid idea, but it seems to be working very well. I suspect it is just the surrounding hype that makes it fun, but fun it is. However, I think the grinder girl's 15 minutes are up.

"Is This Anything" is another segment that hits more often than it misses. It is amazing what some people will do to get on television.

On the other hand, it is long past time for both "Psychic Sandwich" and "Beat The Clock" to go. "Beat The Clock" just grates on me; it isn't funny, it isn't suspenseful, and it is downright mean to the "contestants". If there were a point to it, it would be different, but it's nothing more than existential silliness. Maybe there's a Zen aspect to it that I am missing. And perhaps someone can explain to me why "Intuitive" Debra Lynn keeps coming back for more "Psychic Sandwich" abuse. It took her three or four tries before she figured out that the object of the game was to pick the NAME of the sandwich, rather than the MAKEUP of the sandwich. So much for intuition.

I miss Biff Henderson locating the viewer mail cities on his big map.

Nathan Lane and Martin Short could liven up a mortician's convention. Wouldn't you love to be stuck in an airport for a few hours with those two?

I do wish he would introduce the band once in a while. We know Paul, of course, and we've heard Anton and Felicia mentioned a few times, but the rest of the group is anonymous. I've even sent this in to "viewer mail" once or twice.

I can't tell whether North Korea is throwing a fit because they are tired of being ignored, or because they think the Bush Administration is too busy rattling sabers in Iraq to worry about them. Either is entirely possible, in my view.

Whichever is true, this is an extremely dangerous situation. As I have said previously, I believe North Korea is more dangerous than Iraq. North Korea has nothing to lose. They have no money, their people are starving, and they have few natural resources. Desperation makes people do dangerous and irrational things, and "irrational" is a good word to describe the current course of action by North Korea. Their announcement today, in which they claim that "any military action by the United States towards North Korea will be the start of World War III," is not the kind of thing one would hear from a rational government.

We ignore them at our peril. Now is the time to take action. We can't possibly make a move in Iraq until the UNMOVIC inspectors deliver a lot more data; rather than stand around and waiting, the Bush Administration should concentrate on the real, imminent, and publicly announced threat in the Korean Peninsula before it turns nuclear.

Or "nu-kew-ler", if you are a politician from Texas.