So to ward off the nastiest effects of the cold, I'm sucking on a Fisherman's Friend, I thought these lozenges were a curiously British phenomenon, like Irn Bru or Cornish pasties, but Asri has assured me they're also very popular in Malaysia of all places.

I can't really begin to imagine the surprise of Malaysian prawn fisherman who'd been dumped on a trawler in a freezing North Sea, culture shock is probably an understatement.

Apart from the incredulous reaction here - "why?" seemed to be the most popular response to the result - things go on much the same as normal.

Maybe the Democrats had "misunderestimed" Bush's appeal to the god botherers in middle America? Who knows?

There's a few things that stand out, the primary one is that the US voting system is in dire need of electoral reform (don't get me started on the UK system which also stinks).

When one of the largest democracies in the world has an election regarded by international electoral observers as more flawed than that of backward third World countries, something is seriously wrong.

The electoral process needs to be accurate and just and also to be seen as such. For example the voting machines with no audit trail provide no proof of their accuracy, we can only surmise this is because they have something to hide. After all, why else do the states using these machines have a higher discrepency rate between the exit polls and the votes declared?

The next election starts now for both parties, part of that process must be to produce an electoral process that can be regarded as fair to all citizens, otherwise every American has disenfranchised themself. Wouldn't you want your vote to count?