As much as I love and repect Ralph Nader - and who among us does not have the full text of Unsafe at Any Speed tattooed on her back in near-microscopic print? - I have finally decided to swallow my bile and vote for Albert Gore.

As op-ed pages around the country never tire of noting, whoever takes office next year will most likely get to replace at least three, and possibly as many as five, Supreme Court Justices, especially if the court takes another one of those ill-advised bus tours to the Bermuda Triangle. The Supreme Court has also been advised to stop accepting invitations to weekend getaways at secluded island mansions and to stop hanging out at that spooky abandoned carnival off Highway 6 - but sometimes they just don't listen to reason.

Of course, if the court's conservatives die, retire, or vanish into a mysterious rift in the space-time continuum, the question will be moot, but reliably moderate John Paul Stevens is 80 years old, and if Gore loses, I will quit school to follow Stevens around with an oxygen tank and a pair of defibrillators.

Call me naive, but I want an activist court that considers the right to privacy implicit in the Constitution, a judiciary that deems federal intervention in the name of social justice not only lawful but desirable. I also want the justices to live in the same house, like the Monkees, and to travel from town to town in a psychedelic bus solving mysteries, like Led Zeppelin.

With the help of The Wall Street Journal, three psychic visions, and my legally-inclined roommate, who has not only taken Con Law twice but also owns Reversal of Fortune on VHS, I have compiled an extensive guide to the Supreme Court's all-too-mortal constituents:

Antonin Scalia hates the Supreme Court. The justices are stupid, and the attorneys are dumb, and nobody understands Scalia's references to Plato's Euthypro, even when he speaks slowly and exaggerates the vowels.

Retirement odds: 3-2, and I am pretty sure that there is no "Euthypro." Despite his relative youth, Scalia's disgust for the Court has marked him as the justice most likely to pack it in early. He has also been voted the Justice Most Likely to Try Out for the New York Knicks, Most Likely to Emerge as an Unapologetic Advocate of Trepanning, and Most Likely to Bite Somebody.

David Souter was appointed by Bush pere, who for some reason thought he was getting a solid conservative, probably because Souter was so polite. As a matter of fact, Souter had never written an opinion before Bush plucked him out of obscurity, according to my roommate, and Bush was unpleasantly surprised when Souter turned out to be reliably moderate, if not actually liberal. David Souter collects penny stamps, and in the winter he likes to microwave his socks.

Retirement odds: "nuts to retirement," says Souter.

Clarence Thomas is only 51 years old. He never opens his mouth in court, and the opinions he disgorges differ from Scalia's only in that they are not written in blood. They're also mind-bogglingly stupid. I am allowed to make that call because I am America's foremost legal scholar, now that Jim Varney has passed on.

Retirement odds: Clarence Thomas will continue to be a sleepy millstone around the neck of the American judicial system until 2030.

Anthony Kennedy is 63 years old and relatively healthy. His teeth are okay. While generally conservative - in which case we would not care who Bush appoints to his seat, as long as he does not try to pick Dick Cheney again - he also supports Roe v. Wade.

People we would like to see Bush nominate to the Supreme Court: David Justice; Johnny Bench; 1941 Kentucky Derby winner Whirlaway; a box of puppies; Clarence Thomas's twin brother, Blarence Thomas, who is always scurrying out of the room moments before Clarence is scheduled to appear but is definitely a different and very real person and not just Clarence Thomas wearing dark glasses and a beret, oh no; and animated soap spokesperson Mr. Bubble. "Mr. Bubble makes bathtime funny-fun-fun," Bush will explain. "Fun. Beep beep! Whoosh! Zap!"

Retirement odds: I have probably been drinking too much Palmolive.

Stephen Breyer is nice, too. He packs his own lunch.

Retirement odds: "figs to retirement," says Breyer.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is my favorite justice. Not just because she is smart, but because she makes us feel smart, too, not like Antonin "I Hate You" Scalia. Ginsburg had colon cancer in the late 1990s but claims that the disease is in remission.

Retirement odds: cancer takes hold when a single diseased cell begins to replicate itself at a fantastic rate. It is nature gone murderous and entropy gone haywire. Does this mole look unusually asymmetrical to you?

Sandra Day O'Connor was the first female Supreme Court Justice in space. Today she lives in Century City, CA, where she does not sing selections from Grease and insert her own name into the songs, no, never.

Retirement odds: if you feel like making an anagram out of "retirement odds," you might try to build your phrase around the words "tired," "semen," "demons," or "Dr. Demento."

ZZ Top: is not a Supreme Court Justice. Does not appear in the Constitution.

John Paul Stevens is older than Man O'War, the Lindbergh baby, The Great Gatsby, and his own father, James Tiberius Stevens, thanks to a complicated set of differential equations and one (1) flux capacitor.

Retirement odds: I have read that you can get cancer inside your eyelids and then even if they don't have to take out the whole eye by the time they find the tumor(s) the cancer has almost always spread to your lymph nodes and metastasized in your liver. I think it was in Highlights. Does this eyeball look unusually lumpy to you?

William Rehnquist is older than Bocephalus, the modern nation of Iraq, the cypress tree, and Latin. He fathered sixteen children in ancient Babylonia and outlived them all. He weeps for them still, this stern, stolid burr oak of a man, though their descendents are as numerous and diffuse as his weird and inconsistent readings of the Fourth Amendment. As Chief Justice of the Supremre Court, William Rehnquist (motto: "If you're not guilty, why are you in jail?") has presided over some of the most irritating rulings since Plessy vs. Ferguson. I am allowed to make that call because I am America's foremost legal scholar, now that Wilt "the Stilt" Chamberlain is gone.

Retirement odds: Yes.

Alas, Gore may well prove to be the creepy, uninspiring Nixon to Clinton's banal but beloved Eisenhower, unable to keep his party in power even in the midst of an economic boom that goaded a fat, happy electorate into spending hundreds of millions of dollars on custom-made golf clubs and gold-plated TV sets and Cadillacs with fins. I will make, then, this vow: if Stevens or any other moderately liberal justice passes on during a Bush administration, I pledge to buy some judicial robes and a pair of elevator shoes and remove his or her face and wear it to court. You might call it creepy, but Dr. Lecter and I call it a commitment to democracy.