Chuck Norris

Campaigning for Mike Huckabee, actor Chuck Norris said Sunday that Sen. John McCain is too old to handle the pressures of being president. "I didn't pick John to support because I'm just afraid that the vice president would wind up taking over his job in that four-year presidency," Norris said. At 67, he is four years younger than McCain, who will be 72 in August. "So we need to find someone that can handle it for four years or eight years . . .

AN A-list celebrity endorsement can lift a presidential campaign. But Chuck Norris' seal of approval can kick-start the Airbus. Take Mike Huckabee's political efforts, for example. A month ago, few even knew that Huckabee was a former governor of Arkansas, let alone a Republican candidate for president. Then karate-movie tough guy Norris -- with a cult following big enough to populate three continents -- announced he was in Huckabee's camp. (They share evangelical Christian views.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits. Chuck Norris frequently donates blood to the Red Cross. Just not his own. Chuck Norris does not fade away. By all rights he should have, by now. "Walker, Texas Ranger," his butt-kicking law-and-order TV series, finished its run on CBS in May 2001, after eight years and 203 episodes.

Howard Jackson, 54, who parlayed his martial arts skills into stunt work with Chuck Norris in films and television, died March 7 of leukemia at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte. A native of Detroit, Jackson was a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton in the early 1970s when he met Norris at a karate exhibition. After his discharge from the military, Jackson trained with Norris at his Torrance studio and with his traveling team of martial artists.

Last summer, for no particular reason, Ian Spector, a computational biology major at Brown University, created the Random Chuck Norris Fact generator and put it up on a page on his website, www.4Q.cc. So far, the page has registered more than 3,000 "facts" about the actor and martial arts champion. "I'm asked a lot which facts are my favorites and my stock reply is that they all are," Spector says. He admits he answers that way because he doesn't want to hurt posters' feelings.