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What it's like out there:

If Gov. Gray Davis has any doubts that he's in deep, deep political trouble, he should spend a few hours with Burt Pronin.

I ran into Burt outside an Albertsons supermarket in Brea the other day. An affable, silver-haired 73-year-old wearing shorts and a Hawaiian-style shirt, Burt was relaxing in a lawn chair near the store entrance, next to a tiny sign that said "Recall (Remove) Governor Davis," holding a sheaf of blank recall petitions in his lap.

And passers-by were eagerly lining up to fill in the blanks.

"Where do I sign?" one guy walked up and demanded. "Can I sign more than once?" a woman asked. "Can I sign it, like, a million times?" a store checker on break wanted to know.

And so on. In 15 minutes, with virtually no effort on his part, and without ever stirring from his lawn chair, Burt collected seven signatures � along with a dozen expressions of support from passers-by who said they had already signed a recall petition.

"This is not a hard sell," Burt said, chuckling. "I don't even have to approach them; they come to me!"

Read the rest. And the numbers:

Recall organizer Ted Costa told me that as of Tuesday he had turned in 506,496 signatures to the secretary of state's office, and that 300,000 more signatures are already "in the pipeline."

900,000 valid signatures are required for recall.