Two years ago today, Sarah Palin gave a speech in which she, well, I’m not sure:

I guess down here that’s some southern sweet tea, and you know up in Alaska, we have a smaller version of Tea Party up there, and we call it iced tea, and I am a big supporter of this movement, believe in this movement, got lots of friends and family in the lower 48 who attend these events and, across the country, just knowing that this is the movement, and America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this.

Today, the movement to draft Sarah Palin at Americans Elect has six supporters, none of them from the South and none of them from Alaska.

Five years ago today, we admitted that we’d been accepting gifts in exchange for expressing favor for a prominent presidential candidate. Today, Mister Thumb sent us another shipment of his own personal nail clippings. We’re doing our best to resist this time. But it’s hard, so hard.

“I will confess to you, I’m channeling Ronald Reagan in 1975-1976 and I’m channeling the way he used the Panama Canal.” — Newt Gingrich, January 26 2012

Seriousness descending into silliness.

Stephen Colbert for President? Some may say that Colbert isn’t a serious candidate, but really, are any of the other Republican presidential candidates serious? At least Stephen Colbert means to be funny.

Besides, we all know that Republican voters in South Carolina are looking for a non-Romney candidate. Stephen Colbert is not Mitt Romney as much as anybody else!

Republicans want a leader who hates terrorism. Well, Stephen Colbert hates terrorists. How much? A LOT! You don’t want to take sides with Osama Bin Laden, do you?

Finally, the decision to vote for Stephen Colbert comes down to traditional religious values. Traditional Americans have a personal relationship with Jesus. They want a presidential candidate who loves Jesus, and who is loved by Jesus in return. Jesus loves Stephen Colbert. How much? A LOT! That’s why you have to Vote Stephen Colbert for President – or the baby Jesus will cry!

You may know about Settlers of Catan, the game in which you place towns and roads on hexagonal tiles to claim resources and build an empire.

I was just playing Scrabble with my kids. They were getting bored and frustrated, and asked if they could trade tiles with one another. At least on my Parker Brothers box, that’s not part of the rules, but by gum I think it oughta be. Trading resources is a key part of the Settlers of Catan game, one of the features that transforms a rote set of rules into a psych-out melodrama.

How else could you make Scrabble more like Settlers of Catan? How about roads? You could let tiles move along the “roads” made by the crosswords of letters, so long as their absence doesn’t turn any word into a non-word. Maybe a tile could move as many spaces down the “road” as the number of letters you play in a turn, and at its destination it could help make a new word.

Working the other way, how could you make Settlers of Catan more like Scrabble? Well, how about introducing letter tiles? At every point of every hexagon that a player has roads on, she or he could put down letters with scrabble point values as long as they spelled a word, and the person who spells the highest-point word could get two extra victory points, just like you can get with the Longest Road or by playing the most Knight cards.

Are there other ways you can think of to make Settlers of Catan more Scrabblish, or to make Scrabble more Catanish? Lay down your ideas in the comment section.

If they’d made the announcement on September 28, it would have been too late. Whew! Now I can become an official fan. Does a salary come with that, or is it more just a line on the resume?

Well, Free-ish. I hate it when people leave the fine print to the last, so let me say upfront you gotta pay shipping and sales tax, which is slightly bogus, but this is the best deal we could get with our distributor…

… but that said, hey, want a Krampus Card for the holiday season? J. Clifford drew up this doozy of a Krampusnacht design and you can get it free on a card (not including shipping and handling, yeah, I know, sheesh). Here’s how.

Step 1. Visit the Krampus Card page here and add it to your shopping cart.

Step 2. use the coupon code KWTAHJFOVOWK at checkout.

That’s it! One one card is free per person, and the offer is good through November 24 2011. Get it now so you can send an endearment (or perhaps a birch switch) to your love in time for the Krampuslauf.

If you’re reading this and you’re anywhere near Washington DC, consider coming down for an all-night Dance Party in Freedom Plaza (14th and Pennsylvania NW).  Part of the purpose is to have a good time while protesting, but there’s a larger strategic goal: to hold the Plaza and keep it going into another week.  If the DC occupation can make it through another night into the workweek, the police will have a hard time articulating a reason to sweep everyone out… and as we’ve all learned from the experience of Occupy Wall Street, if the occupation can make it through one week, it’ll make it through another, and another, and continue to grow.

9 pm.  Freedom Plaza.  DC.  Dance Party.

This group took to the stage in occupied Freedom Plaza in the early afternoon on October 8, 2011 as part of the extended Occupy DC protest in Washington, DC.