Man, I am so glad I don’t drink: The State of the Union Drinking Game.

My personal favorite is what to do if the Res says, “Don’t mess with Texas!”

Update: Damn. South Knox Bubba rules. He’s gone one better than the Drinking Game and really put his money where Bush’s mouth is.

Damn. Bubba’s going to listen to the speech and check the transcript? That is dedication. I think I have to soak in a lavender bath Tuesday night. But I think I’m in with Bubba…now I just gotta pick a charity…

And yet more update: Adam Felber’s totally hilarious SOTU drinking game. My favorite bit:

At any point during the War portion of the speech, any player may assume the role of Rogue Nation – exclaiming “Yikes!” and then ducking and cowering. Everyone else must follow suit immediately. The last player to do so becomes the Next Pre-empted Nation, who is then obliged to take a drink.

No matter how dangerously drunk the Pre-empted Nation becomes, nobody is permitted to suggest that they be given a break. Anyone who does so immediately becomes “France,” and is obliged to finish their own drink while being ridiculed by the other players.

Update, Tuesday: I’ve decided on my charity. It’s CoffeeKids, a charity devoted to making the lives of coffee growers better.

Update, Thursday: And CoffeeKids has my money.

Recently I bought The Assassin’s Cloak, a wonderful anthology of excerpts from a wide variety of published diaries and journals, organized by date. (So you can open it to, say, January 17 and read all the entries for that day, spanning hundreds of years.) I noticed that a large number of the excerpts mentioned political occurrences happening in the lives in the writers, and I thought, “I never write about the external world at large in my journal, I should do that more.”

So I sat down and wrote what I thought would be a short summary of my take on the current political scene in my diary.

It ended up going on for pages.

And I realized that I am so scared about what’s going on in the world today (and am such an inherent coward to begin with) that I would never, ever post any such thing on this page. Because, you know, they’re reading.

Paul O’Neill collaborated with Ron Suskind on The Price of Loyalty, and when asked, pre-publication, if he was worried about possible repercussions, he said something to the effect that he was rich, he wasn’t worried.

In the week since, Paul O’Neill has started backpedalling on his words something furious. He’s been misinterpreted. He’s not anti-Bush, in fact, he’s voting for Bush. Things are just great.

Paul O’Neill is a wealthy, respected man who’s had a long career.

You think you’re tough? Maybe not so much.

I know I’m not.

I will, however, point you to this: The Tom Paine State of the Union Scorecard, which you can use to judge the SOTU address coming up on Tuesday.