One of the biggest things I miss from our old site was the mock drafts that used to run every Friday. Those were fantastic time wasters, and a good one was a virtual guarantee that you were going to be far from productive at work, as your day instead degenerated into arguments with strangers over who would be the best Saturday cartoon character to have sex with, (and now we all know how that would go), or some other equally inane topic, all of which were still more important than that TPS report deadline your boss was yelling about. Good times.

Well, it’s been long enough. After a discussion in the back channels yours truly is bringing it back, with some slight rule changes. The old site had 4-5 main contributors, one of whom may not have been real. So they’d do 2-3 rounds themselves, then kick it to the kommentariat to draft whatever was left over. You can do that when you’ve only taken 10-15 of whatever topic was up for drafting. We, however, are a much more connected group when it comes to the writin’ and draftin’ of things, so if we did that we’d easily take out 30-50 before we threw the bedraggled leftovers to our beloved readership. That’s no fun. So these drafts, which I expect to last as long as I remember to do them, (2-3 weeks), will just leap right into it.

Also, for content and alliteration reasons, we’ve moved the draft to Monday mornings, so get ready to kill your productivity right from the start.

First come, first served, subject to my randomly assigning the first pick to someone else, generally because they came up with the idea. Or because they bribed me. For now, please wait 10 picks or 30 minutes before making another one. That will be revised up or down depending on how much participation we get, which I hope will be a lot.

Today is July 5th, which means that America has been 245-years-old for all of one day. In honor of this birthday, today’s draft topic is the admittedly broad topic ‘Americana.’ Americana is defined as “related to the history, geography, folklore, and cultural heritage of the United States of America. Americana is any collection of materials and things concerning or characteristic of the United States or of the American people and representative or even stereotypical of American culture as a whole.” Might be blue jeans, might be hamburgers, might be imperialism in the service of capitalism. If you think it reflects the USofA, you go right ahead and draft it.

Have at it! And remember: