Friday, May 20, 2011

Flying Giraffe

As I sat down to draw this, I thought, "A flying giraffe... there's something new." It wasn't until after I'd drawn it, colored it, and given the sketch away to one of my Facebook fans that I started wondering just how original the concept of a flying giraffe was. I Googled it and found 1,260,000 other flying giraffes... so, not quite as original as I had hoped. At that point, I couldn't help but wonder how many non-flying giraffe images Google would find, so I did a second search for the simpler, more conventional "giraffe." That one yielded 2,430,000 images. So it turns out that only about one-in-three of the internet's giraffe population is capable of flight... which I'm pretty sure is the actual percentage you would find if you just went outside and looked around.

Saturday, May 07, 2011

Hooray for Moms!

I've been a dad for a few years now, and I've learned a lot of things about raising kids, the most profound of which is that, on my best day, I'm passably decent at it. I guess I do all right compared to some delinquent fathers, but I'm not even close to being the best parent in our house. This is probably true in most homes, because let's face it, moms are better than dads at about everything. Like when my daughter was coming around the corner and bumped her hand on the wall... my wife immediately gave her a hug and asked her if she was all right. What?! Where does she get this stuff? All I could think of to do in that situation was say, "I'm just glad you're still alive enough to cry about it." I've found that dads aren't generally very compassionate... at least not in our house.

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there... especially my favorite moms, which includes my wife, my mom, my mother-in-law, my sisters, my sisters-in-law, my step mom, my grandmas, my grandma-in-law, my aunts, my cousins, my cousins' wives, all the moms who read my blog or are my Facebook fans, all the moms who are currently reading this or having it read to them because they like pictures but can't read, and any of you who aren't moms but someday will be or would be if you could be. Hooray for you! You're making our lives seem bearable on days when we know they really aren't. Thanks for all you do... and Happy Mother's Day!