Happy New Year!

2006 is down to its last few hours. Starting tomorrow morning, I'll be writing the wrong year on checks and things for the following four to seven months. Really looking forward to that. It's been a good year... new job, new blog, new house, fun trips, lovely wife...

Happy New Year, everyone!

Back to Sketches

A fox with a stretched out body... a snail with a beard... a cash-carrying fellow in a terrified sprint... a lady stirring a mixing bowl with her foot. If this page of sketches only had some vampires and assorted birds, it would be a showcase of everything that Christmas means to me. Oh, hey - there they are!

May your next few days be as festive and fun as a long-bodied fox is crafty. What?

Merry Christmas to All

This is my Christmas card to all of you who still come to this place I call "blog." I don't know a lot of you personally, but it's nice knowing that you stop by occasionally to see what I've drawn and to partake of my mental wanderings. I'm glad there's you, or I probably wouldn't have a blog. So thank you all, and happy holidays!

Merry Christmas from me to you. And you other religions - some greetings too.

Conan & the Manatee

As part of a joke on his show last week, Conan O'Brien mentioned a fake website. He found out later that NBC has to buy any website he mentions if it doesn't already exist, so for $159, NBC became the owner of HornyManatee.com. Conan didn't want the site to go to waste, so they started adding stuff to it, including fan art. I sent in this one that I spent about a half hour on. Conan and his show are the coolest.

I bet some of you sailors would like to have a mermaid like this one over for spaghetti. Am I right?

Two Turtle Doves

The Twelve Days of Christmas is a ridiculous song. If you sing at a fast tempo and skip five or six verses, you can sing the whole thing in just under 40 minutes. Yet sadly, the song's length is the most sane thing about it. I love Christmas carols... but I do not like The Twelve Days of Christmas.

In the first seven days of the song (which, as far as I can tell, is sung in real time), a total of 59 birds are presented as gifts. Fifty-nine birds? Did I give you the wrong impression concerning my feelings for birds? I mean, I have nothing against them, but let's leave some of them outside. Maybe one of these days of Christmas I could get a truck full of bird seed, because tuppence doesn't grow on trees.

And ten lords a leaping? I don't even know what I'd do with one lord a leaping. I'm going to have to rent a bus just to take them all down to the pier. Now, nine ladies dancing... there's a gift! That's something I've wanted for a long time. See - if you personalize a gift like that, good things happen. But the lords and the drummers and the sanctuary's worth of birds... ridiculous.

Perhaps the most upsetting thing of all about The Twelve Days of Christmas... there's only ONE day of Christmas. December 25th. Maybe for next year's one day of Christmas I'll get my true love a calendar.

(When my wife saw this drawing, she said, "You know - turtle doves aren't half turtle." I know that. I'm not an idiot. They're half dove.)

You Better Watch Out!

I drew this for our Christmas card last year, based on the song "Santa Claus is Coming to Town." Some of my friends said they had to hide or destroy the card because it was scaring their kids. That song always made me a little uncomfortable, so I was glad to relay that terror to a new generation of children.

"He sees you when you're sleeping.

He knows when you're awake.

He knows when you get home from school,

And he knows what bus you take."

That's not exactly how the song goes, but I think the lines I added are implied. If he sees me when I'm sleeping AND when I'm awake... what else is there? He sees everything I do! It's a Christmas stalking. Normally I avoid puns, but in this case I'm not ashamed. It had to be said.

A Little Mermaid

It has been widely suggested that manatees (or "menatee") could be behind the myth of the mermaid. Sailors who were unfamiliar with manatees may have seen them and mistook them for the mythical, human-like species. A manatee surfacing in a patch of seaweed could have appeared to be a mermaid with long, flowing hair.

How much ocean water do you have to drink before manatees begin to look like attractive, young maidens? And if ocean madness isn't to blame here, how ugly were the women these mermaid-discovering sailors left at port if "woman" was a logical title for the first sea cow they ever saw draped in seaweed?

I should have drawn what the sailors were actually seeing, but I wanted to draw a pretty mermaid instead. Maybe another day.