Many thanks to Dan Telfer for the inspiration for today's cartoon. And, of course, to Discovery Channel for their animal pr0n.

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Get Your Rear in Gear.

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I'm not sure the math works out, but I was certainly not in NYC very long and spent most of it in a small, server-filled room.

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Happy Anniversary, sweetheart.

I have to admit, Maru is cute.

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We packed really light for our weekend getaway to New York, and so instead of all the sketch pads and pencils and pens I've accumulated since I started this project, I took a little moleskine and a couple of pens. This one and the next two were drawn in that little notebook.

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I don't think I even remember the sequence of conversation that led to (the other) Erica uttering the phrase "Fuzzy has unicorn crotch", but say it she did.

New York is great, but when we got stuck there, I just assumed that's what the weather was back in Chicago.

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I was actually really happy to help out. Bear!

It's a reasonable amount of fun!

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Why, yes, I did just get around to watching these two terrible movies.

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I hadn't quite realized that my sketch book is 9x12, until I used the whole page to draw this cartoon and then couldn't scan the whole thing on my letter-sized scanner.

Erica would really like for Large Bear to not be sad, but I'm not sure that's in the cards.

We went to the live taping of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me tonight. The radio show is funny, but the live show is at least 50% funnier -- there's just more of it (it's a two hour taping that gets edited down to an hour radio show) and Peter Sagal's facial expressions are delightful cherries on his comedy sundae.

Thanks to Erica who gave me the joke for today's comic.

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I'm second-guessing that maybe I should have said "reasonably fun", but these guys (as many of my characters do) talk like me, and I talk like that.

You know, a crate of cookies.

Technically, Mary Shelley was 19 when she finished Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. You may remember how I felt about the book, but the same things that drove me crazy about Victor Frankenstein -- his whininess and passivity -- would seem to make it perfect for the modern teen angst treatment vampires are getting.

I don't know if you can tell, but this is Schmuzzy drawing his own Zs. Both the "why I drew it" and "why you might not be able to tell what it is" are because I myself was very sleepy when I drew it.

Man, that Franklin and Bernice, they sure are terrible people.

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This is what happens when I stay up all night.

I know the Crownie exists because Erica brought some home tonight that Mrs. Rebecca Ryder had made.

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I just started these guys by sketching some lines and seeing where it went from there and, unusually for me, I don't know their names yet.

Happy America!