Lookout, world! The OWL blog has reached its terrible twos! That’s right: as of this week, the blog is officially celebrating its second anniversary.

Much has happened since last year’s blog-iversary. I’ve written 125 articles
and you’ve posted more than 2,500 comments. (Nice work!) In fact, we’re approaching 5,000 comments since the start of the blog. Can you believe it?

To mark the occasion, I’ve crafted a list of my Top 10 favourite moments from the past year.

Let’s get the party started!:

#10: The first Reader Art of the Week (AKA RAotW)
This is my favourite new feature from the second year of the blog. As I said at the time, I’d publish a new piece of reader art every week if I could. But for that one I need your help! Send your comics, drawings, poems, and stories to me at owlblog@owlkids.com. If you haven’t sent something in to be published on the blog yet, what are you waiting for?!

#9: Six questions with… DwayneTheShark
I mean, it’s not every day you get to converse via email with a nurse shark.

#8: The first Saturday blog post
As you guys know, I’m addicted to the blog. I’m always checking in on the weekends to approve comments, see what you guys are saying, and so on. But until I wrote a mailbag on a Saturday in early October, I’d never actually posted anything on the weekend. I had so many good questions piled up, I couldn’t wait!

#7: The original comic Claude Bordeleau drew for the blog

#6: Breaking news on the OWL blog
In the first post of the second year of the OWL blog, I posted some very big news: the return of “Max Finder Mystery” to OWL. Lots of you were very excited about the news, and I was happy to report it here first — blog readers knew long before anyone else!

Now, here’s some other big blog news: Owlkids is publishing a new collection of “Max” comics: Max Finder Collected Casebook, Vol. 4! It includes the 10 most recent comics, as well as three brand-new stories penned by series creator Liam O’Donnell. You heard it here first!

But, you’re saying, “That’s only half of the Top 10! Where’s the rest?”

Check back tomorrow for the Top 5! In the meantime, please take a moment
to talk about your own fave moments, conversations, and YouTube clips? Post a comment below!

Craig, owlblog@owlkids.com

Eight days! Eight days until the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games officially begin! Can you believe it? I can’t. We here at OWL have been talking about the Olympics for so long it started to feel like they were never going to come.

But they are going to come. In eight days!

One person I know has a firm grasp on events is Vivien Bowers, author of
Wow Canada! (a book published by Owlkids). Vivien was in Vancouver recently and took a snapshot with the three Olympic mascots. Check it out:

Fun, huh? As you’ll know from page 5 of your Winter Olympics Collector Edition of OWL, the mascots are (from left) Sumi, Miga, and Quatchi.

And, hey, did you notice that there are some empty speech balloons in the photo? Susan, OWL’s art director, put those in there to give you guys a challenge. What do you think Vivien and Quatchi are saying? Let us know in the comments below.

Eight days! I can’t believe it.

Craig, owlblog@owlkids.com

Okay, guys. Big news: the Groundhog Day groundhogs have spoken, and the majority of them say we officially have six more weeks of winter.

As legend has it, if the groundhog sees its shadow upon emerging from its hole on February 2, we will have six more weeks of winter. If it doesn’t see its shadow, we will have an early spring. However, technically speaking, whether or not the groundhogs see their shadows, we still have six weeks and five days of winter left. So what’s the deal?

To get some answers, I decided to launch a new, [hopefully] recurring OWL blog feature: “OWL Exposé.” I came up with five things you may not know about this odd, annual event, and I’m very excited to share them with you.

Buckle up:

1. There are no less than 19 groundhogs that participate in Groundhog Day prediction festivities across North America, but they don’t always agree. The five Canadian ones I’ve read about online are Balzac Billy (from Balzac, Alberta), Spanish Joe (Spanish, Ontario), Shubenacadie Sam (Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia), Watson Willow (Watson, Saskatchewan), and Wiarton Willie (Wiarton, Ontario). This year, only Balzac Billy predicted an early spring.

2. One of Wiarton, Ontario’s most famous landmarks is a statue of Wiarton Willie — it’s made of limestone and weighs a whopping six tonnes. You can see a picture of it here. (Bonus fact: the actual name of the statue is “Willie Emerging.”)

3. Groundhog Day may be the ancestor of a Celtic festival called Imbolc. According to Wikipedia, “Imbolc is traditionally a time of weather prognostication, and the old tradition of watching to see if serpents or badgers came from their winter dens.” However, groundhogs are NOT the ancestors of serpents. There is no relation.

4. The largest Groundhog Day celebration takes place in Punxsutawney (say: “PUNKS-uh-TAWN-ee”), Pennsylvania. The town’s population usually sits at around 6,000 people, but as many as 35,000 have shown up to catch the groundhog. Punxsutawney is also where the first official Groundhog Day took place in 1886.

5. Some places where groundhogs aren’t plentiful substitute other animals for the day. For example, Alaska celebrates Marmot Day and the Denver Zoo in Denver, Colorado, observes Prairie Dog Day.

Also, if you’ll remember from one of my earliest OWL blog posts, the prairie dog looks like this:

Still awesome!

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That’s it for me, guys. I hope you enjoyed this new, wild OWL blog feature. If you did, let me know in the comments. Also, feel free to suggest new subjects for me to check out!

Talk to you soon.

Craig, owlblog@owlkids.com

Hey all. Here are the results for the reverse mailbag questions from a couple weeks ago. As usual, I’m going to tabulate the most popular answer for each question, and then I’m going to weigh in with my own thoughts.

Let’s rock!

1. Do you have any New Year’s resolutions?

Popular response: Yes. A whopping 75% said they did make resolutions this year. The most popular answer was study harder. A few blog readers would also like to be nicer to the people in their lives (sisters especially).

CB response: Yes. I want to read and write even more this year than I did last year. If you have any recommendations for what I should read (or write… why not?), let me know!

2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics?

Popular response: 8. However, that’s only because I counted
blog readers Hailey and Emily as if they answered 10 each. If I calculated your guys’ excitement using the numbers they actually gave (82 and one million), it would be 50,011. On a scale of 1 to 10, that’s pretty excited!

CB response: 10. I can’t wait to cheer for all the athletes featured in the awesome “What’s It Like” feature in the special Winter Games issue of OWL. We had writers tracking down interviews all over the place for that one, and I think it turned out great. Definitely one of my favourite parts of the issue!

What about you? What did you enjoy most in the Winter Games special issue?

3. What’s your favourite planet? (Here’s a website to help you decide.)

Popular response: Earth. With 27% of the vote, our home planet narrowly edged out Saturn (22%) for top spot on your list. Special mention goes to blog reader Hailey (again) for listing her favourite planet as Hoth. Three cheers for obscure Star Wars references!

CB response: Saturn. With all due respect to Earth, which is awesome and recently had an incredible movie made about it, I will go with your second favourite (which, coincidentally, is the second largest planet in the solar system). Mainly I love the rings, and how scientists keep discovering new ones:

That ring is so large it would take a billion Earths to fill it! Amazing.

4. Which do you prefer: baby bunnies or baby koalas?

Popular response: Bunnies. Again! Honestly, OWL readers, I think I may have created a [very cute] monster when I found that bunny picture and entered it in the OWL Blog Cute-off.™ For those keeping score, that’s four wins in a row. (Sorry, penguins, pigs, tigers, and koalas — you could’ve been contenders.)

CB response: Koalas — if only because I chose the photo and had to believe it was cuter, or at least as cute. Next reverse mailbag, I’m going to have to get creative with the Cute-off.™ You just wait!

5. Would you rather have 10 toes on each foot OR 10 fingers on each hand?

Popular response: 10 fingers by a nose. (Get it?) In a pretty tight race, 10 fingers took 60% of the vote.

CB response: I’m going to say 10 toes. I liked blog reader Marwyn’s observation that 10 fingers on each hand would make playing piano easier, but I was sold by blog reader Lucia’s argument: 10 toes would be awesome for swimming. Also, think of how much money you’d save on flippers!

And that’s it for me, guys. Thanks to everyone who participated in the reverse mailbag. As always, it was a lot of fun compiling your answers and thinking up my own.

Talk to you soon!

Craig, owlblog@owlkids.com

Hey all. Is it me, or has it been WAY too long since the last edition of Reader Art of the Week? Personally, I think it’s been too long.

So, without further adieu, here’s a drawing sent to me by OWL reader Casey:

Cool, huh? I love the way Casey used shading to add depth to the portrait.

I don’t have any other info on this, but that just allows us to use our imaginations. Any guesses on who this is? Someone famous? Someone from history? Let me know in the comments below!

Many thanks to Casey for sending in her art. Please send me your drawings, doodles, stories, poems, etc. If you’re really proud of something you made for school, send me that, too! Just make sure to include all the relevant details in your email so I can fill in the OWL blogosphere.

That’s it for me, guys. Check back tomorrow for the results of the recent reverse mailbag. If you haven’t voted yet, hop to it. Time’s ticking away!

Craig, owlblog@owlkids.com