Posted December 9, 2015 at 2:05 am

This comics original script frustrated me. While it successfully showed Sarah attempting to avoid addressing the elephant in the room as clearly as this final version does, it did not actually contain any mention of elephants, nor did it make clear that twelve tons would be an absurdly heavy weight for even an elephant.

Several rewrites later, however, an elephant did find its way in to the script, and all was right in the world.

In so far as this comic was concerned, I mean. There's quite a bit wrong with the world as a whole, really. Have you looked at Twitter recently? Outrages are occurring with such frequency that I've started mistaking outrages over new things for ongoing outrages that had previously ignited.

It's enough to make a person want to forget their worries by thinking about elephants, but wishing to suddenly stop thinking about the various troubles of the world would be like trying not to think about elephants, and thinking about elephants in a manner that brings to mind the metaphor of not thinking about elephants is enough of a mind twister to give a person an elephant-sized headache.

All that aside, let me just say now that it is not at all strange that Sarah is familiar with the average weight of adult male African elephants. We all have random trivia about random animals that we've picked up from random places under random circumstances floating around in our heads, and Sarah just so happens to have information regarding elephants floating around in hers. This is perfectly natural, and really, we should have suspected as much all along.

It is worth noting, however, that she is technically incorrect. While it is true that six tons would be an above average weight for an adult male African elephant, it is only true if using metric tons. If using US tons, which she undoubtedly is, six tons would actually be the average, making a six ton elephant perfectly within acceptable parameters of mediocrity.

This small error on her part, however, only lends credence to the notion that this is simply trivia she happened to have heard, and that she is not, in fact, a true expert on elephants in general. This makes the entire sequence several times more realistic than it might have been otherwise, and proves that I am a very clever and handsome individual worthy of your admiration and praise even if it turns out that I only realized she was in error well after the script was written, and retroactively justified it in this commentary so that I could have Sarah simply say "half that" instead of something that wouldn't have read quite as smoothly.