Google's cuddly Mother's Day doodle
In honor of Mother's Day in America and several other countries, Google has two of the letters in its logo hug a third.
Mother's Day doesn't fall on the same day everywhere.
Somehow, the card companies that invented it couldn't quite manage worldwide co-ordination. So while the U.S. and Australia seem to celebrate their mothers today, the British and the Saudi Arabians, for example, honored their mothers on March 18. (They had their own doodle, embedded below.)
Still, Google is a quintessentially profit-oriented American company, so today its doodle shows how mothers can profit from the affections of their little offspring.
Yes, it's 'o" for offspring, as two little o's in Google's logo come racing through a door and leap at the "g" that represents "grossly overworked", their hard-pressed mother.
Sadly, these kids still seem to believe that flowers are an appropriate gift for momma.
This may no longer be true, as one survey suggested that matriarchs are now rather more keen on receiving, say, an iPad.
On Google's blog, the company also honors mothers by reminding them to use Google Calendar, Google Hangouts, Google+, Google Play, Google Chrome, Google Search and YouTube (where it offers a fine recipe for Betty's Louisiana Crunch Cake).
Mother's Day, you see, is a day of family love, of honoring the woman who tolerated you when you didn't deserve it, fed you when you were getting on her last, um, gray hair and guided you when you were more clueless than a rat at a fast.
But it's also a day when products get pushed, gadgets get sold and Verizon's mothers explain that all they really want is an employment contract.
Yes, Mother's Day has become a commercial event. Well, that's just the way the world has become right?