Happy New Year! Things have been pretty hectic around here these past few weeks. You probably thought we were just lazying around not producing new episodes, but actually we’ve been doing all kinds of stuff recently. First, we’ve been building a small recording booth. It was pretty rough going for a little bit (we have no construction experience) but finally we are almost done. If this works out like how we hope it will, this new recording booth will allow us to make episodes faster and easier. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who made a donation over these past few months. We saved up the money and used it to buy wood, screws, foam, paint - all the materials. Tomorrow I’m going to build a little table to use inside the recording booth (just something to put our papers on while we’re in there); many thanks to our friend Tim in Los Angeles who donated the very nice table legs that I’ll be using.

So anyway, here it is, our current production que: two new blurbs; a follow-up Q&A episode to the Lt. Watada episode (061222-01); an episode about pollution in the Pacific Ocean; a tutorial on how to videotape an interview; a mini-biography episode (Bunny’s current pet project); and hopefully, if we can coordinate it, an episode about nuclear non-proliferation.

Very scary: Last Sunday (Jan 7) Mimi was playing with some wire and we don’t know exactly how she did it but somehow she got it wound around and around really tight on her paw. The more she tried to get it off the tighter it got and I’m sure it was really painful. By the time we found her a few hours later it was almost impossible to take off but after a long struggle we finally cut it off with pliers. It’s been four or five days but Mimi still can’t walk good (nerve damage?), but we’re just relieved that she didn’t lose her paw. So everyone out there, please be super careful when playing with wire, rubber bands, and things like that.

Hmm. Looking over my diary entries from last year, it’s pretty obvious that I am not a write-in-your-diary-everyday kind of cat. But I want to be - I do know how important it is to keep a written record of your thoughts, ideas, feelings, and so on. If you don’t write things down it’s almost like they never happened.

~ pinky

Mr. Peter Weiss, interviewed for Pinky Show episode 061211-01 (What is a Crime Against Humanity?) sent us this memo:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) will move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” on January 17, 2007…the first such change to the Clock since February 2002. The major new step reflects growing concerns about a “Second Nuclear Age” marked by grave threats, including: nuclear ambitions in Iran and North Korea, unsecured nuclear materials in Russia and elsewhere, the continuing “launch-ready” status of 2,000 of the 25,000 nuclear weapons held by the U.S. and Russia, escalating terrorism, and new pressure from climate change for expanded civilian nuclear power that could increase proliferation risks.

I didn’t know what the Doomsday Clock was, I had to go look it up. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m trying to schedule an interview with John Burroughs of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, I have some questions about nuclear weapons and stuff to want to ask him about.

~ pinky

We have two new blurbs recently posted. You can find them here, on the archives page.

One is narrated by one of the ants from my AntFarm™, Ant 2-20. It’s about the relationship between electricity and human beings’ place in the universe. Very philosophical, those ants.

The other blurb is kind of/sort of about Thomas Edison. Before we posted the finished blurb online, Mimi, Bunny and I got into a discussion about whether some parts of it should be changed.

For example, there was a part in the video where I called Thomas Edison an “asshole”. Personally I didn’t think it was a big deal (because it’s true and I still can’t think of a more appropriate word), but in the end we edited that part out. Mimi especially felt that it wasn’t necessary; that if viewers came to that conclusion on their own after hearing about some of the things he did, then that’d be a better way to present the material.

The other thing that was kind of difficult to decide on was the part where I mention Edison’s interest in electrocution as a method of capital punishment. In the final version of the blurb I just show a picture of an electric chair during this part, but in an ealier draft I had included a close-up photograph of an electrocuted prisoner’s face (Allen Lee “Tiny” Davis, convicted murderer, executed in Florida in 1999). I felt really conflicted about including that photo because on one hand, it’s a very graphic and horrible photograph (face contorted/frozen in pain, blood spilling down from his nose and mouth) and including it felt a lot like exploitation and appealing to people’s purely emotional side in order to make a point (i.e., that death by electrocution is not instant, painless, and/or humane, as it is often - and mistakenly - assumed to be). On the other hand, the image itself is shocking not only for how disturbing it is, but also because much of its power comes from the fact that the public never sees these kinds of images. It’s kind of like images of war (real war, not glamourized/romanticized war) - I think it’s easier for people to feel distant and disinterested when it’s time to debate the morality of war (or capital punishment) when they’ve never been confronted by some of its more horrible aspects. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.

To me, images are especially powerful, in some ways even more powerful than words. And sometimes only pictures seem to be able to engage people’s emotions and prod them towards right action. Even off the top of my head I can easily think of quite a few photographs that, although emotionally wrenching to look at, moved human beings all over the world to demand action be taken - Ronald Haeberle’s photographs of the My Lai massacre and Huynh Cong Út’s photograph of napalmed civilians are only two obvious examples from the Vietnam war.

Actually, we had this discussion many times while we were making the Vietnam War episode - there are a lot of very disturbing photos in that episode and we actually sat around and debated the pros and cons of including or exluding every image. If there is a guide book regarding how to make ethical judgements regarding images in educational cat videos we haven’t seen it yet. We make our own rules as we go along. [ post-entry note: I’m actually still kind of surprised that we have not received even one complaint or comment about the violent images in that episode. Those images made me so uncomfortable and sad on so many levels and I’m curious as to why no one has questioned our decision to include them… ~ p. ]

So anyway, in the end we decided to remove the electrocution photo. Which doesn’t mean that we’ll never use provocative or unpleasant photos in the future. For me it just means that I want to be careful about showing these kinds of images. If I honestly think that showing these pictures creates an opportunity to learn or change consicousness, I tend to think that it’s okay. What I feel more uncomfortable with is reducing an image to pure shock value or (guilty) voyeuristic pleasure. In this particular case, we thought that the blurb-format is so short that it’s more difficult to surround the image with some context for better understanding. It’s a judgement call.

Anyway, I just thought I’d mention this discussion we had. It might seem like a ‘nothing’ thing to everybody else, but this kind of stuff seems really important to us and it’s a big part of our learning.

~ pinky

I just received an e-mail from my friend who teaches in an Asian American studies department at a university in New York. She was telling me that the university is seriously considering closing the department. What’s really discouraging is that I’ve been hearing the same thing from other folks from other universities from around the country - not just Asian American studies but also African American studies, Chicano/Chicana studies, Native - the list goes on (same thing can be said for art, music, drama, dance…). Seems like every time matters of insufficient funding (or abundant controversy) come up at schools, the automatic response is to question whether or not these more marginalized areas of study are ’still necessary’ or ’still relevant’.

And when I say marginalized, I don’t mean less important. From a cat’s perspective (small animals are very marginalized - think about it), these areas of study may very well be more important. Because to me, a university is one of the last places in society where alternative perspectives can truly be cultivated (I guess now I’m talking about an ideal-world scenario - I don’t actually see this happening so much). And it’s precisely because Asian American/African American/Native/GLBT/Other-related knowledge and experience are so marginalized, undervalued, and even attacked in society-at-large that these departments in universities become worth of our best efforts to protect them. They are absolutely essential to the well-being to our society. If university people really understood and believed this, wouldn’t it make sense that they should work to protect these departments rather than periodically threaten them with termination? My humble suggestion to all you people at universities (that means you too students!):

1) Fight for the protection and development of the most marginalized areas of study. Especially in repressive or otherwise unimaginative times. Diversity of thought will help our planet and all living beings, but we can’t have it if we don’t fight for the structures that’ll create it.

2) Fight for the redistribution of money (especially public moneys) from hurtful and exploitative practices - both national and international - that benefit the privileged elite, to practices that enlighten and benefit the majority of all living beings. Money spent on nuclear missiles means less money to pay all those hard working adjunct instructors!

Oh hey, here’s an idea. If you want to save money, go after the business school - those guys have lots of other resources and their track record for improving the condition of the planet isn’t so good. If you still need to cut more from your school’s budget, consider shutting down or ‘down-sizing’ (I love that term!) your most widely respected, most deeply entrenched departments. Don’t worry, people won’t stop reading Shakespeare - he’s had several hundred years of worship in hundreds of nearly identical departments everywhere, so his place in the world is pretty solid I think.

~ pinky

p.s. You can hold the hate-mail, I don’t have anything against Shakespeare; I think he’s awesome, blah blah.

[ note from Bunny: All over the country Kindergarden-Grade 12 schools have cut physical education, health, music, art, and other good stuff from their programs. I think these decisions are being guided by an abnormal fixation on money, work, and competition. It is no longer fashionable for human beings to explore the full range of being human. Good luck with that. ]

I like art. I like looking at it and I like drawing too. But something occured to me yesterday when Bunny, Mimi, and I were talking about art. They were asking me who my favorite artists are. I named a few but they hadn’t heard of any of them. They know some artists - Giotto, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, van Gogh, Degas, etc. But no one who doesn’t fall into the ‘dead white men’ category. Isn’t that interesting? They both read the newspaper every day but can’t name even one artist who is alive and practicing art right now.

Which started me to wondering: In today’s society, are artists irrelevant? I mean, to me, maybe because I like art and I try to go out of my way to read about it whenever possible, I would say “Of course artists are relevant!”. But to be realistic I think that may be an extreme minority position these days. Imagine: You ask a thousand random Americans to name five contemporary artists. Artists from the U.S. or from anywhere else in the world, I don’t care. I doubt more than 1% of them would be able to name even five. Some people might have a hard time coming up with even one! If no one knows you exist then it becomes kinda difficult to argue that you’re making any kind of impact on society.

Art is one of those things, like ‘education’ or ’strong families’, that nearly everybody automatically will say is good, important, and so on. Very few people are going to say “Art is bad. Destroy all art.” Even people who don’t like art themselves will probably try to soften the tone by saying something like “Well I’m not really into art myself, but I guess it’s important…”. Something like that. But if it’s so good or important, then how come nobody cares enough to know something about it?

Another weird thing: When I say ‘art’, I think most people automatically assume I mean ‘visual art’ (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.) - not the literary arts, not film, not theater, not dance, and so on. So the term ‘art’ is most powerfully connected to the visual arts; it’s not like saying ‘the arts’, which I think then implies the inclusion of all the different arts, right? So why then, of all the arts, contemporary visual art is possibly the most off-the-radar screen with the general public? I mean, most people can name at least a few current writers, at least a few filmmakers, TONS of actors I’m sure… but no visual artists. Okay, I just realized - no one cares about dance either. Unless it’s in a movie like Flashdance or Save the Last Dance or whatevers.

I’m not saying that Raphael, Degas, Vermeer, et. al. aren’t worth looking at, I’m just wondering why people don’t care enough about the visual arts to go check out what’s going on right now. Isn’t there anybody out there doing something important?

~ pinky

[ Bunny: This is one of your more obtuse posts so far. Yeah, art is dead to the masses. But that’s ‘high art’. Popular visual art is bigger than ever. It’s advertisements, comic books, pictures on t-shirts. You’re comparing high art with low art, and across different moments in history. What about all the independent and avant-garde filmmakers who are making films nowadays - you think most people even know who they are? Nope. So not a fair comparison. Corporations (and their respective design/PR departments) have replaced the individual artist. And guess what - I didn’t read any of your art books to figure that out. ]

I’ve been thinking about Bunny’s response to my last post these past couple of days. I think her point about me comparing apples and oranges (different historical moments; ‘high’ & ‘low’ art forms) is pretty important. Because after I thought about it some more, I came up with lots of additional observations and questions that didn’t really answer my question (basically “Are Artists Irrelevant?”) but did help make me to think through things some more. A couple of examples:

• Maybe the general public can’t name 5 contemporary artists, but is that really a reliable indication that artists are not impacting society in a meaningful way? Maybe their innovations or ways of thinking are being assimilated by society and culture in other ways (other than simply becoming individually ‘famous’, cult-of-personality-style). Maybe their art is just being filtered though a broad network of ‘middlemen’ - including some of the same formats Bunny mentioned (advertising, comic books, t-shirts, advertisements, etc.). It’s possible that the public really does have a connection to practicing contemporary artists without being aware of it. I should talk to the art directors at the big advertising or design firms, and ask them if they look to contemporary artists for inspiration and ideas. I’m guessing they do.

• I’m not sure about the ‘high art/low art’ dichotomy. It’s complicated enough that I don’t really know how to use it for analytical purposes. I mean, intuitively I know there are some pretty powerful associations that people make that are hard to entirely dismiss. Like there are tons of people who wouldn’t really want to go visit a museum on a Sunday afternoon because they just don’t consider themselves ‘museum people’. I think there’s a lot of assumptions rolled into labels like that - there’s an implied class thing, the education-level thing, and so on. I wonder - is that a relatively new phenomena? Did a wider segment of the population go visitng museums on Sunday afternoons, say, during the 19th century? If they did, was it because television hadn’t been invented yet as a form of competition? Or if they didn’t, what kind of stuff were ordinary people looking at back in those days? Certainly they didn’t have billboards and advertisements and photographs and glossy magazines everywhere like we have today. Come to think of it, did museums back then even function the same way they do nowadays? Nowadays anybody can pay $5 or $10 and then go in and roam around for a few hours. How back then? Were they free? Were they exlusive? When were museums invented anyway?

Anyway, so I guess one big thing that I’ve been reminded of in the past couple of days is that every question is like a fortune cookie. A fortune cookie with at least 50 or a 100 slips of paper stuffed into it, each with even more questions on it. And instead of getting freaked out that the original question is getting too complicated to answer, I guess it’s important for me to try to keep a good attitude about it and be open to complexity.

Oh, by the way, in Bunny’s posted response, instead of the word ‘obtuse’ she originally called me ’stupid’. She only changed it after Mimi and Kim said she was being mean.

~ pinky

[ Bunny: I did not call you stupid. I called your post stupid. ]

I experienced a very bizarre day the other day. Bunny was teasing me about having gained some weight recently (I haven’t) when she used the word ‘piñata’. I’d never heard of a piñata.

Bunny: You don’t know what a piñata is?
Me: No.
Bunny: Are you serious? You never heard of piñatas?
Me: No.
Bunny: What are you? From Mars?
Me: grrrr.

Annoying, but at least I learned a new word. So anyway, fast forward a few hours and Mimi is watching TV and there’s this comedian on Comedy Central telling jokes (Demetri Martin - he’s actually pretty funny). Anyway, he says something like “I like parties but I don’t like piñatas because piñatas promote violence against flamboyant animals”. I got the joke because Bunny had just told me what a piñata is. Cool.

Then, the same night, now we’re all watching TV and there’s this commercial for a show called Viva Piñata. It’s a animated show where the characters are all piñatas. Info from the website:

“Viva Piñata™ is a wacky, zany, anything-can-happen animated cartoon series about the world of Piñatas.

In the lush environment of Piñata Island, a multitude of happy, colorful Piñatas live the sweet life, frolicking, dancing and filling themselves up with the most delicious goodies a child could ever want!

They eagerly await the glorious day when they are chosen by the Piñata Factory to attend birthday parties or special celebrations all over the world, bringing joy, treats, and tons of fun to kids of all ages. It’s no wonder that wherever the Piñatas go, they’re the life of the party!”

Very cute, and interesting premise - though oddly enough it kind of reminds me of the rhetoric of martyr recruitment (not that I know what that really sounds like…). I realize this is all just make pretend, but don’t you think the piñatas should be terrified to get the call? What a horrible end:

1) hang you from the rafters or a tree.
2) children take turns beating you with a stick.
3) beating continues until you break open and your insides spill to the floor/ground.
4) much celebration and joy as children madly scramble for candy.

*shiver* All I can say is I’m glad I’m not a piñata. Anyway, I still can’t get over the coincidence. They do say that strange things happen in threes, but I didn’t know it was true till yesterday.

~ pinky

<— the Viva Piñata piñatas.

[ Bunny: Piñatas come in all kinds of shapes, including non-animal shapes. I don’t know how it is elsewhere but in LA there are supermarkets and piñaterias where you can get practically anything popular with children in piñata form - Pokemon, Batman, whatever. But kids like animals. And a festive-looking donkey is at least 10 times more fun for kids than, say, a piñata made in the shape of a toilet bowl or telephone. ]

[ Kim: I bet they have cell phone piñatas. Kids love cell phones. ]

A little while ago I think I mentioned that we were working on a follow-up to episode 061222-01, Ehren Watada: a Soldier Refuses an Illegal War. The follow-up was basically an analysis of Lt. Watada’s rationale for refusing to deploy. As we were working on it, we looked at hundreds of responses to his statements on the internet and in newspapers, and based on this started diagramming out what kind of stuff we kept on seeing over and over again. We were looking for patterns. And what we saw was that there seems to be one overriding question that people want to know: “Is the U.S. invasion of Iraq legal or not?”. No disrespect intended towards Lt. Watada, but we think that knowing the answer to this question is even more important than the other question that keeps popping up - namely, “Are officers in the military allowed (or even obligated) to refuse orders if they are, in fact, illegal orders?” Of course the two questions are connected, but in the interest of keeping the episode easy to follow, we decided to change direction a bit and try to get to the bottom of the first question rather than the second. The current working title of the episode is now The War in Iraq: Legal or Illegal? - or something like that.

Speaking of Ehren Watada, today is the first day of his court-marshal trial at Fort Lewis, Washington. All of us here at The Pinky Show are praying that he receives a fair trial. One thing that especially concerns us is that we heard that the Army has in advance disallowed any presentation of evidence as to why Lt. Watada refused deployment. The presiding Army judge, Lt. Col. John Head, has stated publicly that he considers the reasons behind his actions as “irrelevant”. Maybe the Army has learned something from the Pablo Paredes trial…

Last Thursday (February 1) I interviewed John Burroughs, Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy. I asked him some things about nuclear weapons; I think I really learned a lot. Anyway, we’re almost done putting that episode together. Unless we run into some unforseen problems or difficulties, it should be on our site in about a week. The Iraq War one I just mentioned above probably won’t be done for another couple weeks …at least. We want to be as careful as possible about getting all our information in order, checked, and double-checked before we release stuff.

~ pinky

Bunny and I have been closely following the feedback we’ve received for the Ehren Watada episode we posted at YouTube.

We’re not surprised that there’s been negative responses. But what was really eye-opening for us was the feeling of rage and hate that dominates the language of the negative feedback. There’s not much reasoning going on, not much analysis or argument. Mostly name-calling, racist epithets, and exclamations of self-evident ‘truth’. It’s weird how people can sound so sure of what they believe even though it appears (based on the logical gaps and misinformation in the responses themselves) that they haven’t done much research into the matter. So bizarre: If someone doesn’t make the effort to sort out the facts and historical foundation of a given situation, why would they then feel justified in expressing their position with such simplistic and self-assured language?

Until we’ve done the research on any given subject, it’s actually pretty obvious that we don’t have enough information to form a well-informed opinion on that subject. In other words, until we do some kind of inquiry into the matter, we are, by definition, ignorant. I don’t think there’s anything embarrassing about admitting that.

So how come so many people think it’s okay to make hurtful declarations, directed at an individual or a group of people, based on nothing but stereotype and preconception? Isn’t it useful to think carefully about where and how we learn the things that we are positive we ‘know’?

Probably until the day I die I am never going to understand how it came to be that human beings can have so little compassion for each other. I can understand that somebody who is very smart can review all the same information that Lt. Watada did, and then come to the conclusion that he should be sent to prison. After doing some research, I can say that I’ve actually come to the opposite conclusion, but to be real, of course I believe that it’s also possible to see things differently. If I disagree with you and it’s important enough, I’ll try my best to try to convince you that you should think differently. And maybe there are even some situations where I might even fight you for what I believe in.

But I hope I will never take pleasure in dehumanizing a human being. I doubt there has ever been anything good to come out of reacting to a situation clouded by hate and hasty judgement. What are the benefits of strong, decisive action based on misinformation or misconceptions?

I’ve been told that human beings should try to respect each other - not just when they are alike, but especially when they are different. Does this also apply to differences caused by the holding of different ideas?

The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever. - Soren Kierkegaard

I doubt that many of the people who are directing the most scathing words toward Lt. Watada could bear the emotional weight of a million people’s animosity for even one day. And if that concept seems hard to even imagine, then I think that means something too.

~ pinky

I was poking around Nancy Snow’s website and found this quote.

Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings and actions that make for peace and freedom. Conversely almost nobody wants war or tyranny; but a great many people find an intense pleasure in the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for war and tyranny. - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Good quote. Before I’m gone I’d like to have a deeper understanding of ‘why’.

~ pinky

p.s. It’s 8:45pm and the newswire says that the court-martial of Lt. Watada has been declared a mistrial. Not much information yet - I’m so curious about the details. All I’ve heard so far is that a new trail is set for March 19.

Exactly one month ago, I posted our (then) production cue:

“…two new blurbs; a follow-up Q&A episode to the Lt. Watada episode (061222-01); an episode about pollution in the Pacific Ocean; a tutorial on how to videotape an interview; a mini-biography episode (Bunny’s current pet project); and hopefully, if we can coordinate it, an episode about nuclear non-proliferation.”

Well, the two blurbs were done (Thomas Edison Hates Cats, and Ant: Light Pollution) and we’re almost done with a third. The Lt. Watada Pt. II episode morphed into the Iraq War: Legal or Illegal? episode (approx. 2 weeks from completion). Bunny is still working on her mini-biography episode (according to Bunny ETA is “March-ish”) and who knows when the Pacific Ocean one will get done (that one is actually being worked on by a friend of ours, so…?). But we did finish the episode on nuclear weapons last night - it’s called 27,000 Holocausts. Special thanks to Dr. John Burroughs, Executive Director of Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy. I thought he was very clear and easy to understand so I’m happy with the way it came out.

Anyway, after we bring our current production batch to a conclusion, I think I’d like to make an effort to work on some episodes or blurbs that maybe aren’t so ‘dark’. It’s not that I think nuclear weapons or war aren’t important enough to keep making new episodes about - of course they are, and we plan on making lots more episodes on these kinds of subject matter. But when we started this Pinky Show project Bunny and I also had lots of ideas for episodes that were about pop culture, the arts, education, traveling, and things like that. We really like that kind of stuff too. But I guess with the war going on our minds have been sort of preoccupied with the more overtly political subjects. So anyway, I guess I’m just writing this entry as a way to remind myself that we shouldn’t forget to do some ‘non-war’ episodes soon.

~ pinky

Today is the first day of the Chinese lunar calendar, year 4705. As such it’s the Year of the Boar (a.k.a. Year of the Pig). According to the Wikipedia entry, many people traditionally don’t eat meat (animals) on the first day of the new year in order to insure greater longevity for themselves. I don’t know if that really works or not, but at the very least I’m sure it’s appreciated by all the animals that would have otherwise been eaten today. To be on the safe side I would have liked to have avoided eating any animal-related food today too but by the time I read the Wikipedia stuff I had already eaten some dried fish (I think that was fish). So I guess no longevity for me.

Hmm, looking at the Wikipedia pictures of Jiaozi (饺子) makes me hungry…

Bunny has a new hobby. She is now sewing dolls. The way this came about is that we were down by the highway looking for things to eat (as usual) and while we were there we came across a large plastic bag with lots of smaller packages of different colored fabric remnants in it. We’re thinking it fell off a delivery truck. Anyway the four of us dragged the whole thing back to our trailer (very tiring). Bunny started cutting out pieces right after and now she is sewing them together in the shape of cats. I will post a picture of one when she is done. Me, I’m not really into sewing. It looks relaxing but I can’t get the hang of tying knots.

I think since this is the beginning of a new year, I would like to start a new hobby too. I’m going to try to decide on one before I go to sleep tonight.

~ pinky

After thinking about it some more, I’ve decided to stop eating other animals. I don’t know about milk & eggs though, I’ll have to look into that some more. ~ pinky

After thinking about it for a couple of days, I decided that my new hobby is going to be learning how to speak Chinese. The hardest part was trying to decide which language to learn - there are others that I also like the way they sound (German, Hawaiian, Navajo, Spanish, etc.). Bunny suggested that I learn them all at the same time but I thought that’d be too difficult. In the end I just decided to go in alphabetical order. This is in addition to my already-hobbies: reading, documenting stuff, and learning to play bass guitar.

Bunny’s new hobby (doll-making) is going pretty good. Here is the first one, finished last night.

I put the light bulbs next to it so you can see how big it is. There were some parts of it she wasn’t happy with so now she’s working on a revised version. [ Bunny: This doll came out too narrow. I didn’t realize it’d lose width when I stuffed it. The revised doll will be a more accurate representation of Pinky - i.e., ‘fatter’. ]

For those of you who’ve been asking when we’re going to finish the next episode, please rest assured that we’re not spending all our time sewing dolls and watching subtitled kung-fu movies. This hobby stuff is just what we do to ‘relax’ after our work-day is over. We still work on episodes 7 days a week.

~ pinky

I’ve been thinking about a small thing that happened last week. The four of us (me, Bunny, Kim, & Mimi) decided to go down to town to try to find some food. Before we left Kim and Mimi kind of got into a disagreement - Kim was going to bring her airplane along with her and Mimi said something like:

Mimi: Why don’t you leave the toy at home?
Kim: I want to play with it while we’re walking there and back…
Mimi: If you’re holding your airplane you can’t carry food.
Kim: I can carry food and the airplane.
Mimi: You won’t be able to carry as much food.
Kim: Yes I can, etc., etc.

So anyway Kim ended up bringing the airplane and guess what? After three hours of going through dozens and dozens of dumpsters and trash cans all over Baker, CA - we’re finally heading back home when Kim suddenly stops and says “Hey! Where’s my airplane?!?” She didn’t have her airplane anymore. She left it somewhere; we’d been all over town and it could have been anywhere. So we walked back to Baker and started looking in all the places we’d been. As you can imagine, Kim was in a near-panic and Mimi was quiet but visibly grouchy.

We finally found the airplane, or what was left of it, in the parking lot of the Bun Boy Restaurant. A car had run over it and it was flat and smashed into lots of small pieces. Kim started crying and I had to carry her home. I think at that point even Mimi was feeling really bad for her because that airplane was her absolute favorite - she was always playing with it.

When we got home Kim wandered off for a while but she came back the next morning. She told us that she decided she’s not going to play with toys anymore because she doesn’t want to lose any more toys. Mimi said that wasn’t necessary and she just needs to be more responsible and leave her toys at home from now on.

I don’t know if Kim is going to give up toys for real, but I think I can kind of understand why she said that. Maybe it’s not good to have anything that’s so precious that losing it would devastate you.

~ pinky

In the past few months the number of people watching The Pinky Show has been increasingly quite a bit. And with more viewers we’ve also been getting more e-mails. Some of them include what I think are ‘odd’ questions (I don’t mind). Like this one:

Dear Pinky,

Are you and the others all strays? Did you used to be owned by anybody? I’m curious because I have a cat named Tanya and I was wondering if she too may be considering making a break for it too!

Elizabeth
Manning, TX

I feel pretty conflicted about human beings. On one hand I’m generally not impressed with the way human beings treat animals. On the other hand I’m sure there are lots of people out there that are capable of having a mutually respectful relationship with a cat. I consider each person on an individual basis.

But to answer Elizabeth’s question, “yes we are strays” (though we prefer the term ‘dissociated’). My personal history is a bit murky - but here’s everything I know: I was born somewhere on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. When I stopped being a kitten I was taken to and left at the Humane Society, where I was then ‘adopted’ by some nice people and taken to live in a house. (trivia: According to Humane Society records, my original name was ‘Georgia’.) Anyway I stayed there, living in relative luxury for a couple of years, before leaving for Los Angeles in 2004. So I guess you can say that regarding living arrangements and human beings I’ve been ‘mostly dissociated since 2004′. I say ‘mostly’ because I still correspond with my last human being family (who actually helps us with some aspects of The Pinky Show) - unlike Bunny, Kim, and Mimi who were VERY HAPPY to leave their humans behind. Tanya - if you are considering “making a break for it”, please be sure to have a plan beforehand - it’s an extremely dangerous world out here (for cats).

Bunny has been very focused on her doll making and is making good progress (the reviews have been mixed - I think they look really good, Mimi says they are ‘creepy’). I, on the other hand, have done only one lesson of Chinese (Mandarin) and that’s all. That language is so difficult it’s not even funny. The pronunciation is a killer and it has different intonations you have to remember for each syllable. It’s so hard I’ve even been practicing my bass guitar extra as a way of avoiding practicing my Chinese. :P

Dolls v2.0: Click on the picture to pop-up a bigger version.

~ pinky

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself… - Mark Twain

Ouch. I wonder what Mr. Twain would have thought about our current congress?

Oh, speaking of Mark Twain, last week I read A Connecticutt Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I almost never read fiction but I really had a lot of fun reading this. Maybe I should read more fiction - it’s good! I had no idea people wrote stories about time travel back in the 19th century (I like time travel; this book was published in 1889). It felt like a very old-fashioned book version of a science fiction movie, like The Terminator or something.

~ pinky

We’re almost done with part III of our comic strip series on the topic of globalization. As Bunny mentioned the other day, we’re really enjoying the challenge of trying to superimpose a different narrative onto the same cartoon sequence over and over again. For those of you who are curious about the original Peanuts comic that served as inspiration for this series, here it is:

<--- click to see a larger version

I found this comic strip in a Peanuts book a couple of years ago and photocopied it. At the time I used Liquid Paper (’white-out’) to remove the dialogue, thinking that I was going to just recycle the original pictures while replacing the words with my own dialogue. I wish I hadn’t done that because now I can’t remember what the original dialogue was about. If any of you Peanuts fans out there know, please send me an e-mail!

Also, a short note regarding our intent for this series. The subject of globalization is important to understand but also very complicated. Many of the books and reports we’ve been studying about globalization are fairly dense and take a long time to read. And since we think the best way to learn difficult subject matter is to be able to discuss it with others, we decided to create some ‘instruments’ to help start up good discussion. We think it’s important to create texts - even if they come in a comic strip format - that help stir new questions or concerns in peoples’ minds.

By themselves I think these comic strips are actually kind of difficult to understand. And as some of our viewers have noticed, they’re actually quite ‘dense’ - we tried to pack lots of different implications, meanings, and references into every word and phrase. We also tried to write it in such a way that there are some problems and inconsistencies built into what is being said. We hope these things can be drawn out in conversation and argument.

For example, one of the most important questions we’re always thinking about when writing Pinky Show episodes are ones concerning ‘who’. For these comic strips we had a lot of discussions about questions like: Who does Bunny’s character represent? An individual? A certain class of people? How about Mimi’s character? Who are the ‘we’ or ‘us’ or ‘them’ that they refer to? Are they mistaken? Stuff like that.

So basically what I’m saying is that these comic strips are not intended to be a one-page “everything you need to know about globalization”. Not possible, not desirable! There are a ton of excellent books, study reports, analytical essays, documentaries, etc. out there that cover a broad range of perspectives on the many issues surrounding globalization. If you’re new to the subject, I tend to think a critical approach is a sensible place to start (after all, the ‘pro-globalization’ point of view is pretty well covered by the mainstream media, schools, U.S. governmental policy, state/corporate/international financial institutions, and so on…).

• Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005), by Vandana Shiva.

• When Corporations Rule the World (2001, 2nd edition) by David Korten.

• An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004), by Arundhati Roy.

• No Logo (2002), by Naomi Klein.

Primary sources are also very important. Just one such example - please consider the World Bank Extractive Industries Review’s report Striking A Better Balance (2004), as well as the World Bank Group Management’s official response to the report (also 2004). Fascinating and sobering.

Okay, I better go for now. We want to finish and publish Part III by Friday. Please take care everybody.

~ pinky

[ A reminder from Bunny: Each episode has an accompanying transcript. Transcripts are easier to study than videos. ]

Bunny and I just watched a documentary called Oil on Ice. It’s about the controversy surrounding whether or not to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. [mini-review here] One of the most disturbing things in the film for me was how the oil companies would hire scientists to provide ‘expert’ analyses testifying that oil spills have minimal lasting environmental impact (such as, for example, after the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in 1989). These experts are used in the oil corporations’ public relations reports and videos to enable them to continue engaging in devastating environmental exploitation.

I guess because I’m actually a big fan of science, it hurts me to see scientists acting like academic mercenaries. I really wonder if they’d act this way if they could be held accountable for their role in the systematic harming of the environment. They are, after all, providing a key element of the necessary propaganda required to sway public and governmental opinion.

We already have the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ to protect human beings from particularly odious crimes, systematically committed. Why don’t human beings apply the same logic to protect the environment against, say, ‘crimes against nature’? (and I’m not talking about people doing it with swans, okay?)

<— click for larger swan porn

~ pinky

As part of our ongoing attempt to ‘learn about human beings’, we routinely observe them (spying) from a distance. That’s what we did today; it was my turn (Bunny) to take notes.

There’s a trailer park not too far from where we live. Today we observed a family having a birthday party for one of their children. They had colorful balloons and twisty crepe paper streamers. No piñatas. Two mini-vans and a Volkswagen car arrived with three families (8 kids total) in them. Then the daddy-of-the-trailer took out a small-size inflatable swimming pool and blew that up with a foot-pump. The kids stood around and watched and apparently when you are 4 or 8 years old this is exciting. When he was done they put some water in the pool (not much) and then the daddy blew up little inflatable things that went around the kids’ arms and then they all jumped around in the tiny pool, making much splashing. Then the daddy took out an inflatable slide that was maybe about 5 feet tall and shaped like a killer whale. He blew that one up with the same foot pump. We all thought that his leg must be getting very tired. When he was done with that the kids lost interest in the small swimming pool and they all started using the slide. Then all the adults went in and the kids were playing by themselves for a long time (we thought that was very dangerous but none of them died or anything). Then for some reason the bigger kids decided to make the smallest child sit in the pool while they tried to flip it over. They struggled with that for a while (the small child stayed put) and finally they figured out how to get the side bent down and then the water gushed out. Then the wind picked up the pool and it blew away real fast like a huge kite. Must be the small kid wasn’t in it by then. All in all we enjoyed their birthday party.

~ Bunny

Lately we’ve been having an escalating ant problem. Not with my ants (my AntFarm™ ants) but for some reason the ‘wild’ ant population around here seems to have quadrupled in the past month or so. They’ve been getting in our food, they try to make nests among our books and papers - today I even found some walking on our computer. When I opened up the computer case I totally freaked out - they were moving in! (carrying baby ants in, etc.) Gross! I’m sure a thousand ants living in the computer would make it crash and then we’d lose all our data. I shut down the computer, I told them to leave immediately; they ignored me and kept on bringing more ant-stuff. I tried to brush them away with a feather duster but then they just ran all over the place and made me all confused and panicky. It was insane, there were just too many of them. I followed their ant trail outside to their giant ant nest and when I saw that there were several thousand more of them out there, I realized that I really had to do something to stop them. I mean, I love ants, but these ants are sort of like out-of-control or something, and we can’t have them destroying our computers (we can’t make The Pinky Show without computers). So Bunny and I walked into town and… (*gulp*) bought some ant poison. I feel so awful even saying that. When we came back I said a prayer and we dropped a bunch of ant poison into all the big ant nests we could find around here. Then I cleaned off the computer as best as I could and moved it to a new location. It’s been about 6 hours since I poisoned the ants and already there’s noticeably fewer ants walking around. Some of the ants I do see here and there look weak and disoriented and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they fall over and die. I feel really sad. Isn’t it so strange how I love my AntFarm™ ants so much and I wouldn’t ever do anything to harm them; yet these other ants, just because they don’t live in a small plastic container I felt like I had to kill them all? Other than the plastic container, I think actually all ants are the same.

~ pinky

I wanted to share with everybody an e-mail I received from crazy wolf (a.k.a. Wolfgang). It’s about my poisoning the ants the other day (April 2nd diary entry):

hello Pinky

about your ant problem [wild ants]
killing them is not the answer
using poison is an absolute ‘evil’
save our planet and yourself
by being what you teach

many ancient peoples have understood the inter[connectedness] of life on this jewel planet
they knew that to keep the undesired spirits away from the household or village
an offering had to be made
a recognition of the other
honoring the other
so
with regard to ants
the ancients made an offering of food [daily]
to their ant relatives
the offering was made in close proximity to the ants home[s]
but in a direction away from the village
this act of ‘life’
created harmony

Pinky
make peace not war

crazy wolf

After thinking about it for a while, I wrote him back:

Hi Wolfgang,

Thank you for your letter. The ant incident has been bothering my conscience a lot. I think using poison was a bad thing to do. When an emergency arises your first reaction or ’solution’ tells a lot about where your mind and heart is at. It made me sad that the only thing that I could think of at the time was that I had to kill all the ants. I wonder what I would have come up with if they were not ants but maybe tigers, owls, or something else. I certainly wouldn’t have tried to poison them. Anyway I thought it was wrong but then I also couldn’t think of an alternative. So thank you for writing me, I think it’s a very different kind of relationship with ants (and others) that you’re talking about. I will have to try this way of doing things and make an offering, but it’ll be just the one tentative step since it’s not like I deeply understand that way of being you describe.

You mention ‘ancient people’ and speak of this way of being in the past tense. Are there many people who are like this today or are they all gone? Are you someone who is like this?

Take care,
pinky

I’m very grateful that Bunny made us this website. We often receive very thought provoking e-mails and each one is like a mini-opportunity to learn from people from all over the world. One of the things that I’m having the most difficulty with is trying to imagine how to live a more respectful life on a day to day basis in this modern world. I hope Mr. crazy wolf writes back.

~ pinky

All of us go once a year to the doctor and today was Bunny’s turn. I don’t think any of us enjoy visiting Dr. Wendy even though on a personal level she is a nice person. Every visit involves a lot of poking, grabbing, shining bright lights in our eyes, and so on. But we go anyway because I guess it’s important to try to be healthy. That and going to the doctor the only way I know of where we can get heart worm medicine.

I don’t know exactly why but Bunny was SO cranky today and we all had to basically shove/drag her all the way to the doctor’s office (not easy since she is really strong!). And when she got there she also fought and struggled with Dr. Wendy and assistant, but of course they are much larger and stronger and have four hands and a towel to wrap her with, so Bunny eventually lost.

The most shocking part to me was when they washed out her ears - they were so dirty inside. Dr. Wendy says Bunny is being lazy and not grooming enough. I guess we will all be grooming more from now on. Next Friday is my turn, bleh. Not looking forward to that…

So anyway, when Bunny got home she went straight to grooming then right after that she went to sleep. It’s almost midnight and she’s still sleeping - all that excitement must have wore her out.

~ pinky

I was hoping Wolfgang/crazy wolf would write back, and he did. It’s a good e-mail - very helpful in explaining where he’s coming from, and I thought everyone would benefit from reading it and considering its implications (For those of you who missed what this is in regards to, please see the diary entries about ants - April 2 and 6):

dear Pinky

this is a very complex issue
in that our current hypermodern culture is disconnected in varying degrees from ‘feeling’
which can be stated as pitiless [read compassionless]
when I use the word ancient peoples
I could use the term ‘primitive peoples’
but I avoid that term because of the implied inferiority
ancient peoples understood that they were a part of a cosmos
one spirit among many
the idea was that everything was imbued with spirit
and that to act against anything without pity
was to invite catastrophe
pity compassion reverence are all roots of the same tree
hypermodernism has abandoned these roots
in other words ‘the roots of life’
in favor of the ‘right’ of the freedom of ‘aesthetic expression’
this freedom of aesthetic expression dominates both art and science
the ancients understood the importance of limits or taboos
their cosmology/mythology was full of stories about the consequences of transgressing these limits
the guiding principle could be expressed as an ‘aesthetics of pity’
our modern and hypermodern culture is clearly one of destruction
even if we were to remove from the critique mans inhumanity to man
consider that without reservation the wholesale destruction of hundreds of millions of living organisms when chemically spraying an acre field during food[?] production
the word production is an indicator of what is really transpiring
one example
there or countless others
so yes
there is another way of being here
a way that has been ‘intellectually’ neutered by those who inhabit the ivory towers of power
a way that would render this jewel planet a livable paradise for a million years into the future
a way that has been all but erased from our collective hypermodern consciousness

remember the Yoko Ono / John Lenon campaign
‘The War Is Over’
(if you want)

still true

some suggested reading
Wisdom Of The Mythtellers - Sean Kane
Spell Of The Sensuous - David Abram
Art and Fear - Paul Virilio

Pinky
consider pity [compassion]
almost everything that you post on your Pinky Show
speaks of the pitiful [full with compassion] or the pitiless [without compassion]
I do not see it as that big of a leap to perceive the entire cosmos from this perspective
including ants

as Thich Nhat Hanh expresses - PEACE IS EVERY STEP

crazy wolf

I need to study this further. I feel like I respect the perspective but I don’t want to just acknowledge this with words and then move on with my life unchanged.

~ pinky

Today was my turn to visit Dr. Wendy. The visit was short, maybe 20 minutes, because basically I’m pretty healthy. She gave me a shot and put me on the same heart worm medication that Bunny is on. The heart worm medication is about $50 for a 3 month supply for the two of us. All together our check-ups cost over $300. I think in the future we’re going to have to stagger our visits to the doctor because the way it is now, we both go at around the same time and then we are broke. I have no idea how we are going to pay for food and electricity next month. Our bank account is nearly empty and it’s interesting how that directly affects how much time we can spend on creating new episodes.

We need to do some fundraising. Maybe in the short term we can sell some t-shirts or cookies or something, but if we want to be able to keep working on The Pinky Show, eventually we’re going to have to do something more ambitious.

Fundraising idea #1: Bunny stands on a tall pole. You know who David Blaine is? A few years ago he stood on a 90 foot high pole (22 inches wide) for over 30 hours without eating or sleeping. At the end he jumped off into a pile of cardboard boxes. Scary. Well Bunny says she can stand on a pole twice as high as that (and narrower on top too) for even longer. I’m not crazy about this idea because I don’t know how we’d ever build a pole that large to stand on, and anyway, it just sounds too dangerous.

<– conceptual rendering (click for larger view)

Fundraising idea #2: I walk across the country, from Los Angeles to New York. I could bring a video camera and interview interesting people I meet along the way. I’ve always wanted to see this country from ‘up close’. Negative: I’m kind of worried about getting run over by a car or truck along the way.

Fundraising idea #3: Apply for grants. Not as exciting as #1 or #2 but also less likely to result in death.

I’m trying to remain optimistic that we’ll be able to find some kind of solution to our money problems fairly soon. Either that or this little experiment of ours is over.

~ pinky

Our computer server that holds the Pinky Show website crashed on Friday due to some kind of hardware malfunction. As you can see our website is now back online, but my last diary entry got lost. I got all grumpy because that entry was actually a long one and it took me a long time to write.

So anyway, just in case you missed it, here is a not-as-carefully-written summary (a.k.a. the “financial report”):

• After carefully reviewing our 2006 accounting records, Mimi has determined that The Pinky Show project is not financially sustainable. We either need to find a way to pay our bills or shut down.

• We currently have a small group of very generous individuals who have taken it upon themselves to keep The Pinky Show alive. But except for these donors, we basically receive no donations. Since launching this website the amount of visitors we receive has grown tremendously every month. However, comparing the site traffic data to donations records, Mimi estimates that more than 99.9% of our visitors don’t make donations. (yikes!) So although we do have a few very faithful supporters, we also haven’t come close to being able to sustain The Pinky Show through donations from the viewing public in general.

• Bunny is almost done with The Pinky Show Online Store. Not that we think we’re going to sell tons of t-shirts or posters or whatever; this is actually just something we wanted to do because we thought it’d be cool to have our own online store.

• Up till now we’ve been paying our bills by working various ’side jobs’ unrelated to The Pinky Show. For example, Bunny and I have worked with an independent publisher on a number of educational projects; Bunny has built a few websites for some non-profits, artists, and so on; I’ve done some photography & design work for various organizations; Mimi has been doing research and consulting on health-related issues; etc. All this stuff brings in some money but it’s also been taking away time from working on The Pinky Show. This is the main reason why we don’t release new episodes very often. Our long term goal is to be able to stop doing this stuff and dedicate 100% of our time to making new episodes. Eventually we want to be releasing a new episode every week. But in order to do that, first we have to figure out where funding for this project is going to come from.

• After much discussion, we’ve decided that the most promising option at the moment is to try to fund The Pinky Show through grants. So Mimi and I have spent the past several weeks doing a lot of grants research and writing; this will probably continue until our financial situation changes. Neither of us are particularly good grant writing, I hope we get better as we go along!

• Any time we have to work on Pinky Show stuff will be roughly divided 70/30: 70% of our time writing for grants and 30% of our time producing new episodes. At one point we even talked about the possibility of using 100% of our time to try to secure some kind of funding before proceeding. But in the end we decided that we really don’t want to let the website to become totally “dead”. So while we’ll still be making episodes, our output will drop off quite a bit (by about 70% I guess).

Hmm - I think that’s about it. For some reason I still feel pretty optimistic that one day The Pinky Show will find a broad enough audience that we’ll be able to work on this project full-time. We intend on keep on working on this until we either succeed, or receive some kind of clear message that there’s no audience out there willing to support this project. Making The Pinky Show is really fun, so of course I’m hoping that eventually we’ll be able to grow it into something permanent.

Sorry for the lousy report, I just don’t feel like writing the same post again, and anyway, my memory is not so good. Now back to grant writing for me and Mimi. That plus Bunny and I are getting close to finishing up another episode.

~ pinky

We’ve been keeping track of the voting for a few weeks, and it seems that these two are, by a pretty decent margin, the most popular:

and (click to see larger versions)

Being that it’s kind of hard to anticipate how many people are really going to order a t-shirt, we decided to just make one design to start off with. If we do get orders and people want more desigs, we were thinking we could always add more later.

Anyway, after some discussion we decided to do the design on the right (the one where I’m standing up). We chose this one for a couple of reasons: 1) it’s a one-color design (easier to print than the 4-color design on the left); and 2) we thought it was a little weird to have just my severed head on a t-shirt without the rest of me.

Personally I also like that design the best because it doesn’t say “The Pinky Show” or have our URL on it. I know that’s supposed to be ‘good advertising’ but I think maybe people who like the Pinky Show might just want a t-shirt with a Pinky Show-type picture on it, without having to become a walking billboard for our show. I figure if people really want to help us get more viewers it probably makes more sense for them to just tell their friends about us. I doubt anybody ever sees a URL on a t-shirt and thinks to themselves, “gee, I better memorize that URL and remember to check that out later today when I get home from work…”. You know what I mean. So now it’ll just be a very quiet and semi-secret relationship between me and the person wearing the shirt. Does that make sense?

We still have to buy some ‘blank’ shirts and also practice our screen printing technique. Assuming they come out nice, we’ll send out an announcement via the newsletter when we have some shirts ready to go.

Okay, that’s everything going on in the world of t-shirts. Back to work - Bunny and I are still working on the Iraq War episode. These episodes take a while because we like to double- and triple-check all the information, over and over again. Mimi & Kim are on vacation at the moment. Our goal is to be done with the episode and surprise them with it when they get back next Monday night. It’ll be tight; there’s still quite a lot to do.

Take care,
pinky

I was looking over some of my ‘old’ records when I came across the notes from the very first meeting where Bunny and I had discussed the possibility of creating The Pinky Show. When I saw the date on those notes - April 4, 2005 - I got really excited. I thought I’d stumbled upon these notes exactly two years to the day. Wow! This must mean we should celebrate! I ran to show Bunny…

Bunny: *looking at the notes* “It’s May.”
Me: “Huh?”
Bunny: “April 4th was last month. You missed it by a whole month…”

Oops.

Okay, so apparently I have a hard time remembering what month I’m in. But whether its been 2 years or 2 years+1 month, I think we do have some things to be thankful for. We’ve actually made some good progress since we started - it’s not easy to draw up The Pinky Show with a two-cat production team, and the feedback has been really encouraging. It’s also been a real struggle to make ends meet at times, but somehow we’re still here. And although we haven’t been able to work on this project full time, that’s still our goal and I have good feeling that sooner or later something nice will happen if we keep on pushing this project forward.

I’m especially excited about the work we’re planning for this summer/fall. I don’t want to say too much about it before we get more of the details worked out, but I will say that it’s basically a multi-episode series based on a walk across the United States. It’ll probably be Bunny who does the walking. It’s not going to be easy so she’s already started preparing herself. More details later.

~ pinky

Mimi and Kim came back from their vacation tonight. They got back around 9 p.m. and then went straight to bed. I guess I’ll ask them how their trip was tomorrow. Anyway, we’re happy they got back safely.

Earlier tonight I was reading an article about the shooting murder-suicide at Virginia Tech. 32 people were killed, the murderer also died when he shot himself. I was thinking about the horror of that number - 33 people suffering and dying like that is just so sad, not to mention all the other people who were physically injured or emotionally traumatized that day. The article went on to call it ‘the deadliest single-perpetrator shooting in United States history’.

I suppose it’s natural to compare one tragic day to other tragic days - it’s not a pleasant thing to do but I can kind of understand the logic of doing so. But then I got to thinking - what about comparing tragic days to ordinary days?

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in 2005 there were 14,860 murders. 10,100 of those people were killed with a gun. Divided by 365, that’s an average of about 28 people killed with a gun every day. I guess you could say that in terms of number of victims, it’s kind of like having a Virginia Tech mass killing every single day, except it’s spread out all over the country.

Another way to think about that number is to say that every month in the U.S. about 850 people are shot to death. One way you can imagine the relative scale of this number is to know that the average size of an elementary school in the United States (According to Education Statistics Quarterly 1995-1996 data) is 428 students. So if you can imagine a person with a gun going to an average-sized elementary school and then executing every single student there, and then going to another school and then doing the same thing over there too - well, that’s how many people are getting shot to death each and every month in the United States.

It’s fairly peaceful out here in the middle of the desert, so much so that it’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of ‘there’s nothing going on’. I certainly don’t think about gun violence every day, even though it certainly looks like it never really stops. Maybe the occurrences aren’t sufficiently ‘lumped together’ enough to warrant our concern. We seem drawn to ‘exceptional stories’ and ‘big numbers’ - apparently even when the big numbers are actually smaller than the everyday numbers.

~ pinky

I just came across some trivia on the internet. Did you know there is a word - ailurophobia - that describes the ‘extreme or irrational fear of cats’? I’m aware that there’s lots of people out there who don’t like us (for whatever reasons), but I’d never heard of that word before.

And since it’s always a good idea to know who your enemies are, I also copied down some names of ‘well-known cat-haters’. I think this means these people are famous and they are also known to hate cats - not that they became famous by hating cats:

Alexander the Great (356 B.C.-323 B.C.)
Julius Caesar (100 B.C.-44 B.C.)
Wu-Chao, Empress of China (624-705)
Pope Gregory IX (1147-1241)
Genghis Kahn (~1150-1227)
Pope Innocent Vll (1336-1415)
Pope Innocent VIII (1432-1492)
Elizabeth I (1533-1603)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
King Louis XlV (1638-1715)
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)
Isadora Duncan (1878-1927)
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969)

Wow, look at the people on that list! (Although… doesn’t Isadora Duncan seem a little out of place on that list?) I found this commentary interesting:

“It may be that men with dreams to dominate the world can’t get used to the idea that cats won’t submit to them.” (www.rulingcatsanddogs.com)

I guess that’s worth considering - it’s true, we don’t take to demands to submit very well (why should we?)…

Here’s another bit of anti-cat trivia from www.pawsonline.info:

“Chicago banker Rockwell Sayre must have been the world’s worst cat-hater. He lived in the early 1920’s, and started a campaign to rid the entire world of cats by the year 1925. He offered financial rewards to cat killers.

He said that cats were “filthy and useless” and claimed to have inspired the killing of seven million cats during the first three months of his campaign. In 1925 he extended his campaign for a further ten years, as there were many cats still left. But soon after he himself died.”

Seven million cats?! Even if he was exaggerating, obviously this guy had a lot of cooperation from other cat-haters. And I take offense to the “filthy” remark (I conceed that the ‘useless’ part is debatable).

What’s up with people hating us so much they’re willing to kill us? I have never heard of any cat organizing the murder of 7 million human beings. I bet even in the entire history of the planet not even sharks have killed 7 million human beings. Obviously human beings have some ‘issues’ that seriously need addressing…

~ pinky

[ Bunny’s note: Can’t prove it, but my theory is that cat-hating is closely tied to women-hating and nature-hating. History is filled with countless examples of people abusing, torturing, and killing cats. People have been projecting their fears, neuroses, anxieties, or whatever on us for thousands of years. People are crazy; we suffer the consequences. ]

[ Mimi’s note: We are survivors. ]

[ Kim’s note: “Beware of people who dislike cats.” - Irish Proverb ]

Bunny, Mimi, Kim and I will all be in Las Vegas for our first extended, multi-day Pinky Show meeting. On the agenda is a careful evaluation of what we’ve done since we started this project, and what we’d like to accomplish in the near future and beyond. Our top priority is to create a workable plan that will provide some source of income so that we can work on The Pinky Show full-time (rather that part-time, as we do now). This is important to me because I want to be producing and releasing new episodes a lot more frequently. There’s so many things I want to learn and I only have a short time in order to do it. Before I’m gone I want the episode archives to have hundreds of episodes in it, not just a few dozen.

We chose Las Vegas for our meeting (instead of just staying at home) because we thought the unfamiliar surroundings might give us a different perspective. That and also we need some video and pictures for an episode we’re working on about internal colonies. So we’ll do some running around with cameras and tripods and such while we’re there too.

Anyway, I just wanted to mention that we’ll be ‘out of the office’ next week (I’ve always wanted to say that) just in case you write us an e-mail and it takes us longer than usual to reply. Everyone please take care.

~ pinky

We just returned from Las Vegas yesterday. All in all I think we got a lot done. Although it was only a week long and Las Vegas really isn’t so far away, by the time we got back we were all very, very tired - so tired that I feel like I should only be using short sentences to record my thoughts. Some people have been asking for a summary of what we did on our trip so here it is.

Sunday evening, June 10. Start walking to Las Vegas.

Tuesday morning, June 12. By the time we get to Las Vegas we’re so tired we decide to rearrange our schedule and do ‘nothing’ the first day. We had planned to give ourselves Friday off but instead I’m out-voted 3-1 and we immediately use the first half of our play-day to nap and recover from the long walk (100 miles). After napping we rent cat bicycles (tricycle for Kim) for the afternoon and ride out to Red Rock Canyon, right outside Las Vegas. Our plan was find some nice shade and just sit around and admire the scenery, but when we got there it looked like everything was recently burned (desert fire? no shade at all) so basically we just had to keep on moving.

<-- click on thumbnails for larger pictures.

I had to take a picture of this - these mountain-sized rocks are at the Calico Basin at Red Rock. To me they looked like giant, sleeping cats.

Okay, maybe not so much in the photograph, but they did in person.

Anyway, by the time we got back to the city it was pretty late. We returned the bicycles and met up with two of our human being friends at their hotel in Downtown Las Vegas. They gave us food and let us sleep in their hotel room every night for the remainder of our trip. We didn’t have a meeting that first night, we just went to sleep.

Wednesday, June 13. This was our first day of work. In the daytime we went to the Atomic Testing Museum for ‘information gathering’, from 9 a.m. when it opened until 5 p.m. when it closed. We took a short break for lunch (Himalayan food - loooks and tastes like Indian food to me). From about 6 p.m. till about 2 a.m. we had the first of several Pinky Show meetings. The meeting went long so we went to bed without dinner.

The Atomic Testing Museum.

Thursday, June 14. Daytime was spent doing more information gathering. We went to the Nevada Test Site - home to about a 1,000 nuclear detonations and probably the most bombed place on Earth. While we were there we had a run-in with ’security’ (with all their SUVs and guns and body armor) that was really an adventure in and of itself - but I guess that’s a story for another day.

One of many warning signs at the entrance to NTS.

Thursday afternoon & evening: more meetings. Dinner was Las Vegas ‘buffet food’. Between the two of them I think Kim and Mimi probably ate about a thousand shrimps. I have no idea how so much shrimp can fit in such a tiny cat (Kim). Buffets are a terrible idea.

Friday, June 15. More photography and note gathering at Lake Mead and Valley of Fire. These places are beautiful. And hot! The heat kept on making our camera shut down.

The water of Lake Mead is so blue it glows.

Lots of bright orange-red rocks at Valley of Fire.

Like the previous two days, we have a long meeting from late afternoon to about 3 a.m. Dinner is Chinese food. I’m still trying to avoid eating animals so I ate mushroom-noodles & pea sprouts while the others ate fish.

Saturday, June 16. Two more of our human being advisor-friends arrive in Las Vegas and we all have another meeting together. I have a baked potato for lunch. We break at 5 p.m. and attend a friend’s wedding held in the backyard of a house on Torrey Pines Drive. It’s a small wedding - 22 people and 4 cats. We have lots of fun and leave around midnight.

Sunday, June 17. Another full day of meetings, starting from the morning and ending at 10 p.m. We get dinner food from a Whole Foods Market. I have never heard of Whole Foods Market but apparently they are popping up everywhere. I don’t know if the food was healthier than what we usually eat but it didn’t taste good.

Monday, June 18. One last day of meetings. This meeting and the previous one centers on matters of financing The Pinky Show. On one hand I do realize that talking and planning about money is essential if we’re going to be able to continue working on The Pinky Show. But personally I’d rather spend my time thinking about matters of history, culture, politics, and stuff like that, so basically these meetings feel like some form of mild torture. Regardless, by the time we say good-bye to our human being friends I feel like we’ve made some progress in terms of deciding on some of the things that need to be done in the immediate-future. We all wave good-bye to each other and they go catch their various airplanes to go back to where they came from. The sun goes down and we start our walk back home.

Tuesday, June 19. Arrive back home.

Wow, I was also going to talk about what we discussed in our meetings but this diary entry is already so long and I’m sure you’re already bored by now. So I think I’ll continue on tomorrow. Sorry.

~ pinky

A week of meetings generates quite a lot of minutes. I did take notes but it’s not a verbatim transcript per se, so my apologies to everyone if this summary contains inaccuracies or misinterpretations of what was actually said.

Looking Back: The First Two Years.

• All of us agree that working on the Pinky Show project has been a good learning experience for us. It’s really pushed us to learn how to do things we never would have otherwise attempted (none of us actually enjoy working with computers) - for example, we’ve had to learn how to: build and run a web site; record sound and music on a computer; draw cats; edit video; make t-shirts; and so on.

• It’s kind of amazing to us how much of the time we’ve spent during the first two years has been just trying to learn how to do all the technical stuff necessary to produce the Pinky Show. It may not always be apparent to viewers, but in every episode we usually try to experiment a little in order to improve on at least a couple of things. As we get more comfortable with the ‘production’ side of things, we’ll be able to make new episodes faster and more efficiently.

• The most rewarding thing about working on this project however has been the ‘non-technical’ aspects: doing research; drafting and editing scripts; searching for or creating illustrations; talking to all kinds of knowledgeable people. It’s really been the kind of ‘education’ we were looking for.

• We all agree that the best part about making The Pinky Show has actually turned out to be the part that no one else gets to see. After we do our preliminary research (’information gathering’), we all sit down and start discussing how we should present the information. We argue about the implications of presenting this way and that way. We map out all the ways we imagine what we say could possibly be interpreted by different audiences (and the logical consequences of each). It probably doesn’t look like it when people see the final result, but behind the scenes we actually do a lot of fighting (and yelling and biting and scratching) about what matters and why. We have a lot of arguments about wording. Each discussion inevitably sends us back to do more research; we repeat this until we feel like we can make an episode that has what we call ‘instrumentality’. Ultimately we make decisions based on whether or not something will make an episode more useful as a political weapon. Even if it’s a very small weapon. Anyway, the working process we’ve developed is not a methodology per se and it’s certainly not efficient. But it’s been the most enjoyable part and being able to slug it out on a daily basis is having a profound effect on all of us.

• Our episodes have slowly (technically) improved. One day we’d like to re-do some of our earlier episodes (version 2.0), especially the Columbian Exposition one and the Vietnam War episode.

• We’ve experimented with different formats for presenting information and will continue to do this using formats we haven’t tried yet - for example: music videos, slide shows, tutorials, street interviews, and so on.

• Our favorite episode type so far is the ones where we start out with a ’simple’ question and do the research in order to try to find an answer - for example, the Vietnam War episode, the Iraq War episode, etc. Unfortunately episodes like these also take the longest to produce and so they are also the most expensive to produce. Runner-up is we like the merging of travel diary with research, such as in the Columbian Exposition episode. We like this format but of course these also tend to be expensive because of the additional costs associated with travel. We like interview-based episodes and they are much faster (and therefore cost less) to make, but since they are telephone interviews we think maybe it is visually a little boring. In the future, whenever possible, we would like to do some in-person interviews.

[ Bunny’s note: If we do in-person interviews that also adds travel costs because we’re in the fucking desert. ]

• Originially we had intended the Pinky Show to be a very short-form program (approx. 3 to 5 minutes per episode), with a new episode released every few days. Although we still like the concept, we quickly found out that that format didn’t really suit our personality-types. We tend to like to be very careful in our research (which takes a lot of time) and also we tend to like to look at the relationships between things (which also tends to be not-so-easy to explain). All of these things made our episodes longer and longer and basically we have really struggled to keep our episodes short and ‘tight’ rather than go on and on in a discursive fashion. We always joke that pretty soon we’ll be making 2-hour documentaries, then after that 10-hour, 5 part mini-series.

• Most of our episodes thus far have centered on pretty dark subject matter. This was not our original intention but considering the current state of world affairs (and the fact that with the exception of Kim we are basically a serious bunch), we’re not surprised it’s gone this way.

• Mimi & Kim originally intended to be more actively involved in research and writing. However for various reasons this hasn’t really happened (yet) and Mimi’s PS work has mostly been limited to financial and organizational paperwork and some grant writing. We wouldn’t have been able to continue work on the Pinky Show, however, if it weren’t for Mimi & Kim’s outside work and financial contributions that have allowed us to pay for equipment, bills, and all our other expenses. Hopefully in the near future they will be able to be more directly involved in creating content.

• Bunny & I have also had to spend lots of hours away from Pinky Show work in order to take on (paying) outside projects. Based on our calculations we would have been able to produce at least 50% more episodes over the last year if we were able to dedicate all our time towards the Pinky Show.

• The relatively large number of international viewers has been an unexpected but nice surprise. The question has arisen about whether or not we should provide translations (subtitles) in other languages.

• Viewer feedback has (generally) been far more positive than we had anticipated. Which is nice, but it makes us wonder if people are really understanding the implications of what we are saying.

• Lack of funding continues to be our largest problem.

Okay, just like yesterday, this entry turned out to be really long. So I’m going to stop right here and tomorrow I’ll conclude my report by summarizing some of the stuff we discussed that relates to what our plans are for the future. Hugs to everybody.

~ pinky

Although we weren’t able to resolve every single issue that needed addressing on our agenda, we did decide on how to proceed on quite a few things. This is a very condensed version of some of the conclusions reached during our meeting - all subject to change of course!

Looking Forward: The Upcoming Year

• What are some of the upcoming episodes that we want to do in the near future? Well, the biggest elephant in the room for us is colonialism (i.e., Native/Settler relations), both throughout history and right now. We’ll finally have a chance to touch on that in our upcoming ‘What is an internal colony?’ episode. Also in line for upcoming episodes (hopefully) are analyses of popular culture. We really like art, music, movies, etc., but we really haven’t talked about any of this stuff yet in any of our episodes.

• Translations & Subtitles: We’ve received a few e-mails from people outside the U.S. who have requested subtitles - especially in Spanish and German. Although we all agree that it’d be great to have The Pinky Show translated into these and other languages, we have a few constraints. First, none of us know how to speak either of these languages. The second issue is one of time. We only have a two-cat production crew to do the job of making new episodes (our top priority) and running most of our day-to-day operations, and I feel like we are already stretched pretty thin. Bunny has an idea though - she really likes anime (Japanese animation) and says that the way a lot of anime is subtitled into other languages is a good model for how The Pinky Show could also be done. These translated episodes are called ‘fan-subs’ and basically the subtitles are created by viewers of the episodes who can speak both the source and target languages (bilingual). The producers of the episodes themselves are usually not involved at all. Sometimes the viewers who do the translations meet and coordinate on a website dedicated to creating the subtitles (essentially a ‘translation wiki’). It’s not like we’re lazy or don’t want to be supportive, but politically speaking we think it’s important to maintain a certain amount of ‘distance’ between ourselves and the finished subtitled episodes simply because we can’t vouch for the accuracy of subtitles we can’t read. If viewers understand they are reading subtitles generated by other viewers rather than our production team, we think this will go a long way toward dissipating a fair amount of false assumptions and misunderstandings before they arise.

• The $$$ Situation: So far we have been trying to fund the PS through grants and donations. We also have recently opened a Pinky Show online store. The short story is that none of these have shown much promise in terms of funding our project, at least for the time being. So far no one has shown any interest in funding the PS through grants. Our site traffic continues to go up every month and we receive lots of encouraging e-mails, but besides a tiny handful of individuals (thank you to those people!) we have also not been receiving any donations. So far we have sold maybe 3 posters, 3 shirts, and a Pinky doll from the store. So instead, practically all of our ‘funding’ has come from our outside work - building websites, photography, design stuff, etc. But according to bookkeeper Mimi we haven’t hit equilibrium - with our current ratio of outside work to Pinky Show work, every month we continue like this we accumulate more debt (apparently we’ve been spending too much time working on Pinky Show stuff, and not enough time making money doing outside jobs). So until we start getting grants and donations, we need to be more disciplined and only work on producing new episodes after we’ve raised the money to pay for their production. If we don’t do this our debt is only going to get bigger and sooner or later we’re going to starve. Not good.

• Mimi doesn’t think donations are ever going to be a good way to sustain The Pinky Show. She basically thinks that even if people like watching our episodes, people are ‘cheap’. I’m not sure if that’s true or not but I also think that we don’t have nearly enough traffic at our site to receive a significant amount of donations. I’m guessing only a tiny fraction of people actually make donations. So I think we need thousands and thousands of people visiting our site every day just to have a chance to receive a decent amount of donations. For this reason I think we need to focus on attracting lots more viewers to our website. We have to build relationships with larger, more well-established progressive organizations in order for this to happen. Examples of this kind of relationship building include having our videos (or at least links to our videos) prominently placed on high-traffic websites, co-producing episodes that other organizations can immediately put to educational use with their membership/audiences, and so on. Bunny and I will try to do a little of this kind of work every week, but I think this falls under the category of ‘long-term’ development work. It’s kind of amazing (ridiculous?) that we’ve actually never done any PR or marketing-type work the whole time since we started. No wonder no one knows we exist… o.O

• Mimi brought up the question of whether or not we want to (re)consider the possibility of 1) doing an iTunes style buy-our-episode-for-$1.00 type of thing; or 2) making our website only accessible via some kind of subscription thing; or 3) accepting advertisements as possible ways of generating income. I vetoed all of the above. I see these as last-last-last resort kind of options and anyway I highly doubt they’d work. I don’t think people feel like learning from cats is something they’d be willing to pay for; I don’t want money to be a barrier (even a symbolic one) to poor people accessing the content we produce; and we don’t have enough traffic to interest advertisers (not to mention Bunny and I hate advertisements…). No.

• Mimi will continue to pursue grants whenever possible. I’ll help her with the writing. To be realistic though, it may take us a long time to figure out how to get grants. Neither of us are experienced in grantsmanship.

• One of the things that I’m pretty good at is making things. So we decided that Bunny and I will try to raise some money by making and selling more t-shirts. We’re going to make a few more designs and then try selling them on eBay and stuff like that as a fundraiser. I doubt we’ll make a lot of money this way but at least we already know how to make t-shirts and it’s the kind of thing that can bring in some income right away (I hope), instead of months or years from now.

• I also got some unexpected encouragement from the others to try to write and illustrate children’s books. At first I was like ‘Yuck, I don’t even like human being children…’. But Mimi made the important point that they don’t really have to be for children at all, that children’s books is really only a format - very simple text and lots of pictures. So basically I can make children’s books for adults. This idea I like. So I will be trying that. I have to look into how we’d be able to economically print out the books - there’s no sense in making a lovely children’s book that costs $80 each. Mimi suggested e-books, and while that’s a viable option, in the end we decided that if we can find a way to print out a physical book for a reasonable cost then we’d prefer to have something people can hold in their hands.

• One of the main set of questions that needed answering before closing our week-long series of meetings: What will we do if we can’t find a way to have The Pinky Show financially sustain itself? How much longer can we continue before pulling the plug on this project? We all had slightly different answers. Mimi and Kim have promised to keep on helping for at least another year. But they do have other commitments and I’m sure it’s been hard for them knowing that they’ve directed a lot of their hard earned money to this project and yet we’re still struggling. Bunny said she’d be willing to keep on working on the Pinky Show until she dies, even if financial constraints force her to treat it as just a part-time thing. I feel like I want to work on this until I die too, but I see this as being primarily an educational/political project rather than a hobby, and as such I feel like this project has to be of a certain scale in order for it to make sense. If I can’t somehow find a way to eventually produce an episode a week (my dream output), I think maybe I could be more useful doing something else. I’ll wait until next year’s meeting to see how I feel about it then. Until then I’m going to keep working on this as if our little project is guaranteed to find support.

I’m sure I’m forgetting lots of things (I didn’t take notes the entire time) so Bunny, Mimi, Kim - please feel free to add whatever you like to these notes.

Postscript:

• Tuesday, June 19: Upon arriving back from our trip, I find an e-mail in my mailbox notifying us that we have been rejected for another big grant we had applied for. Sad!

• Wednesday, June 21: We receive an e-mail from a curator of an upcoming exhibition on radical education at a museum in Slovenia, asking us if we’d be interested in participating. Yes we would! Happy!

So goes our roller coaster ride here in our lonely corner of the Mojave desert.

~ pinky

Today is the Fourth of July. Here in the United States people call it ‘Independence Day’. We woke up this morning, looked at the calendar, saw that today is the day, and wondered if we could feel the difference in freedom if we just sat quietly for a few minutes. Kim said she thought she could feel something but the rest of us agreed that today pretty much feels exactly like yesterday. [ Bunny: If you want to feel different get off your ass and do something different. ]

Today marks the 231st anniversary of the Continental Congress’ approval of the Declaration of Independence. That’s 231 years since that profound document was written up and agreed upon - “Yup, we’re going to do this”. So with all those smart guys standing behind that promise (Thomas Jefferson & gang) and 231 years to work on it, we should pretty much have the “all men are created equal” thing covered, right?

Well, no. Apparently there’s always going to be a lot of work to do. Things get better, then they get worse, then they get a little better again, then a lot worse, then a big step towards good in response to the last bad - it goes on and on and I guess our biggest job is to just not give up. I mean, if we still think “all men are created equal” is a good idea.

We had a short meeting this morning and decided to take the day off from our fundraising activities (the stuff we’ve been doing non-stop since our Las Vegas meeting) and instead use this Independence Day to relax and remind ourselves what we’re trying to work towards. So, today’s schedule is filled mostly with scenes of peaceful domesticity and also a couple of documentaries we’ve been meaning to watch for a while. And cartoons.

7:00 a.m. Wake up, brush teeth, etc.
7:15 a.m. Trying to ‘feel the independence’.
7:30 a.m. Meeting.
8:00 a.m. Mimi & Kim marketing, Bunny & Pinky clean up.
10:00 a.m. Do e-mail.
10:30 a.m. Write this post.
11:00 a.m. Make lunch for everybody.
11:30 a.m. Eat.
12:00 p.m. Watch cartoons.
12:30 p.m. Discuss cartoons.
1:00 p.m. Snack break.
1:30 p.m. Watch documentaries: Make It Plain (1994), The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971).
5:30 p.m. Start walking to spider’s hole.
6:00 p.m. Dinner with spider & family (bring large-size marshmellows).
11:00 p.m. Finalize new t-shirt designs & vote.
2:00 a.m. Sleep.

Hmm… I haven’t been writing in this diary as much as I should. I respond to a lot of e-mails every day; maybe I’ll post some of them here.

~ pinky

In an article titled Habeas Corpus: A Defense Against The Dark Arts, Caroline Arnold discusses the political significance and psychological impact of the U.S. government’s suspension of habeas corpus. You know what habeas corpus is, right?

In common law, habeas corpus (Latin: [We command that] you have the body) is the name of a legal action or writ by means of which a person can seek relief from unlawful detention of himself or another person. The writ of habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action. (from Wikipedia)

Anyway, at the end of the article, she ends with: “…if you secure a piece of toast with the buttered side against a cat’s belly and drop the cat from some height it will spin indefinitely in midair and never land. That’s because, as the necromancers of White House science would tell us, cats must always land on their feet and toast always lands with the buttered side down.”

Fascinating. Luckily we have both toast and cats available to test this theory. We will post the results as soon as possible.

~ pinky

[ Note from Bunny: All I can say is anybody who reads this article and still chooses to do nothing about it -