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 ]