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 - Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right - better not complain too loudly when they’re tossed into a secret military prison at some black site… ]

Update: July 20, 2007 - We are done with our testing and it’s clear that the White House is lying to the public. Mimi did not ’spin indefinitely’, falling quite rapidly to the ground 5 out of 5 times. She did enjoy the butter though. ~ pinky

Last week was crazy. On July 19 (Thursday), one of the YouTube editors placed a Pinky Show episode on the front page of YouTube. We immediately felt the difference in the form of thousands of e-mails pouring into our mailbox. Apparently not everyone was thrilled with what we have to say, as the very next day (Friday, July 20) the Pinky Show website was hacked and we had to shut it down for a few days while Bunny cleaned it up. To be honest, we were all kind of surprised that someone would hack our site in an attempt to silence us. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was annoying and I’m sure Bunny didn’t enjoy debugging the site. But seriously - anybody who’s spent any time at all with cats must know that you can’t stop us from doing what we want. I’m sure this won’t be the last attempt to shut us up, but in the end, all of these attacks will fail. We are not big, or rich, or powerful, or anything exciting like that, so instead we will just be relentless.

Back to the story. By Friday, July 27, we’d finally slid off the front page of YouTube. But in the span of one short week we’ve acquired over half a million episode views and over a thousand new subscribers. Pretty sweet huh? During the week I also replied to about five or six hundred e-mails. My sincere apologies if I never got around to answering your e-mail - there were just so many and in the end I had to skip a lot of very charming e-mails just because my eyes were getting all weird like this:

O.o

So anyway, our 15 minutes of internet mini-fame has finally run its course and all I can say is that it was really exciting and fun. We made a lot of new friends! It was also a great learning experience. We not only got to learn a whole bunch about hacking, but the big increase in traffic and feedback produced a lot of information that now we get to sit down and analyze.

Things are getting back to normal around here and I think starting tomorrow I’ll be able to get back to doing some of that fundraising work we’d started before this YouTube thing blew up. I’m excited to get back to work on that stuff because we’re really focused on finishing that episode on internal colonies.

Oh wait - one more thing! In the middle of all this e-mail and hacking craziness we also managed to crank out a mini-video open call for a project we’re currently calling Americanism: The Movie. If you haven’t already seen it please check it out. It’s only been up for a couple of days but it seems to be generating some interest. So I’m hopeful that more people will post video responses, enough so that we can edit them together and make an interesting episode out of it. If you, or anybody you know, has an opinion about Americanism - or globalization, colonialism, racism, or any of the other little morsels that wrapped together make up the giant Americanism Burrito™ (okay, that is probably the world’s worst metaphor ever) - please participate in this project.

It’s bedtime; I better go. Goodnight. ~ pinky

[ note from Bunny: That’s a big burrito. Look how small the Coke is. ]

[ from Kim: What’s in that burrito? ]