E-mail from Eric W.:

Subject: Is PS okay?! Please blog to prove!
Hi. You have not blogged since Dec. 2008. Please blog something to let people know you are still up and running and are not locked up in an animal shelter! …Also… Have you thought about adding a section to your website where teachers can upload lesson plans, Word documents, pdf documents, etc. that would go along with you videos? They could somehow be peer reviewed before appearing online, or vetted in some way. Eric :)

Pinky’s response:

Hi Eric, Thank you for your concern. No, we’ve not been locked up (recently). And I don’t want anyone to think that we’re just sitting around watching T.V. or something so here is my mini-report on what’s going on around here at the moment: 1) editing & animating two new PS episodes; 2) putting together a new feature for the Commons Gallery; 3) Bunny is working on “tiny colonialism comix”; 4) I’m writing a children’s book (for adults); 5) we’re writing curriculum for some upcoming workshops; 6) ongoing grassroots education project re: colonialism in Hawaii; 7) computer died and (semi)resurrected; and 8) we just finished up and submitted a new grant proposal today for starting a program to collect oral histories (yay! everybody cross fingers!). So, rather than blog everyday about being on the verge of a nervous breakdown I just decided to leave the blog alone for the moment.

BUT! Regarding teaching materials idea - yes, Bunny and I have been talking about doing something like that on and off since… well, since we started this project. But things never seem to calm down around here so we’ve never actually gotten around to doing it. Hopefully sometime later this year Bunny will be able to make a Pinky Show Wiki so that interested people would be able to coordinate work on things like supplemental materials, episode subtitles, or whatever else people might find useful. We’re hoping to do that eventually, we’re just flat under a bunch of work at the moment.

But not dead!

Take care,
pinky

[ note from Bunny: The situation in Gaza has deescalated somewhat but is still dire. Please remind your friends that we have two excellent documentaries in our Dec 2008 diary archives on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, and Occupation 101. Send them here. ]

I received this video from Phiya a while ago but kept on hesitating to put it up because I wanted the Palestine videos up at the top of the blog, etc. Well today there was a huge traffic accident near here and three people died. Human beings - please, PLEASE drive more carefully. Life is so precious and you really do not have to be where you are going just a few minutes sooner…

Please take care,
pinky

[ Kim: People always seem to forget that cars are very death-possible. Please treat your car like it is a killing machine because that's exactly what it can do. Go ask Bunny. ]

[ Bunny: I was the only one from my litter that didn't die under the wheels of a car. All of my brothers and sisters (5) are gone. But this video isn't about cats getting hit by cars. ]

[ note from Pinky: My favorite thing about this video is that it is a reminder that there are 10,000 things that we experience in our daily lives that we are not understanding. This person is a philosopher and he's using everything he has to change himself and also the world around him. Maybe it seems small, but isn't it good? Sorry, I forgot to add the website: http://trafficwaves.org/ ]

[ Kim: I know, I'm just saying cars are heavy and they go fast so they're inherently dangerous. But people just drive them unconsicously like a bad habit and then we're the ones who get runned over.]

Well we seem to have touched a sensitive nerve with our mini-zine. Quite a few hate mails - not a ton because it’s still day one - but still very impressive. I’m always fascinated by all these people who swear up and down how much they hate us but they still keep watching our show. What’s up with that?

Keep the hate mail coming. It’s very useful to us. Personally I think most of them are just over-the-top stupid and I think it’s a waste of time to respond, but Pinky’s always studying them and making notes on which points and arguments keep popping up. In the end we use them as a starting point for understanding what we need to address in our future work. So, I guess I should say, “Thank you, idiots”.

Anyway, we did recieve this encouraging e-mail from Greg. Pinky had mentioned in her What’s New update that a couple of our critics had slammed our mini-zine for not being “nuanced”. A nuanced mini-zine? Hmm. Here’s Greg’s take on it:

Pinky, Thanks again for your wonderful website, videos, and other presentations. Speaking of  ‘nuance’, your “How to Get Free Land in 5 Easy Steps” speaks to Native American, Australian Aboriginal, and many other situations where indigenous peoples have been exploited and displaced by colonialists and imperialists. It also speaks directly to the Israeli ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinians as a means of confiscating their land. Once again, Pinky has succeeded masterfully in presenting a simple summation which effectively clarifies the moral issues of a social or political problem. Sometimes, by avoiding specifics, a ‘lack of nuance’ allows the reader room to interpret the message in a wider context.

Pinky and I had a conversation today on the responsibility of ordinary cats (human beings also ok) to publicly take stands against violence and injustice, whether the stand happens to be popular or not. We’ll be making that into a video.

Bunny