Hi everybody - Happy New Year!

Bunny and I got back from our desert walk yesterday - a few days sooner than we had originally planned. What happened was I accidentally stepped in a hole and hurt my leg. I can’t walk so good now so we came back. Not a great way to start out the new year but as Bunny pointed out, at least I wasn’t run over by a car or get bitten on the face by a rattlesnake. That’s Bunny - always looking on the bright side.

We did get some things resolved though. For one thing, a rough schedule for the first part of this year has been mapped out. I’ve been wanting to learn more about where I’ve come from. Not just literally (”I’m from Hawaii”), but also I feel like I need to understand more about where I’ve been and why I am the way I am, before I can clearly see the path I need to follow in the future.

I think I mentioned it before that I was born (somewhere) in Hawaii, right? Well I left Hawaii when I was pretty small because I was feeling really curious and wanted to see the U.S. mainland. That’s when I left home and not too long after that I met Bunny, we traveled around for a while, and then afterwards we settled here in the desert and started doing The Pinky Show. But lately I’ve been thinking about Hawaii more and more. There’s a little voice inside my head that keeps telling me that there’s something there that I need to understand before I’m going to be able to really understand the United States.

I called up my good friend in Hawaii (I lived with her before, when I was still kind of like a kitten) and asked her if we could stay with her while we do some research about Hawaii. She said yes, we can stay as long as we like. We still have to figure out some of the details and there’s a few things that need to be wrapped up before we can go anywhere, but I’m already starting to feel excited about going back and getting started.

Kim and Mimi haven’t decided yet if they want to go to Hawaii or stay here in the desert. They want to go but they also want to be here for the desert flowers they think might be blossoming this spring (we had rain this winter). I told them there’s lots of flowers in Hawaii - all the time. o.O

Daisy said he’ll come along if we need his help. I said “Of course we need your help.”

I know what you guys are wondering - if you all go to Hawaii, who’s going to take care of the ants? I think the ants can run around free for a few months, they’ll be just fine.

I’m going to write more in this diary this year. That’s one of my new year’s resolutions.

~ pinky

Pinky the genius stepped in a hole and stress fractured her leg. So we had to come back early (Wednesday). So instead of a peaceful walk in the desert we will continue our new year planning from the usual boring kitchen/dining/study table. Pinky forgot to mention in her diary that she stepped in the hole only about 10 seconds after saying “Wow look at all these holes!”

Bunny

Bunny and I are tentatively scheduled to fly to Hawaii to start work on our series of episodes on Hawaii on Jan 13 (that’s a Sunday). I’m pretty good at disguising myself as a suitcase but I think Bunny better start practicing otherwise this whole trip is not going to happen.

Kim and Mimi will be coming to help out whenever they can, but probably won’t be able to be there most of the time. They both have regular jobs as well as an upcoming non-Pinky Show project for which they have to be in India for a couple of weeks in February.

Daisy will meet us in Hawaii a little later. He’s currently in Paris for who knows what. He’s always on the move.

~ pinky

Pinky and I (Bunny) are now in Hawaii. We may not be able to post as many blogs while we are here (not sure about access to computers, etc.).

We are staying with a friend at her house in the middle of a rain forest. This is not like the desert at all and the humidity is making me all frizzy.

We have a busy schedule. Even in our first 24 hours here we have learned a lot. Pinky or I will report back with more as soon as we get some ‘free time’.

Bunny

P.S. Ahi poke is my new favorite food. It is SO GOOD.

[ Kim: What’s ahi poke? ]

[ Bunny: I found the picture below here. ]

We have a new Pinky Show Radio episode. Today’s topic: What’s Wrong with GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms)? It’s an interview with Jeffrey Smith, founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology. It’s a fairly in-depth interview (almost 45 minutes) - a nice change from the typical 5-minute radio story or 1-minute news story. You can listen to the show here:

http://www.pinkyshow.org/archives/episodes/080124/

Posted by Bunny.

Just posted our newest ‘episode’. It is a re-presentation of an excellent documentary made in 2006 by Na Maka o ka Aina for Earthjustice, the non-profit public interest law firm. A quick summary:

When the biotech industry decides to use the lands and people of Hawaii as its test guinea pig, local farmers, activists, researchers, and others speak out.

You can watch the video here:
http://www.pinkyshow.org/archives/episodes/080210/

Posted by Bunny.

Hi. Pinky and I are finally back in the desert and production on our multi-part Hawaii project is already moving forward. Tentatively we are thinking that it will end up being a four-part project. Part 1 is a two-take quickie tour of the island of Oahu and kind of functions like an introduction. Part 2 is about colonialism and settler colonialism. Part 3 is a case study of colonial space. Part 4 is kind of like an oral history piece. We may add other parts later. Hawaii is an amazing and complex place and I hope we will be going back soon in order to learn more.

Also the fish in Hawaii is fantastic.

Posted by Bunny.

We have a very nice interview with Captain Charles Moore of Algalita Marine Research Foundation - click here to read it.

By the way, Capt. Moore and crew just finished their month-long 2008 expedition through the North Pacific Gyre. The AMRF website has an excellent blog with lots of photos that documents the entire voyage with daily entries. If you like the PS interview I think you will enjoy reading the blog too. You can find it here (note: the entries are posted blog-style, with the earliest entries at the bottom of the page and the most recent at the top - in other words you gotta read these things backwards).

Stay away from those plastics.

Posted by Bunny.

Pretty soon. As of right now we have 2,921,545 views. When we hit 3 million all four of us + Daisy are going to celebrate with donuts and coffee. The Iraq War: Legal or Illegal episode went over 1 million YT views a few days ago too.

Also, for those of you who hate us so much and keep sending us threats and hate e-mail, please keep them coming. Nothing amuses me more than reading your pathetic and stupid comments.

Right now we are in the middle of producing our Hawaii episodes so we are not blogging as often. Our apologies to those of you who like the blogs. Kim & Mimi are busy doing some non-PS stuff at the moment so I can’t ask them to blog.

Bunny.

I just made a new area to acknowledge all those who have supported us with donations since day 1. You can check it out here. The new system will be able to accept short comments or dedications from now on - isn’t that cool?

- Bunny

We have a new area of our PS website. It’s called “Pinky Presents” and it features educational videos made by others. I made this area because in spite of trying to be super clear that we didn’t make Islands at Risk: Genetic Engineering in Hawaii, we got several e-mails sent to us that made us realize that some people out there thought we made that video. Well we don’t want to take credit for anybody else’s work so now we have this new area.

Anyway, in addition to having the new area, there is also a new video in that area for you to watch. It is also by Na Maka o ka Aina and is called We Are Who We Were: From Resistance to Affirmation. When was the last time you got to see a video about Native Hawaiian sovereignty from a Native perspective? The Na Maka website has about a hundred videos - go check it out. I haven’t seen them all but in my opinion Faces of the Nation and Act of War: The Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation should be required viewing for every American.

- Bunny

Pinky’s interview with Jeffrey Smith - a.k.a. What’s Wrong With GMOs? - is currently being featured in YouTube’s Education area. Which means that for the next few days we will be slugging it out with other YouTube educational videos for viewer supremacy - videos by hot babes (I use the term loosely) teaching about word origins, and real live (”live”) college professors explaining the finer points of ’storytelling theory and practice’. The competition is intense.

Also, I just added a few entries in our Specials Area - human beings and some other stuff. And for those of you who haven’t been following the Wikileaks controversy - go check it out. Very, very interesting.

- Bunny

Looks like the internet gods like Pinky. Not only is today Pinky’s birthday, we also hit the 3 million views mark at YouTube. Coincidence?

To celebrate Pinky’s 6th birthday we are going to catch a ride into LA and go looking for a comic book store. I told her I’ll buy her a copy of Persepolis if we find one.

Production on the Hawaii episodes is going well. We’re kind of doing them “all at once” but will be finishing them individually, in order. We’ll have the first episode (the intro) released before the end of the month, and the others will follow fairly quickly thereafter.

No other news to report.

- Bunny

We are a little behind schedule with our production schedule. We’d been hoping to release the first episode of our Hawaii: The Colony series before April but it’s already March 28 so it looks like it’s not going to happen. Pinky’s been really sick for a couple of months now and so we still haven’t gotten around to doing the audio recording for the episode. She still sounds pretty miserable and spends a lot of time lying around saying “guuuuuhhh…… bleh…” or something similar. The upside is that we’ve had more time to do more revisions to the script (parts two and three included) so I guess that’ll be a good thing in the long run.

We’ve been receiving e-mails from people in various European countries (Germany, Poland, etc.) telling us that our GMO episodes on YouTube are being ‘blocked’ by someone. Is it YouTube or is it their governments? I have no idea. If anybody knows who’s responsible for this sort of thing, please let me know.

Posted by Bunny

Last Friday I mentioned that we have been receiving e-mails from some people in Europe saying that they can no longer access our What’s Wrong with GMOs? episode at YouTube. Well, the story checks out: visiting the YouTube site via an anonymous European proxy server returns the message ‘video not available’ if you try to access the GMO video. Okay. But looking into the matter I’m discovering that there’s actually all kinds of weird things going on at YouTube.

For example: If you do a YouTube search for ‘GMO’, our What’s Wrong with GMOs? video - although being the most popular video on the subject by far - is buried way down in page 3 results, right next to all the other videos nobody ever watches. Our Islands at Risk: Genetic Engineering in Hawaii video is also receiving the same treatment (search: “GMO taro”).

Some of our YouTube subscribers have e-mailed us asking whey they’ve been ‘unsubscribed’ from our YouTube channel. Others have been asking us if we’ve been deleting their comments (we never delete comments).

Strangely enough, if you do a search for “Iraq War Illegal”, our The Iraq War: Legal or Illegal? video still pops in at number 1 (1 million+ views). Our Vietnam War video comes in on the first page of returns, as does our illegal immigration video. So why is our GMO episode (only ~40,000 views) being suppressed in Europe? Is it related to the pressure the U.S. is exerting on European countries to accept GMO? I don’t know.

As you can imagine it’s going to be very difficult to find out what exactly is going on at YouTube/Google. Censoring a nobody organization like The Pinky Show is easy - we’re not the New York Times and don’t have a small army of researchers or lawyers to look into this.

Bunny

My friend Teacup recommended this video to us and we all thought it was an excellent presentation. It’s a Creative Commons (3.0) video so I decided to post it in the Pinky Presents area. I hope lots of people watch it. If you find yourself moved by the analysis there’s an excellent website at www.storyofstuff.com with a ton more great resources - an excellent blog (by Annie Leonard), an extensive NGO list, reading list, organizing materials, etc.

~ Bunny

This is a great lecture that Pinky turned me on to late last night. I was sleepy but it was so good I ended up listening to the whole thing and going to bed at 4 a.m. You can listen to it here. It’s audio only so I stuck a Wikipedia photo of Dr. Yunus on it.

After I listened to the lecture Pinky and I were looking up some microcredit info when we ran into the Kiva website (www.kiva.org). This is a website that allows anybody to make a tiny loan to somebody who really needs money to start up some kind of business or other life-sustaining project. Excellent idea, I think I can do this. My felt can wait.

- Bunny