New Blurbs

Posted by Bunny.

A few days ago I posted a new blurb about stupid toys. If you haven't already seen it, you can check it out by clicking here. I also posted a blurb yesterday called Students against Rice Eaters. I like rice.

Pinky's Ants Speak

Posted by Bunny.

The Ants from Pinky's AntFarm™ have prepared a statement so we've made it into a mini-blurb. You can hear what they have to say by clicking here. I've also posted a new Idea in the Fight! section.

Bumper Stickers

Posted by Pinky.

One of the things I like to do to relax is to browse the internet. I guess you could say it's kind of like a hobby (I've heard people call watching television their hobby - that's also pretty bad). I don't really like to do physical activities like exercising (yeah, I know), and there's not too many things to do around here that anyone could call 'amusements', so reading, talking with friends, looking for stuff to eat (and then eating it), and browsing the internet are what I like to do best. Which brings me to the subject of today's entry - annoying bumper stickers. Here's one of the stupidest ones I found tonight:

Not really sure what to say about it other than this bumper sticker makes no logical sense to me at all (if anyone out there can educate me as to how U.S. soldiers have saved us from speaking Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Russian, or [insert evil/inferior foreign language here], please feel free to e-mail me a mini-history lesson). Okay, here's another:

Aren't human beings also made of meat...?

Yesterday Bunny and I were arguing about something (not bumper stickers) and she implied that I'm a humorless slug (by calling me a "humorless slug"). I may be a slug (see exercise thing, above), but I don't think I'm actually totally humorless. But I've noticed that whenever I don't laugh at something somebody else thinks is funny, suddenly I'm 'humorless'. Like now.

~p.

Not a Good Performance; Moving On

Posted by Pinky.

Hi everybody.

It's a good thing March has 31 days in it, otherwise I would have had no entries this month. We finally finished our first video episode yesterday, and while we're quite happy to get number one out of the way, making that episode was also a pretty stressful process. I suspect we're going to run into quite a bit of problems for a while, being that I'm not going to be able to fix many of the problems we encountered any time soon. First off, we found out right away that I'm not a good performer. Talking with your friends is sure a lot different from talking with a microphone and camera in front of you and having that little red recording light flashing. I'm learning all kinds of things I didn't really want to know about myself: I tend to slur a lot of words together. I tend to trail off at the ends of sentences. I mispronounce a lot of words. When I'm reading my script, it really sounds like I'm reading from a script. And it's almost as if the harder I try, the worse everything gets. Plus, I really don't like the sound of my voice… I think I need voice lessons, acting lessons, and a whole bunch of other lessons I've never even heard of yet. I'm sure it's just going to take a lot of practicing on my part to get better, and it's actually really nerve-wracking to think that there's people out there listening as I'm floundering around in front of a microphone. My ego's all slumped over and tired from the mean ass-kicking it received this week.

But Bunny, Mimi, Kim, and I, we've been talking about it a lot these past few weeks, and we keep on coming to the same conclusion - it's important to keep working. We'll keep trying to improve as we go along, but for the time being, we just feel like we have to be stubborn and single-minded and force our way forward. We read the newspapers every day and sometimes we just feel so overwhelmed, almost like there's nothing we can do to make anything better. We probably won't know for a while if anybody will find The Pinky Show useful in some way or not, but one thing we've definitely found out for ourselves already, is that in order to make The Pinky Show, we have to talk a lot things out. And all this talking and discussion is helping us to kind of sort out our thoughts and think through some of the things that's been pressing down on us. An other option would be for us to lie around and spend all our time complaining and whining about stuff - I'm pretty sure that kind of behavior accomplishes absolutely nothing. Cats don't live a long time you know, we're here in this world for a little while and then we're gone. We don't have much time to waste.

~pinky

Our First Video Episode

Posted by Bunny.

I just put our first video episode online (Fabulous Imperialism: The Columbian Exposition of 1893). Working on it was fun - not counting the research and collection of all the materials, that episode took us about a week to put together. It's a bit rough and now that we are done with it, there's quite a few parts that we would have liked to have done differently (or better). But rather than keep on working on it forever we decided to move along and just put it out there and see what people say about it. So there it is. Hopefully we'll get feedback that'll help us to get better at making these things.

To me, the first half is kind of boring but it is necessary and the second half ties everything together so please watch the whole thing.

~B.

We're on a Roll

Posted by Bunny.

We are on a mini-roll. Another blurb done, this one is about elephants. No real message or anything like that, we just liked Tim's elephant story and decided to share it with everyone. Mimi was upset that we put in the picture of the elephant stepping on that person's head - she said it is 'anti-elephant', which I don’t think it is. If anything, I think it's anti-guy-riding-the-elephant or anti-guy-who-told-guy-riding-the-elephant-to-step-on-that-other-guy's-head. Anyway, the new blurb is here.

Watch a New Blurb

Posted by Bunny.

Another blurb done. This one is about those 'Support Our Troops' ribbon stickers. I don't know if they are popular all over the country but around here they are everywhere. Please watch, download, and e-mail.

The Pinky Show Trailer

Posted by Bunny.

Okay, so we finally have a short video introduction to The Pinky Show. You can watch it by clicking on the tiny television set icon on our home page. Pinky and I never made anything like that before so we just watched a bunch of trailers to get some kind of ideas. The first thing we noticed is that all the trailers are 2:30 minutes long (why is that?). Ours came out to be 2:21 - we tried but couldn't think of nine more seconds of something to put in there, sorry.

Our First Blurb

First blurb done. Click here to watch it. Small enough to download and attach to e-mail. Please e-mail to your friends if you like. It's about B2 bombers. According to Pinky they actually built those B2 bombers very near here. Thank you.

The Olympics™

Posted by Pinky.

Bunny, Mimi, and I watched the Olympics™ tonight on television, it was the final night of the ladies figure skating competition. I have to admit, I'm a bit confused by the whole idea. To me, figure skating looks like some kind of art-form, maybe similar to dancing, theater, or maybe even painting. It's weird to me to make that into a competitive sport, with winners and losers. I said "Why does this have to be competitive? Why not just have all these girls perform, and we can enjoy all of their performances without having to say 'you were the best, you were second best, and so on'…?" Then they both looked at me like I was from the moon and said "Nobody would watch…"

Really?

Why are human beings so hard-wired for competition? Is it simply a handy motivational mechanism useful for promoting excellence and forward-movement? Or is it something more primal, perhaps a deeply-embedded animal instinct that long ago allowed certain cavemen the ability to survive by clubbing their smaller, weaker, less competitively-inclined cavemen buddies to death during long winters and other times of food scarcity?

Not being the competitive type myself, I won't pretend to know the answer to this. Bunny recommends that I just interview some ice skaters to find out what they think about this. Personally I find it hard to believe that any ice skater would have anything at all in common with a club-wielding caveman.

~p.

....................................

Posted by Bunny: Tanya Harding? In your face Pinky.

Ready to Go

Posted by Bunny.

Finally got back some equipment today I've been waiting for to be repaired for weeks. It sure took a while, but all of our equipment seems to be working together now and I think I can finally say that our little production studio is ready to go.

One of the disadvantages to living way out here in the borderlands is how long it takes to fix things if (when) things do go wrong. Not to mention we are severely under-equipped to begin with. And lack a knowledgeable staff (and budget) to properly operate or maintain the equipment we do have. I also don't think we have any funding coming our way, in the foreseeable future anyway, to acquire new equipment (not that we'd be able to afford any training for said vaporware anyway)… Disaster? Maybe. Pinky keeps telling us not to worry too much, that all we can do is try our hardest to make this thing work and keep going as long as possible, and hopefully something good will happen.

Which reminds me, I have to get the donation page working. We're going to need donations if we want to keep this website up, running, and commercial-free.

~B.

Are Ants Yummy?

Posted by Bunny.

De-bugging the website. I found a bunch, though I'm sure there’s more that I haven’t found yet. If you find any, please drop me a line by e-mail. I'll try to fix them as soon as possible.

Pinky's on a short trip, she’ll be back next Wednesday. I've been watching Pinky's AntFarm™ for a few days now. Getting ideas.

~B.

Pat

Posted by Pinky.

Tonight Bunny, Kim, Mimi & I went to a friend Pat's memorial service. To be honest we didn't know her very well, mostly we just saw her around sometimes behind the Greek restaurant's dumpsters, but she was always very kind to us the few times we did get to talk. She was also very well respected around here, known for being very compassionate and also knowledgeable about “scientific” methodology. She was also quite stunning to look at - I've never seen another pure white rabbit around these parts, perhaps she was an escapee, nobody knows. But she was run over by a truck last Tuesday, I'm sure she was killed instantly and didn't suffer at all.

I don't think there ever was a human being born who decided not to drive a car or truck because of the risk to small, crossing animals.

~p.

Counting the Dead

Posted by Pinky.

I'm still being haunted by that awful photograph (Jan. 14 entry), and the insane war that produced it. You know, one of the places that photograph led me to was to think about the disparity of numbers of the dead. 30,000 Iraqi civilian dead, 2,000 U.S. soldiers dead. I don't mean to trivialize death and suffering by going on and on about numbers, but I can't help but wonder - is this kind of disparity between the number of dead soldiers versus the number of dead civilians 'typical' in times of war, or is this war in particular some kind of highly unusual exception?

I did some quickie 'research' (I use the term very loosely, sorry) and learned that during wars, it's not unusual for many more civilians to die than soldiers. Once such example being World War II: about 25 million soldiers died, compared to over 62 million civilians deaths. The Korean War was similar in this respect: about 750,000 dead soldiers (North Korean, South Korean, Chinese, U.S., U.N., Soviet) versus between 1.25 to 1.55 million civilian deaths (both sides). I don't have exact figures because I don't think anyone really knows exactly how many people die during wars...

Another thing I didn't realize is how many war-time deaths are caused by starvation, disease, exposure, drought, 'friendly fire', atrocities, and so on. For example, during the American Civil War, twice as many soldiers died from non-combat related reasons than were killed in 'action'.

When someone says the word "war", I immediately think of "death". The thing is, though, that the iconic image of 'war-time death' that immediately comes to mind is of a soldier (invariably a male soldier) being shot, bombed, bayonet-ed, grenade-ed, or otherwise killed by... well, another male soldier.

Obviously I have an overly simplistic, one-dimensional concept of how wars actually destroy lives - children, women, the elderly, soldiers... cats... And I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one who thinks like this. So I'm curious - what would be a good way to teach people about war and what it really is?

~pinky

Fight! Opens

Posted by Bunny.

We needed a place to put stuff some of our friends have been sending us: Fight! area now open.

[ Note: Sorry! This section no longer exists. ]

Name Days

Posted by Pinky.

Today is "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day" here in the U.S. Which is also to say that the other 364 days of the year are "Not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day". In their place may I suggest "Malcolm X Day" (May 19), "Sitting Bull Day" (how about June 25?), "Anne Sullivan Day" (April 14), and about 361 others.

War Picture

Posted by Pinky.

I was browsing the internet last night when I accidentally came across a very graphic photo that really shocked me. It was a photograph of an Iraqi man who had been shot in the head by a U.S. army sniper. His head was basically gone, his face was flattened out and floppy like an empty rubber mask. There was blood everywhere, trailing away from his head via a small foamy river. He had no head any more, but he did have blue pants and clean tennis shoes. It's hard to believe that someone’s life can end so quickly, and with so much violence.

This morning I woke up with a huge knot in my stomach. I'm sure it was that awful photograph and for most of the morning I kept wishing I hadn't ever seen it. Then I started wondering to myself, "How many Iraqi people have died during this war?" I went online and found a website called iraqbodycount.org. The current estimate is somewhere around 30,000 civilians killed by military intervention in Iraq. This is a number that exceeds my comprehension.

There's been a lot of argument here in the U.S. about whether it's right or wrong to show photos of dead people, be they U.S. soldiers or Iraqi civilians, in our newspapers or on the evening news. But if my not-very-close encounter with just one dead Iraqi man left me so sad and angry, I can only imagine what would happen if people were confronted with many, many more images of this kind of violence and suffering. I don't want to see photos of mutilated children, but I'm sure there are thousands. They must exist - but where are they? I still don't understand why all the news reports of bombings, kidnappings, executions, errant missles and whatnot don't seem to affect me on the same visceral level that that one photo did. Maybe if you want to complicate a war, the public needs to see more pictures?

~pinky

Our First Episode!

Posted by Pinky.

Bunny just posted our first episode on our website. I had a chance to sit down and do a very short interview with my friend Dr. Hui, who was nice enough to drive all the way out here from LA (I think it’s about a two or three-hour drive). Besides doing the interview, we gave Dr. Hui a nice tour around the immediate vicinity (the old trailer park, the huge electrical power line towers, the semi-abandoned junk yards) and we also showed him our plans for the university we're hoping to build one day (I think he was impressed). We really enjoyed his visit.

Even though it's just one episode on our website so far, at least now I feel like we're slowly moving forward. It's a start. We have three more episodes in-progress, I hope to have them all done and posted on our website very soon.

~p.

I'm the Softest

Posted by Bunny.

I just posted our very first Pinky Show episode to the archives section. It's called The Health Care Crisis, Part I and is an interview with Dr. Hui. He hung out with us for a while and my favorite part was when Mimi, Kim, Pinky, and I were all walking with him down by the dried-up river bed and he was feeling all our fur and he said that my fur was the softest (it's true, I'm really really soft).

Anyway we're happy to finally have a Pinky Show episode on the website - this one is a text-only episode, but following ones will probably be audio or audio with pictures. It looks pretty ridiculous right now, sitting there in the big, empty archive all by itself, but we'll keep making more.

~B.