Saying it again: The "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" never happened!

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Posted by Pinky.

One of the most common criticisms we receive regarding our The American War: the U.S. in Vietnam episode goes something like this: "How can you say the Gulf of Tonkin Incident never happened? It did happen! You cats are wrong! How dare you conspiracy theorists suggest that the U.S. government used a fraudulent event that never happened to plunge our nation into war... blah blah blah."

Enter a recently declassified National Security Agency study - Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975 (download the entire report here). The study is a comprehensive analysis of U.S. codebreaking and eavesdropping work during the Vietnam war - the government's official history of e-spying if you will - and the Gulf of Tonkin incident receives a full analysis from a signals intelligence perspective in Chapter 5. The conclusion of that analysis? The Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened.

Thank you, we will be accepting written apologies at our usual e-mail address.

But seriously, you know what's really annoying? These people who e-mail us about how we make up stuff to back up our arguments don't seem to do any research themselves before firing off angry e-mails. The thing is, we were able to figure out that the Tonkin Affair never happened after doing just a few days worth of research into the 'incident'. It wasn't difficult to find out that it never happened and we certainly don't have any high-level security clearances that allow us access to top secret information. We just read normal books and reports that anybody can find in any decent library. So as nice as it is to have the NSA back us up on our "rediculus lies and claims", this kind of information really is already out there.

Annoying thing #2: The release of the NSA study and its findings were not covered in any of the mainstream U.S. news outlets. None of them. Maybe there'll be a hailstorm of reports about it next week, but I doubt it. I had to find out about it from a French newswire. Crazy huh.

~p.

Nice e-mail from David S.

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Posted by Pinky.

I don't answer a lot of e-mails anymore. I don't mean to be disrespectful, but to be honest, answering individual e-mails is not a good use of time. There'll probably always be a part of me that feels like I'm being very impolite or not-nice if I 'ignore' even one e-mail that we receive, but lately I've been trying really hard to keep my feelings in check and look at things programmatically. I have to ask myself: What is our primary responsibility? Well, we're supposed to be making educational materials. E-mail is fun and all that but since there's only two of us working on the production end of things, every hour I spend writing e-mails takes away time from research, writing, edting, and so on. Bunny and I typically work 12-14 hour days to keep the PS project moving forward. And at the end of the day we usually just feel too brain-dead to respond to individual e-mails. Plus, I'm a terribly slow writer.

Having said that, we frequently receive e-mails that, for one reason or another, we really want to respond to. Over the past couple of years I've been responding to as many of these as possible, but lately there's just been too many of them and I haven't been able to keep up at all. So what we're going to do is try to respond to some of the e-mails we receive here in the Diary area. Bunny does that sometimes (Bunny Mailbag), but not too often. So we're going to try to do this more often.

Anyway, tonight I wanted to share a very nice e-mail we received a few days ago from a person named David. The things he has to say about fear is, I think, extremely important. The relationships that exist between fear and self-silencing are worth careful examination - not just for the obvious political reasons, but for a million 'personal' reasons as well. A few years ago, shortly after we first met, Bunny and I decided that it would be important for us to create some kind of daily practice that would allow us to continually work towards the dissolution of fear. Making The Pinky Show has been a part of that practice.

Oh, and the hot dog story is good too. It really made us laugh.

message: I like your mini shows. I like the content and the way you express it. I especially liked your one about the illegality of the American war against Iraq.

On a more personal note (don't be scared, I am not dangerous), I want to tell you what made me actually write to you:

Two things basically.

The first one is that listening to you and your audience/contributors de-paranoided me. What I mean by that is, the information I received about in the Pinky Show's Legality of the Iraq War combined with the link your site provided to the BBC's "The Power of Nightmares" helped me overcome my resistance to sharing some of my strong convictions online. A week ago, it scared me to know that putting my convictions online potentially exposes me to the any of the 6 billion or so other people here.

But today, the post-Pinky version of myself realizes that my so-called leaders passionately devote considerable resources to engineering fear in the hearts of workaday schmucks like me. People like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Powell, Rice, Pearle, Wolfowitz, depend on my fear and the fear of millions like me. They depend on fear to deter ordinary citizens like me from observing and making our own conclusions about decisions they make that significantly affect the daily life of people like me.

Now that I have had a closer [sic] via your show, I'm angry enough to not care that potentially the whole world can know that I regard our "neoconservative" so-called leaders as dangerous, lying megalomaniacs. They are the mirror image of the very "evildoers who hate us because of our freedoms". So, thank you. Your show has helped me come to value my own observation and experience enough to share it without regard to fear. You supplied the information and courageous example which inspires me to write to you.

The second thing that made me write to you was a memory evoked by your picture of a sign showing there's 80 some odd miles to Death Valley. [ pinky's note: the image he's talking about is here. ]

My friend Dale and I call it the Hot Dog Water Story. When I was young and dumb, Dale and I had the brilliant idea to go for a 40-mile hike in Death Valley in August. We read about desert conditions. We also checked out an army manual about desert survival from the library. It said a person needs a gallon of water every 20 miles in the desert.

Long story short, we ran out of water anyway, in the middle of Death Valley. So we started to hitchhike. One car after another passed us by. Then a couple driving a Red VW van going in the opposite direction stopped, picked us up, turned around and drove us back to our camp. The couple was from Canada. They also had a cute little baby lying in a small, blanketed crate.

Dale and I were pretty thirsty by the time our good samaritans brought us back to camp. The only water we had left was in a cooler that contained hot dogs floating in warm water. Dale and I were so thirsty that we downed that hot dog water in nothing flat.

It turns out that our rescuers were camped close to Dale and me. We had a good talk about the whole experience when we had dinner together later that day.

So, thanks for reminding me about Hot Dog Water.

Sincerely,
David S.

Okay, that's today's interesting e-mail. It's almost 3 a.m. - I'd better go to bed now. Goodnight! ~p.

Hawaii: Who's Going

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Posted by Pinky.

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.​

bunny-as-a-suitcase_sm.jpg

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. Right now he's somewhere in France for who knows what.

~p.

2.5 Million Views

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Posted by Pinky.

A couple of days ago we hit 2.5 million episode views over at our channel at YouTube. I'm kind of surprised that a program like ours would get so many views at a place like YouTube. It's not ha-ha funny, we don't have any sexy pictures, etc. We originally decided to put our videos up at YouTube only because some people had written to us saying that they couldn't watch our videos on our website (QuickTime incompatibility, etc.). Now more people watch The Pinky Show over there than over here. I bet most of the people over at YouTube don't even know we have a website.

The other day, a (human) friend came over and we were reading through some of the YouTube comments and private messages we've received over the past few weeks. Some viewers are upset:

"fucking fags, go watch the news the UN autherized the 2003 invasion, no terrorist in iraq? SADDAM WAS A GOD DAMN TERRORIST!!! no WMDs, go ask the kurds if he had weapons of mass destruction, fuckin dumb whore, my and cousin served proudly in Iraq and dont need any of ur hippie shit." - YouTube user 75ranger101

"What The Fuck!!! First, you have NO RIGHT to bash the military in any way!! They fight so people can have the opinions they have, they risk there lives to protect OUR FREEDOM!!! Soldiers are given orders and they follow them, they don't ask questions they simply do as they are told. Second, whether or not the reason's for being in the middle east are legal or not is'nt the point. I lost family both on 9/11 and in the middle east, I find it bullshit that you would spend so much time ranting about an issue that is not up to you. Your cat looks high and your simply repeating something someone had ALREADY bitched about.....MOVE ON!!!!" - YouTube user dragonslayer9342

"FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKS. "Educational" its all propaganda go fuck youselves you fucking pieces of shit... etc." - YouTube user ingderf

Afterwards she was asking us if it bothers us that we get so many YouTube messages that are filled with anger, hate, and threats. She looked surprised when I said 'not really'. I don't really have any strong feelings about it other than to say that it's actually a good resource for us. The comments - especially the really outrageous ones - give us some kind of reminder how people out there are thinking/feeling about the issues. I'm not surprised that there are hundreds of square miles worth of angry replies out there. It's a reminder that certain sectors of society has had to work extremely hard to create this level of conformity. I don't believe that human beings can be born “stupid”; I'm pretty sure that the mainstreaming of stupid ideas has to be intentionally cultivated. And I'm sure it costs a lot of money too.

Actually I think it's kind of funny that my friend was under the impression that it's some kind of emotional burden to have a million people 'out there' hate you, wish pox on you, and so on. I thought cats are famous for being self-absorbed?

~p.

Bunny Mailbag: Quoting the Bible

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Posted by Bunny.

Received e-mail (12/30/2007):

I find it very interesting that you quote the Old Testament in your "From Swords into Plowshares" episode but not in your "Kicking the Apartheid Habit" episode. The quote I'm thinking of is Leviticus 18:22. - R.J. Grigaitis

For those of you who don't have a Bible handy, Leviticus 18:22 says ""You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination." My response to R.J.:

R.J.,

Perhaps you will also interested in Peter 2:18, Exodus 21:26, or Ephesians 6:5 - so that you will know how to treat your slaves. You do have slaves, don't you?

Just to be clear, we consider it fair to quote from any source so long as the source is identified (so that readers can examine the context from which it was taken), and deem the quote to be valuable in some way. Quoting from a source does not imply that we must uncritically accept all other pieces of information from that same source to be the absolute truth. That would be stupid.

~B.

Happy New Year

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Posted by Bunny.

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 our boring kitchen (dining room table). Pinky forgot to mention in her diary that she stepped in a hole only about 10 seconds after saying "Wow look at all these holes!" ~B.

2008: Cats to Hawaii

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Posted by Pinky.

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 well 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 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 lots of 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.

~p.

A New Year

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Posted by Pinky.

Hi everybody. This will be my last post for the year 2007. Starting tomorrow morning Bunny and I will be taking a walk. We'll walk and talk for a few days and hopefully we'll come up with some ideas for how to solve some of the problems facing our project. All signs point to 2008 not being a very quiet or peaceful year, but we're going to try our best to at least have it start it out that way.

The four of us - Kim, Mimi, Bunny, and myself - we'd like to wish all of you, our dear animal friends, much peace and beauty for this coming year. I love you.

~p.

Costco Chicken

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Posted by Pinky.

Gosh I'm tired. After watching that movie the other night (Idiocracy - see yesterday's diary entry), Kim & Mimi said they wanted to visit a Costco in real life (you'd think it was Disneyland or something). Problem is the nearest Costco around here is in Victorville, almost a hundred miles away. We got there by riding on a vegetable truck. Getting back was a nightmare, I don't think you need to know that story.

Well, Costco in real life is not nearly as exciting as it appeared in the movie. No shuttles, no brothels, no amusement parks. But I was impressed with how much STUFF they had. I mean, rows and rows of STUFF piled up all the way to the sky, and people were loading up their large-size shopping carts like there's a hurricane headed this way (there isn't, right?). One thing I thought was pretty weird was what kind of items Costco places next to the check-out lines, for 'impulse purchases'. While in supermarkets you might see small things like chewing gum or gossipy magazines, at Costco they had lots of whole roasted chickens lined up waiting for people to 'grab and go'.​

costcochicken.jpg

I felt sad looking at all those chickens sitting in their chicken-sized plastic coffins. I mean, 1 chicken to eat = 1 (formerly) alive chicken and it's hard to believe that the life of 1 chicken is only 'worth' $4.99. "Good deal" I'm sure most people will say. Bunny and Kim were looking at the chickens for a long time, I'm sure they wanted one.

Poor shrimp. The life of 1 shrimp must be worth even less.

~p.

A Short Walk; Project Twenty1 Film Festival

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Posted by Bunny.

Announcement 1: Pinky and I are just about ready to jump into 'writing phase' for our next few episodes, plus the new year is right around the corner. So we thought it'd be nice to start the new year by going for a walk. Just for a few days. Walking is good, it'll give us a chance to organize our thoughts. We're not bringing any books, just a notepad and a pen. And food and water.

We'll start walking on Dec 31 (new year's eve morning) and walk around here in the desert until maybe Jan 5th or so. It's not so hot right now (about 50°F during the day, 35-ish° F at night) so it should be nice. "Mini-vacation."

We won't be doing any e-mail during this time.

Announcement 2: On January 5th one of our episodes (Thomas Edison Hates Cats) is going to be screened at the Project Twenty1 film festival in Philadelphia. Our very first film festival! We really wanted to attend but it's way too far to walk and we couldn't afford the air fare and stuff. But we were very flattered to be invited and even more surprised when our video was actually selected. This is a 'new' film festival but I think it will be successful because the organizers have lots of energy and are very nice people. But yeah, that's another reason why we're going for a walk. It'd be depressing to be just sitting here at home while our video is being screened at a film festival and we're missing all the parties and stuff.

Okay, see you in about a week.

~B.

Movie: Idiocracy

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Posted by Pinky.

Lately it seems like whenever we decide to unwind and watch a video, we've been gravitating towards comedies. "Temporary escapism" - yup.

Last night we watched a movie called Idiocracy. I'd never heard of it but I like Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live) so I wanted to watch it. In the movie Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph get frozen in an Army experiment and wake up 500 years later. When they wake up they discover that everyone in the world has become much, much stupider. So stupid, in fact, that they are now the smartest people on Earth. Society is in a huge mess (even bigger mess than now) and among other things, Costcos have 'evolved' into the size of cities. For example:​

I really liked this scene - "Welcome to Costco, I love you. Welcome to Costco, I love you..." - I thought it was almost... deep. The extent to which words and ritual - even beautiful or intimate ones - can be emptied of meaning and exploited for economic gain is something that I think we can all relate to. Equally funny/sad was a scene in which Luke Wilson tries to convince a group of U.S. government officials that in order to cure the nationwide drought, they need to stop watering crops with Gatorade. He doesn't have much success (they are idiots). During that scene Bunny looked at me and said "That's not the future; that's how people discuss things over at YouTube right now!" Couldn’t really argue with that.

~p.

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Posted by Bunny: I like Maya Rudolph too but just to be clear, that movie sucked!

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Posted by Kim: No! It was funny!! :D

Bunny MailBag: an e-mail from Matthew Bird

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Bunny here. I haven't been doing Bunny Mailbag recently because we've been very busy w/ research, writing, and editing. We have some big deadlines coming up in March so we are trying not to get distracted with anything, even fun stuff like e-mail. But sometimes we receive an e-mail that’s so over-the-top assaholic that I just can't not post it! Today's e-mail was sent to us by some bird named Matthew.

"I am inquiring about your educational backgrounds. You have an intelligently crafted project underway, but you are very one-sided with your content. I wonder, have you read broadly the topics you discuss? All the readings I have done show that many of your concepts about Globalization and economics are plain wrong. Also, logically, your arguments are lacking sorely in some spots. Do you find it responsible to influence people with your simple-minded jargon? I wonder, have you researched beyond the high-school level about global economics or political science or even history? I am not attempting to be completely inflammatory, although it may sound that way. I have gone through dramatic intellectual epiphanies, I wonder if you are open to the same phenomena. - Matthew Bird"

Pinky saves breadcrumbs for these guys and I always tell her “Don’t bother.”

New Homepage Picture

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Posted by Bunny.

The cross-stitch Pinky I made last year is now featured on our homepage. I also made it into a t-shirt design. Not that anybody is going to want it - everybody loves TV and nobody cares about cross-stitching - but that's okay.

Over the past few weeks Pinky and I have been spending most of our time doing research for our next series of episodes. It's about settler colonialism. Pinky's been studying this stuff for a few years but it's different when you have to get everything together for an episode (or episodes). It's going to be very tricky to explain this stuff. The problem isn't so much that the material is too complicated; I just think it's always challenging to explain stuff to people that they don’t want to understand.

~B.

Winter Hump Day

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Posted by Pinky.

The precise moment of the 2007 winter solstice will be late tonight, at 10:08 p.m. (California Desert time). If you live in Hawaii it'll be at 8:08 p.m. And if you're on the East Coast (U.S.) it'll be 1:08 a.m. tomorrow morning (Saturday, December 22). From then on we'll be zooming towards Spring! Till then, keep warm! ~p.

Lakota Sioux Secede from the U.S.

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Posted by Pinky.

Wow. Here is the story as it was forwarded to us by our friend (thanks Bok-dong!):

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

Washington (AFP) — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said. "This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said."

It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence — an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row," Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples — despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws."

We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US "annexation" of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people," said Means.

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies — less than 44 years — in the world.Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website."

Our people want to live, not just survive or crawl and be mascots," said Young."

We are not trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue the struggle for our children and grandchildren," she said, predicting that the battle would not be won in her lifetime.

We'll definitely be watching these developments closely! Take care, pinky

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Posted by Bunny: The website is at http://www.lakotafreedom.com/ Be sure to read the Declaration of Continuing Independence while you're there.

Pinky: 2007 Cat of the Year

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Posted by Bunny.

We received an e-mail today saying that Pinky has been named the '2007 Cat of the Year' by the Western Association of Deserts. I have no idea what kind of organization this is, but congratulations to Pinky anyway - I know for a fact there’s lots of cats in deserts so it's probably pretty hard to win something like this. ~B.

Small Love

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Posted by Pinky.

Here's an excerpt from a short article on Norman Solomon by Steve Duin:

"The culture has diluted people's resolve, their outrage. The mass-market culture has left us numb. And lack of feeling translates into lack of action. [This is] the freezing of love into small spaces." There is no end to our love for our children or claustrophobic circle of friends. "We say, 'Don't mess with my loved ones, but screw the people across the street or around the world.' Unfortunately, we define our loved ones rather narrowly." - Norman Solomon

~p.

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Posted by Bunny: This relates to some of the points I was trying to make near the end of our Matrix conversation.

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Posted by Pinky: Yeah, I thought of you when I saw this. Thanks for mentioning.