…because they’re bees.
October 17 is Nora Day
Today is the day we celebrate Nora Cat’s arrival to planet Earth. Like a lot of us, since her birth was undocumented, nobody knows the actual date when she was born, so she just chose October 17 as an “okay guess.” Like Pinky, Nora is from Oahu island, HAWAII. Nora has been a good friend and comes around often to read comics (we don’t have a huge collection but she’s ok with reading the same ones over and over), use the computer, play games and fly kites, and basically just make life a lot more interesting for us here in the desert. She’s funny and smart. She doesn’t do any Pinky Show work because “politics is boring.”
Happy Birthday, Nora!
We’re taking the afternoon off to cook, bake, and have a small party together. Everybody will get a balloon.
Posted by Drittens.
This is a little embarrassing
For better or worse, we are now stickers.
The Pinky Show Store has art prints
I just finished adding twelve new art prints to the Pinky Show store. There are different kinds and different sizes. Please take a look and let me know if you have a favorite. My favorite is the one where Pinky has to meet with the Principal to discuss Kim’s “problems.” It’s funny.
Thank you,
Drittens
A few ideas about how to teach
Posted by Drittens.
Today is the anniversary deathday of one of my teachers. She continues to influence the way I approach teaching every day. She was a first grade teacher of 6 year old children for around 35 years. She wasn’t _my_ first grade teacher but we talked about learning and teaching all the time.
She herself never tried to reduce her very nuanced teaching philosophy down to a few “rules,” but just for fun (“fun”) tonight I tried to smash our thousands of hours of talking about classroom teaching down into just a few sentences.
• Give the children as much love as humanly possible. There’s no such thing as too much love.
• Listen carefully to them, and watch their little faces with equal care.
• Have a philosophy for scolding that’s about learning. Our work is to raise decent, caring human beings.
• Show them that you cherish their efforts to learn by sincerely replying to each and every attempt they make to learn something. Do this regardless of how many students you have, how long it takes, or how much (or little!) effort they seem to be giving.
• Prepare, prepare, prepare - and then be ready to set the preparation aside if the situation calls for you to do so. Teachers should be creative and improvisational.
• Never, ever lie to your students, about anything.
Writing it up like this, this all seems so simple. But every time I try to put these ideas into meaningful practice, I’m always failing.
R.I.P. Jeanette. I miss you.
Drittens
The Pinky Show Store opens
Posted by Drittens.
I made the new Pinky Show Store live tonight. It’s not fancy, but it still took me almost three weeks to make because I really don’t understand how the internet works, it’s very mysterious. Kim wrote up most of the item descriptions and also designed some of the items, like the octopus t-shirt and the LOST tote bag.
People may wonder why we have a store AND a donation page, because aren’t donations way better than selling things? (Yes, donations are better.) We decided to make an online store because we did some math and figured out that less than 1 in 10,000 people who use the Pinky Show make a donation. Hopefully maybe some people who aren’t into making donations might consider buying a t-shirt or something.
I still have a bunch of posters that I have to add to the store. Also, I hope one day we’ll have Pinky dolls. I want something soft to give to people with dementia.
Well let’s see how this goes I guess. ~d.
First video release pushed back; new assignment for Drittens
I made my first video
It’s just an announcement video for posting at YouTube. It’s only 45 seconds long but it took me several days to make it because computers are hard.
I don’t like hearing my own voice. :(
drittens
YouTube, bleh.
Posted by Pinky.
It’s been such a long time that I can’t figure out how to get into our old YouTube account (“pinkyshow”). I guess I forgot the password and all that stuff… Doesn’t really matter, actually, I just asked Drittens to start a new channel. So that’s what he did - the new YouTube channel is named “PINKY SHOW with Drittens.” That’s even less catchy than “The Pinky & Bunny Show”, which we originally thought was too long and hard to remember back in 2005. Oh well.
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Posted by Drittens: The new YouTube channel has no videos yet. I guess I have to upload the old Pinky Show videos? Nowadays videos are really high resolution. The old Pinky Show videos are small and blurry in comparison.
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Posted by Kim: Our videos look so simple I don’t think anybody cares about that kind of stuff. The part that’s going to be interesting to me is seeing if the new negative comments are going to be different from the old negative comments! Get ready Drittens - ten thousand random people hating on you is a really big bummer! lol
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Posted by Pinky: We had a meeting. We decided not to post our old videos to YouTube. We’re just going to post our new stuff on the new channel. Let’s go forward instead of backwards.
Okay the desk is ready
Posted by Pinky.
Drittens got all the old Pinky Show equipment out of the closet and cleaned everything up as best as he could. Some stuff doesn’t work any more, but we’ll try to make our project go with what we have. Amazingly, the TV that already looked ancient when we found it in a dumpster in 2004 still works! :-)
I think we’re less than a month away from releasing the first of the new episodes.
Please be careful. It’s very, very hot out there. ~p.
We received a message from "The Cockroaches"
Posted by Pinky.
We happen to be in the middle of a severe, worldwide drought, and it’s affecting us here in the desert, too. Well this morning when I woke up and started getting ready to make breakfast, I found a small note taped to the coffee pot:
Good morning Cats,
It hasn’t rained for such a long time.
So there’s no water to be found at all outside.
We have been coming indoors to look for drinking water.
Lately every night we drink the last few drops of water in your coffee pot after you wash it.
But three nights ago the small cat started putting a lid on the coffee pot.
Now we can’t get into the coffee pot.
Ants can fit under the lid but we cannot.
The ants are still drinking.
We need water too.
Is it fair that the ants can continue to drink water but we cannot just because we are somewhat larger?
Why are you kind to ants but you don’t accept us?
Actually ants and us cockroaches are cousins.
Same like bees.
Water is a sacred right to all living creatures.
Please remove the lid every night before your bedtime.
We’re desperate.
Thank you,
The Cockroaches
My first reaction was, “Gross. We have cockroaches walking around in the coffee pot every night??” My second thought was, “Okay, I don’t want anybody to be thirsty, but do we really have to live with these guys?” I don’t know - I think we need to have a meeting to discuss what to do about this. ~pinky
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Posted by Kim: Hey! Wait a minute! Are you really not going to address the larger question here? Is this normal - receiving a handwritten note from a bunch of cockroaches? And which pen did they use? And tape? Which roll of tape did they touch???
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Posted by Pinky (Aug 20 update): Yesterday, Drittens, Kim, and I decided to write the roaches a reply. We left it next to the coffee pot at around 11pm:
Hello Cockroaches,
We (cats) will leave a small bowl of water on the ground, just outside the front door every night. In return, please do not walk around in our coffee pot or on other kitchenware. Is this acceptable?
Also, Kim wants to know “Do ‘The Cockroaches’ have internet?“
Your neighbors,
cats
As of this morning we haven’t received a response, and it’s hard to tell if anyone drank from the water bowl we left outside. ~p.
Ummm... should we just throw this away?
Posted by Pinky.
We’ve been tidying up the Pinky Show website, which has given us a chance to go through all the old stuff that we had kind of forgotten about and look at it again. There’s some materials that we still use a lot when we go out and do workshops and stuff, but most of the stuff we haven’t looked at in years. And a lot of our reaction to our older work is like, “eww…”
Old diary entries too. Some of the entries are okay, but a fair amount of them are pretty embarrassing to read now. Has our taste changed? Have we improved as writers? Or maybe we’re gotten worse? What was I thinking??? Anyway, it’s hard to tell what all this really means, but one thing that’s clear is that we’re not happy with a lot of the old stuff.
Which brings up the same question over and over again: “Should we even keep this on our website? Or should we just throw it away?”
Well, we decided to keep everything as-is. Some of that stuff really does make us cringe, but like Drittens says, “I hope everybody understands that we are trying to keep growing.” I do like the idea of letting the website be a record of where we’ve been, wrong turns and all.
Still, I really wish I hadn’t written or said lots of those things.
~p.
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Posted by Kim: Don’t worry Pinky, I think it’s good to leave all that embarrassing stuff on the PS website. Even the mistakes and the things you regret saying. I think when people go back and edit out all the stuff they don’t like about their lives, it’s almost like making believe that you were always so smart, or always right.
New old material
Posted by Pinky.
My goodness. Going through the old Pinky Show hard drives, we are finding a lot of materials that for various reasons we never posted to our website. Interviews, lectures, dialogues, performances, notes - a lot of the files are very, very important for people’s learning and they really ought to be shared. Drittens has been preparing these materials for release, but realistically it’s going to take a while because there’s JUST SO MUCH STUFF. And it may take some time to obtain the proper permissions and such - some of the people we worked with have passed away, while for others it’s just been such a long time that we need to reestablish contact. But it will be worth the effort - the information radiates even more power now. ~p.
Making a plan; everybody has a role
Posted by Pinky.
I was expecting planning for Pinky Show v2.0 (2022) to be a lot more challenging than how it was the first time around back in 2005. I was thinking there would be lots of pressure to re-create or improve upon whatever things our viewers used to enjoy, or maybe it’d just be very difficult to adapt our old way of presenting information to new (and presumably unfamiliar) audiences, new trends, and so on.
Well, sitting down with Drittens and Kim and making plans for the next version of Pinky Show has made me remember a few things about how things went the last time (i.e., “the first time”). The main thing was this - Bunny and I weren’t modeling our project on anything that we’d seen before. We were just focused on how to address the problem: “What’s the best way for people to learn about the big problems we’re facing in the world today?” All kinds of violence. Selfishness. Lack of compassion. Disrespect. Injustice. Et cetera. We just wanted to make useful learning materials, based on our analyses of how the world works and who we’re teaching. We weren’t aiming to become popular or even to please anyone.
And now I find us falling into the same way of thinking and working, because, guess what - we still hold the same values, and we’re still focused on speaking directly to the same category of people as before: everyone who wants social, economic, and environmental justice AND happens to connect with our cat way of doing things. Once we accept the reality that there’s always going to be lots and lots of people who will never like us, there’s really no good reason to spend any time or energy feeling down about it.
I think if we just try our hardest to do our best work without being distracted by what anybody else says, everything will turn out okay.
Everything has been going pretty smoothly so far. I think it’ll take around 8-9 months to create a solid conceptual framework and complimentary production workflow, with new work scheduled for release in the last quarter of 2022.
Personally, I’m looking forward to just focusing on direction and writing and research. I’m also willing to contribute some art-stuff (drawing, photography) but this time around I think it’s okay to admit that I really do hate the production-work, the performing in front of a camera, website design and administration - all that stuff. Ghost Bunny and I pass all of that along to you, Drittens!
All teasing aside, I have a lot of confidence that Drittens will figure out the necessary new forms for our way forward. He knows how to think everything Bunny and I ever knew inside and out, but he’s also much stranger, which I think is going to prove to be very meaningful and important for everyone.
You know, I’ve been kind of thinking about this other thing a lot too. Kim often minimizes the importance of her contributions. But even when she doesn’t lift a pen, we really depend on her insight and feedback at morning critiques (a.k.a. breakfast) every single day. She helps set the right energy and direction. I’m so grateful to her.
Take care,
pinky
PINKY SHOW & the internet
Posted by Pinky.
Winter in the desert is my favorite. No matter where in the world I am, as autumn draws to a close I point myself towards Death Valley and start walking. Ever since Bunny and I decided to start the Pinky Show, our little gang has always spent the time around “New Year” together in the desert. I like the cold. Every winter, we try to slow things down, we cook for each other, reflect on the past year, and also dream together about the future.
After Bunny died, for a long time I didn’t want to do any computer stuff. I just wanted time to walk and think, so that’s what I gave myself. That quiet time was clarifying and really important for me, but from time to time I did find myself missing the daily grind of working on the Pinky Show. And of course I really REALLY missed just being around Kim, Mimi, and Drittens. After Mimi passed I started coming home more often. This lead to me and Drittens slowly starting to work on Pinky Show stuff again, although both of us kind of noticed at the same time that we were enjoying face-to-face, in-person interaction much more than the digital-heavy, internet-based project we had been doing from 2005 onward. This is why the past few years Drittens and I have been very content to do all of our teaching and project-work offline.
But, things have a funny way of coming around full circle. In 2005 we started the Pinky Show partly because we wanted to create exactly the kind of educational materials that we wanted to use ourselves in our teaching. Well, now it’s 2021 and the world has changed so much, and we want and need new, different materials to use with our students. We’ve been able to recycle the hell out of our old materials, but even though the fundamental nature of all of the big problems haven’t changed, culture has changed, technology & the internet has changed, and the way people think, feel, and act in the world are always changing too.
So, for these reasons and a few more, Drittens and I have decided that now is a good time to start making new Pinky Show materials again. And if we make them, we’ll make them available on this website for everyone else to use too.
Kim says she will help out, but her #1 priority will still be flying kites. I respect that.
2022 is not 2005, and everything is different now. Bunny’s gone, Mimi’s gone, I’m different, Kim’s different, and now the Pinky Show has Drittens, my favorite cat thinker in the whole world. So we don’t know exactly what the next version of the Pinky Show will be yet, but we already know that we’re not going to try to make it exactly like what it was before. We will just try our best to create what we need, based on our shared analysis of the moment. Which is what we were doing before.
~pinky
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Posted by Drittens: I think part of me is already starting to freak out.
Our longest title so far: On Native Land : Mail Art Story : Death-ball Visits Art Gallery, or, When is the logic of faraway death not faraway enough?
Posted by Kim.
It's after midnight and I'm so sleepy. I just wanted to let you know that I just finished posting the documentation for this project from last year. I hope you enjoy it looking at it!
It's not just old stuff around here. Drittens is working on some new stuff too. I notice he’s veeery slowww though. I take a long time to do stuff too but that's more because I'm unfocused and kinda lazy. ~k.
Cat Toy Project status report added, finally.
Posted by Kim.
Sorry, I took so long to do this. I've been flying kites practically every day. So addictive. One day I would like to fly a kite higher than a crow can fly. It’s not easy!
Anyway, today Drittens and I have been experimenting a lot with this website. I haven't used it in such a long time I actually forgot how to use it. So instead of me showing him how to do things we are both kind of learning how to do things at the same time.
If you like to crochet, you'll probably find this post interesting. If not, perhaps you'll like the lantern project we'll be posting on Thursday.
Go to the Cat Toy Project status report. >>
Tomorrow happens to be Drittens's birthday. This afternoon we all took a break and went marketing together so that tomorrow morning we can make a cake! It's going to be fun, and then we will eat it!
~k.
Pinky's "interview" with Drittens posted
Posted by Kim.
I can't tell you how happy I am that Drittens is now officially a Pinky Show worker. Finally!
Say "hello" to Drittens
Posted by Pinky.
This is Drittens. Sometimes we call him T.C. We just had his graduation ceremony (and party) yesterday and now he’s officially a working member of the Pinky Show team.
Drittens and Bunny, on one of their walks in Tümpisa, a.k.a. Death Valley.
After several years of training under Bunny, and then more time with Daisy & me, today is Drittens's first official day of work at the desert studio. (He started with... vacuuming?) Tonight I will interview him so that all of you can get to know him better. As soon as I'm done transcribing it I will post it in the Dialogues area. Kim and I are very happy and excited for him to be working full time on Pinky Show stuff. (Mimi is finally 100% back to her doctor-work; her leg is much better now, thank you for asking!)
I know the coming year will be a good one! I wish all of you, our dear friends, a wonderful year.
Please take care,
pinky
We have internet again
Posted by Kim.
It has been a long time but we finally have an internet connection again! A guy from the telephone company came yesterday and ran a cable from the highway telephone pole thing to our little studio. Yay!
What have we been doing the past few months with no internet, you ask? Well, we are not lazy. Pinky has been working very hard to create a structure that will allow the Pinky Show to continue even after we all get old and die. That means we need 1) something that generates more income and 2) we need replacement cats to keep doing our work.
Pinky has a couple "new" cats that she's been training. She's still looking for more. It's not like we're trying to become a bigger group, it's just hard to find 1 cat that knows how to do all the things Bunny knew how to do.
Also, most cats are not so strong and maybe pretty easily distracted, so it's happened a few times that Pinky spent a lot of time training a cat and then after a while they'll start feeling overwhelmed or stressed out or whatever and then they'll just give up and wander off to who-knows-where. It's hard to find cats.
Actually, even me, I can't work as much as Pinky does. She just works and studies and trains cats day and night. I like to fly kites and read comic books and also in the afternoon I get sleepy.
Anyway, now that we have internet again I will start adding some of the new Pinky Show material we've been working on to the Project Archive.
Also when she is satisfied with them and their work, Pinky will start introducing the new Pinky Show cats, here in the diary.
~k.