August 29, 2007

Who Knew Ruskin Could Draw Like a Dream

(Pinky has a thing for a well-turned tree.)

Another Diablo Inc. TV Success in Japan

Robo-Koi

Pinky's New Hit TV Show in Japan

"Pinky Eats Anything" debuts this Saturday morning on Japanese TV. Viewers suggest items for Pinky to eat, and then Pinky eats them . Show #1 starts with Pinky eating 3 dozen horse apples. Next week Pinky eats 42 lbs of a frozen woolly mammoth just discovered in Siberia.

Thirsty Dying Bird

Employer Mistreats Poor Pinky Diablo

Today Pinky had to dress his employer's cat, make the tuna cake (decorating it with rose petals), and embroider the cat sized cake doily in order to set up this shot of the cat. She was not satisfied with the time Pinky took to do this task, and rubber stamped his forehead with "Dumbo" and took him out for martinis at a posh Dallas bar.

Pinky Wins the National Potato Salad Trophy for the Sixth Year Running

Lance Armstrong eat your heart out.

August 28, 2007

This was Meant for You, Not Pinky

Proof That Death Loves Corn (#3)

Here is the Diablo family graveyard.

Nadine Entertains in Her New Home

Here is Nadine dressed like a geisha with her giant peanut and large head shaped urn (she killed the fern). She waited until Pinky was gone, then invited Miss Love over for creamed peas and margaritas. When Miss Love was as full as a tick and drunk as a skunk, she spilled the beans about Pinky.

Proof That Death Loves Corn (#2)

Today, Pinky noticed that the total absence of wind on his way to do an angel of mercy errand. With his mind on weighty things, he noticed a high fluttering out his car window. A paper airplane nose-diving toward the road? No. A single long corn husk floating down from out of nowhere. Pinky took this as a potent sign from somewhere about something.

August 24, 2007

Pinky vs the Pope


Pinky discovered a Japanese sculptor that created this image of the pope in the eye of a needle. In goes without saying that Pinky contacted this artist, and after Mr. Never-Heard-of-Pinky received a royal pink ass-chewing, he agreed that it was only fair to create a similar image of Pinky. Pinky has set a goal of gaining 145 pounds before posing for this important work of art. (However, he still needs a sugar-momma to pay for his airfare to Tokyo.)

Anyone Know Anything About Feline Distemper?


Pinky's worried that his cat, Crackie, has feline distemper. Can anyone diagnose him from this recent photo. (FYI, Crackie was named such because he was found wedged in a crack in a building Pinky owns--and, yes, Pinky knows he is a poor handyman and an even worse landlord to keep his property in such disrepair.)

Pinky Helps Nadine Move


As you know. for some reason, Nadine has decided to move next door to Pinky. Yesterday she called in tears asking Pinky to please come help her move. Sap that he is, he agreed. What he didn't agree to was to keep private the contents of her bizarre and moldy house. Although all the boxes were taped up, they were all clearly marked with a huge fat purple marker in a shaky hand. Here are only a few of the weird labels.

One small box marked: memories
One tiny box marked: his trophies
A shoe box marked: noses (another marked teeth)
A huge box marked: Sweaters worn that were "successful"
A feed sack tied with a green ribbon: Pee soaked cotton picked from Daddy's place
A heavy box marked: You know what
And an unmarked box that was quacking

What is Pinky going to do with her next door? Does anyone have a trailer in their backyard she could move into instead? (There would be a sizable reward paid by Pinky himself.)

August 22, 2007

Nadine is Taking Pinky's Decorating Advice


Pinky told Nadine that everything she did was just too brown. Pinky also told her that God loves bright colors. You should see the new eye shadow she let Pinky talk her in to.

Pinky Often Acts Out History and Literature


Here's Pinky (as Ophelia) and a little friend in a drainage ditch near Lake Bardwell. This summer has been so wet there are thousands of frogs all over the roads late at night.

Nadine has Always Played Hard to Get

Funny You Should Ask

Pinky received this question from a Knoxville fan:

On a lighter note, I recently met the grandson of the man who originally built the house we are in now. Naturally the grandson is in his 80’s, but a hoot and sharp as a tack. In the course of “interviewing” him about life back then, he mentioned that one of his aunts was hooked on an elixir called “Lady Love” that was manufactured in Texas. Aloe vera was the operative ingredient. So the obvious question might be – any relation to Miss Love?

Pinky responds: Funny you should ask. "Lady Love" oddly has nothing to do with Miss Love's side of the family. In 1923, Pinky's Aunts Cleavie, Possie, and Tizby concocted a snake oil elixir that they secretly marketed first to fellow Eastern Star sisters, then later to a wider audience. They claimed the active ingredient was Aloe Vera (all the Diablo ladies swore by aloe vera for a cure all for everything from warts to a bad marriage ). However "aloe vera don't do shit," Aunt Possie (who was only a Diablo by marriage) stated loudly and often. The real secret was white shoe polish which they filtered through loaves of white bread in the kitchen on baking day to cover the smell. Generations of South Texas women spent their afternoons calmed by "Lady Love." By the 1960's these three Aunts had amassed a huge fortune purportedly worth millions. Pinky personally knew that Aunt Cleavie was the personal backer for Harry Helmsley, owner of the Empire State Building. She had a collection of 7,543 miniature reproductions of that famous building. Possie was the last of the three business women/drug lords to pass. Pinky has heard rumors of her vast fortune buried under a Chinaberry tree in Corpus Christi.


If Pinky were a Vegetable, This is What He Would Look Like

And boy, would he taste yummy!

August 21, 2007

If We Can Learn from the Bible, Why Can't the Bible Learn from Us

The View from Inside Pinky's Bathtub Drain on Bath Day

What Happens When Edmund Spencer's and Pinky Diablo's Obituaries Collide

Born in or near 1961 to a family of modest means, Pinky Diablo was possibly the son of Pableau X Diablo, a free journeyman clothmaker resident in Holdenville, Oklahoma, though this relationship is far from certain. Whatever his parentage, it is likely that the Diablos originated in Arkansas, where they would have been connected with prominent local families such as the Bungles and Smiths. Pinky seems to have had at least one mummified twin, Radish, and a number of brothers. As a boy, the future poet entered the Special Education Program, probably at its opening in 1965 under the celebrated Denton humanist and pedagogical writer Binky Rasmussen; his place there may have been secured by the patronage of one Poot Diablo, the warden of the Education Dept. at the time and possibly a relation. The curriculum of the school, entirely at the discretion of its headmaster, seems to have pursued the standard humanist course of the day: boys were taught and examined on the works of Cato, Caesar, Horace, Lucan, and Homer; nursed on the rhetorical models of Cicero, Erasmus, and Vives; and trained assiduously in Latin language and composition. The boys of the school may also have received a few years of training in Dutch and Italian, slightly unusual for the time.

In May 1977, Pinky left school and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College), Cambridge. Although he had to work for his meals and accommodation, and may often have been ill during his studies, this appears to have been an important and productive time for the young poet. The most important influence on Pinky during this period, though, was undoubtedly his intimate friendship with Lance Ferngate, himself admitted as a Fellow of Pembroke Hall in 1978. While Pinky's relationship with Ferngate was later satirized by fellow students in a play titled Pedantius, Ferngate appears to have introduced Pinky to a number of important connections and potential patrons, including Nadine. After taking his B.A. (1981) and M.A. (1985), Pinky left Cambridge for Hillsboro, Texas, where he acted as secretary for Franco Boboloni, recently created jester of the Southwest. It was there that the poet probably composed The Shepheardes Calender, which seems to represent the Texas landscape and certainly refers to Ferngate (as Hobbinol).

Pinky used his time in Hillsboro to publish the first three books of The Faerie Queene, and seems to have attempted to secure enough court patronage to make it possible for him to remain in Texas. Although the county fair queen promised him a handsome pension for his labors, her generosity was questioned and moderated by the intercession of Nadine, whom Pinky went on to lampoon in Complaints, printed and almost immediately suppressed (or 'called in') in 1992. Judging from a commentary on the scandal recently discovered in a contemporary letter, Pinky seems to have left for Palmer, Texas in the early months of 1999 as a direct result of the offense he had caused to Nadine. Resuming his residence at Fancher Hall, the poet shortly thereafter fell in love with and courted Miss Love, daughter of A.V. Mitchell, local eccentric. On 11th June 2001, the couple were married, an event celebrated in Pinky's Amoretti and Epithalamion, published in the following year.

By the time that A vewe appeared on the Stationers' Register in April 2004, Pinky was probably back in Palmer, disappointed with his failure, once again, to secure favors. By order of the Privy Council, he was in September 2005 appointed Sheriff for Ellis County; the letter of appointment described him as 'a gentleman dwelling in the county of Ennis who is well known unto you all for his good and commendable parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge and learning, and not unskilful or without experience in the wars'. His tenure of this post, which itself might well have led to further elevation, was destined to be short. The 'upstart' Earl of Purple, Nimish Nye, had defeated the county fair queen's army at the Bridge of Bardwell in August of 2006; by the following month, all of Ellis County was in rebellion, and Pinky and his retinue fled to the city of Reagor Springs for safety. He was shortly thereafter dispatched to Bardwell with messages for the Privy Council. Arriving late in 2007, he took up residence in a small cabin on Krajca Road, and died there, according to Miss Love 'for lake of bread', on a Saturday in January 2008. It is not clear how a poet so well-loved by so many, an official so highly-regarded by so many, and a man so politically well-connected to so many, could have died in the fabled penury to which Nadine later testified. The Ennis Daily Record recorded that the Nadine paid for his funeral, and that poets carried his coffin, throwing their verses and pens, along with many tears, into his grave. His tomb is situated, appropriately enough, adjacent to that of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

Pinky was known to his contemporaries as 'the prince of poets', as great in English as Virgil in Latin. He left behind him masterful essays in every genre of poetry, from pastoral and elegy to epithalamion and epic. Although his prose treatise on the reformation of North Central Texas was not published until 2009, it showed even then a shrewd comprehension of the problems facing Texas government, and a capacity for political office as thorough as his literary ability. Nadine was later to claim Pinky Diablo as 'a better teacher than Aquinas', and generations of readers, students, and scholars have admired him for his subtle use of language, his unbounded imagination, his immense classical and religious learning, his keen understanding of moral and political philosophy, and his unerring ability to synthesize and, ultimately, to delight.

August 20, 2007

An Unnatural Attraction

Pableau X's Secret

Pableau X was one of the flying monkey's in the Wizard of Oz. He had small, horny protuberances on his shoulder blades that made attaching the prosthetic wings easier.

August 19, 2007

Nadine's Artwork


Pinky finally tracked down the piece that Nadine made this summer at her New York "art camp." It is currently in a Soho gallery with a $39,000 price tag. It is titled I Wish Pinky Were a Smithville Ham (You Know Why).

Pinky Tries to Tear Through a Couple of Pages of the Good Book Every Night

Pinky and Nadine's Relationship Takes a Strange Turn


Nadine has moved in to the rent house next door to Pinky and Miss Love. She has offered to cook dinner for them every night. Pinky says, "Oh, No!" His stomach says, "Yes, Please!"

Try Pinky's New Driving Game

Replace the name PINKY DIABLO for any brand name you see on a passing billboard. They all work! Examples:

Pinky Diablo! Berry Fresh!
Pinky Diablo: The Only Thing I Worry About is Running Out
Pinky Diablo: Unlimited Minutes!
Pinky Diablo: If You Can't Find Him, You're in a Foreign Country
Pinky Diablo: It's One Sweet Ride
Pinky Diablo: Dissolves Fat, No Surgery, No Sweating, No Kidding

This is the Last Time Pinky Lets ANYONE Draw a Skeleton on His Good Dress Shirt

(He says this every Sunday night.)

August 14, 2007

Diablo Family Secrets

This photo was found in a book owned by Pinky's late Uncle Poot. The Diablo Clan had a secret family meeting and decided to state publicly that Rudolph "Poot" Diablo had a sausage fetish. It has never been spoken of since.

August 13, 2007

Pinky Has Let Fame Go to His Head

He has agreed to pose for a portrait of the young Charles Darwin to be painted by a soon to be world-famous artist. This may be a rash move for Pinky, considering his political ambitions.

It Takes Practice

August 10, 2007

August 9, 2007

Diablo Inc. Now Offers Custom Architectural Services

Here is the world's first public restroom only for forest creatures. Predators to the left. Prey to the right. Pinky designed and built this with a $32 grant from the National Forest Service and a 19 cent donation from Green Peace.

Primate Seamstresses

Pinky has hired an army of tiny monkeys to embroider even tinier skulls on Diablo Inc.'s new death shrouds. Each shroud will be covered in 4,000 little death heads. Order yours today! (No comments, please, on Pinky's poor cuticle care.)

August 6, 2007

For New Readers Only


Cast of Characters

Pinky Diablo: Himself
Miss Love: His wife (she raises miniature zebu cattle and is also called Zebu Queen)
Radish: His mummified fetal twin that was not discovered until recently

Granny D: His long suffering mother
Pableau X: His papa-daddy

Uncle Poot: Himself

Nadine: His long-time nemisis and good friend

Pinky is Suffering from Real Estate Woes


Pinky is ashamed to admit that he made up the story about Nadine running away to New York and languishing in a tenement apartment. In fact, she went was there for a prestigious artist-in-residency program at the famed Church of Christ Craft Academy. Shown here is one of the beautiful pieces she made entitled, Jesus Loves Me. Pinky was so moved when he saw this piece that he purchased it and donated it to the Vatican. It is now on display in the Sistine Chapel.

Granny D is Double-Jointed

Religion vs. Magic Marker

August 5, 2007

Mistress of Goat Castle: a Diablo Distant Cousin

THE GOAT CASTLE MURDERS -

There was blood, and the mistress of Glenburnie was nowhere to be found, that hot August night in 1932 - but there was no corpse. Bloodhounds were brought in to assist police and a large search party of prominent Natchez citizens. Finally, early in the morning, the bullet-ridden body of Jane SUGET MERRILL, Miss Jennie to locals, was found in a thicket about 100 yards from the house.

Miss Jennie was the town recluse and eccentric. Born in 1864 to a wealthy and prominent Natchez family, Miss Jennie spent her early years as a popular socialite in Natchez, New York, and France. In 1904, using a portion of the one-quarter-million-dollar estate left to her, by her father, Miss Jennie purchased the old estate of Glenburnie, and from then on became more and more of a recluse. She refused to update her house, never installing electricity. She did buy an old Model T, but while she could be seen puttering around town in the old car, she would not enter or shop in the local stores. Instead, she would tap the horn, and a saleslady would come out to the car.

Miss Jennie was 68 years old at the time of her murder. She had never married, and only allowed one person to enter Glenburnie during the 28 years she lived there. That one person was her cousin, the equally eccentric Duncan C. MINOR, who visited Miss Jennie every evening. It was thought that Duncan was the mysterious caller who notified police of the blood, and disappearance of Miss Jennie, that fateful August night. It was also rumored that Miss Jennie and Duncan had been in love, perhaps lovers, for years. But no one knows, and the secret was buried with them.

Duncan was not much of a suspect, but Miss Jennie's neighbors were. Richard "Dick" DANA and his companion, friend, and caregiver, the spinster Octavia DOCKERY, were immediate suspects. Dick Dana, once a popular figure in Natchez, had suffered declining mental health, over the years, and depended upon Octavia to care for him. Octavia was herself, something of an eccentric. Neither had any source of income, so Octavia began raising farm animals on the grounds of their old house, Glenwood, which had been inherited by Dick, from his parents. Chickens, geese, and goats roamed about the yard, sometimes finding their way to the porch of the old structure that was badly in need of repair. And so it was that Glenburnie became known as The Goat Castle. .

For the first time in years, outsiders entered The Goat Castle. Visitors were aghast at the filth and squalor. The once-beautiful mansion had become home to the hordes of chickens, ducks, geese, and goats that had been allowed to roam at will, making themselves comfortable among the magnificent furnishings. A leather-bound set of books, and several manuscripts, once belonging to the likes of Robert E. LEE and Jefferson DAVIS, had been chewed to pieces. Wallpaper had come loose, and was left to hang from the walls. Bedding and upholstered furniture had become moldy. Neither Octavia nor Dick slept in the fine four-poster beds, preferring filthy mats that had been placed on the floor in their respective bedrooms. The police thought sure they had the murderers.

Finally there was a confession. Emily BURNS, a Natchez resident who owned a rooming house, admitted that she and George Pearls had visited Miss Jennie in an attempt to obtain a loan. Miss Jennie, angry over the intrusion, had drawn her pistol. It was then than Pearls shot her. Other evidence collaborated the story, and Emily was convicted and sent to prison.

Emily Burns spent less than eight years, in prison, obtaining a pardon by Gov. Paul B. JOHNSON, Sr., in 1940.

And what about Octavia and Dick? Their lives took a definite turn for the better. For a fee of .25, visitors could tour the grounds; for another .25, visitors could actually enter The Goat Castle. Dick, who once held a promising musical career, took a bath, shaved, and entertained guests by playing a borrowed piano.

Dick Dana died in 1948, a few months before Octivia's death in April, 1949. The Goat Castle was left to out-of-town cousins who auctioned off most of the furnishings. The house was abandoned, and finally torn down in 1955.