Dave Sim's blogandmail #176 (March 6th, 2007)

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Fourteen Impossible Things to Believe Before Breakfast That Make You a Good Feminist

1. A mother who works a full-time job and delegates to strangers the raising of her children eight hours a day, five days a week does just as good a job as a mother who hand-rears her children full time.

2. It makes great sense for the government to pay 10 to 15,000 dollars a year to fund a daycare space for a child so its mother - who pays perhaps 2,000 dollars in taxes - can be a contributing member of society.

3. A woman's doctor has more of a valid claim to participate in the decision to abort a fetus than does the father of that fetus.

4. So long as a woman makes a decision after consulting with her doctor, she is incapable of making an unethical choice.

5. A car with two steering wheels, two gas pedals and two brakes drives more efficiently than a car with one steering wheel, one gas pedal and one brake which is why marriage should always be an equal partnership.

6. It is absolutely necessary for women to be allowed to join or participate fully in any gathering place for men, just as it is absolutely necessary that there be women only environments from which men are excluded.

7. Because it involves taking jobs away from men and giving them to women, affirmative action makes for a fairer and more just society.

8. It is important to have lower physical standards for women firepersons and women policepersons so that, one day, half of all firepersons and policepersons will be women, thus more effectively protecting the safety of the public.

9. Affirmative action at colleges and universities needs to be maintained now that more women than men are being enrolled, in order to keep from giving men an unfair advantage academically.

10. Having ensured that there is no environment for men where women don't belong (see no.6) it is important to have zero tolerance of any expression or action which any woman might regard as sexist to ensure greater freedom for everyone.

11. Only in a society which maintains a level of 95% of alimony and child support being paid by men to women can men and women be considered as equals.

12. An airline stewardess who earned $20,000 a year at the time that she married a baseball player earning $6 million a year is entitled, in the event of a divorce, to $3 million for each year of the marriage and probably more.

13. A man's opinions on how to rear and/or raise a child are invalid because he is not the child's mother. However, his financial obligation is greater because no woman gets pregnant by herself.

14. Disagreeing with any of these statements makes you anti-woman and/or a misogynist.

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The day before I fell ill in December I had written a letter to the National Post. I've written a few of them as you'll see if you order the Collected Letters volumes as they come out, but none of them have ever been printed. My name has only appeared once in the National Post and that was in an article about Seth by Jeet Heer some years ago. Anyway, this letter was in response to an article "Understanding the Hajj":


Having checked my own copy of a translation of the Koran, I take issue with Faisal Kutty's quotation of Sura 3:195 as "I shall not lose sight of the labour of any of you who labours in My way, be it man or woman, each of you is the equal of the other." According to my Koran, the passage reads, "One of you is the issue of the other," an altogether different – and far less feministic – meaning. As a practicing Muslim, I sincerely believe that it is worth reaching a point of understanding and accommodation between the West and mainstream Islam, but I genuinely hope that state can be achieved without mutilating God's Word in the name of misguided political correctness.


I identified myself as a practicing Muslim because I was writing to a Western newspaper where the fact that I conform to four of the five pillars of Islam would qualify me as such. Had I been writing to an Islamic publication I wouldn't have done so in deference to their stricter guidelines: it's not just praying five times a day, it's HOW you pray. Same reason that I wouldn't attempt the fifth pillar, the Hajj to Mecca, at this point: my own method of prayer with my own prayer that I've written would qualify me as an infidel and for me to learn the Muslim method of prayer JUST for the Hajj would, in my view, be hypocritical.


Anyway, this was one time I was really pretty irritated that they didn't print my letter.


What else have I got here?


More stuff from CAD, Clark Dissmeyer. I had an envelope with his name on it from the last piece of his that I printed (remember? The guy who works in the bakery and there was the power failure across most of Nebraska) but, I thought, what if CAD isn't Clark Dissmeyer? That way I'll just irritate both of them! So, I'd give you his address here in case you wanted to write and see about getting on his mailing list of text and (mostly) blasphemous but funny cartoons (Have a HELL of a good laugh with the GOD-DAMN FUNNY PAGES: "Yes, it was a miracle! The Good Lord was watchin' over us when that tornado came through. He sure hated those people up the street, though – he squashed `em like bugs!"), but there are two different addresses. Clark's is an apartment and CAD's is a post office box, so I'm going to hold off until I get the post office box one again. Bad manners to give out an address to a cartoonist's secret civilian identity, I think. As he writes, "I've been in good health but bad mood, so once again I'm going after the Christians." Next time I'll get you his post office box address.


Here's a couple in the I Really Should Know Better category:


Hi Dave,


Thank you very much for mentioning My Romantic Eye in your blog last Fall, the thoughtful response was much appreciated!


This year with Blind Bat Press, I'm releasing a trade paperback of comic strips, where each strip contains a story or plot that revolves around comics, comics fans, life experiences involving striving for a career in comics. The strips will be both non-fiction and fictional plots with comics references. The book will be called The Comic Eye.


Basically, I'm shopping around for a cover artist, who can provide a drawing, penciled and inked for the front cover. Bernie Mireault will colour and logo the cover, all I want is the drawing itself in black and white.


I have $100 to pay for the drawing, and I want rights to use as the cover of his book for the duration of its print run. The drawing would be sent to me as a high quality photocopy or computer file on cd or via the internet. The theme is comics and all the related topics I mentioned above. The size is standard comic size, to be safe sending the drawing a little larger than print size. The deadline is May 15, 2007.


Do you think you and Gerhard might have time to come up with a striking image to serve as cover art for this project?


Drop me a line if you think you might be able to work on this art by the deadline.


This is one of the built-in dangers of being both a theoretically ha-ha retired cartoonist and a raving fan boy. I've wanted to work with Bernie Mireault on something ever since I read his great super-hero comic, BEM and I've always wanted to find a way to support Mark's Blind Bat Press (couldn't have been happier to find out he was still going!) and now here's a chance to do both. Sensible theoretically ha-ha retired Dave Sim goes, "You have your secret project to work on, you have to finish the back cover for Collected Letters vol.2, you have to write your next article for Sandeep's Versus magazine, you have two commissioned drawings to do, you have to completely revise your Last Will & Testament, you have to keep up with the Blog & Mail, you have your own publishing company to publish your work."


Oh, well. Flakey Dave Sim the Raving Fan Boy Without Perspective can rationalize it this way: the hundred dollars Canadian will allow me to buy back roughly .000035% of Gerhard's shares in Aardvark-Vanaheim. I'LL DO IT! (percentage is entirely fictitious, you can all put your Yahoo calculators away).


Just talked to Mark on the phone and (career diplomat that I am) asked how his eyesight is doing. Mark's legally blind, so that's where he gets the name of the company from. Good news I hadn't been aware of – his blindness is a birth defect, not a disease-source blindness so there's really no degeneration: he can see as well now as when I met him (mumble mumble) years ago. THAT explains why he's still able to do this. He even does some of his own cartooning – puts out a mini every once in a while. Anyway, I pitched him on the idea of doing an EC parody splash page as the cover since I've been itching to use the EC lettering font that Mike Lindsay sent me. So this way I get to use the font and do my best Graham Ingels impression with a horror host ("So you think you want to have a career in comic books, you cock-eyed optimistic FANBOY…?) and everything and then leave all the other stuff for Bernie to do. I'd probably pay Mark $100 to let me do it (but don't tell him that). This will be Blind Bat's first foray into trade paperback land with a projected publishing date of later this summer. Check out some of Mark's work at www.markinnes.com or email him at m.innes@sympatico.ca for more information on Blind Bat Press.

Tomorrow: Oh, hey, here's the letter from Robin Snyder I thought I had lost. Dated 19 January!

THERE'S MORE FOR YOU

IN TODAY'S BLOG &

MAAAILLLL!

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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

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P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

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