Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Dave Sim's blogandmail #190 (March 20th, 2007)



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Fifteen 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.

NEW! 15. Legislature Seats must be allocated to women and women must be allowed to bypass the democratic winnowing process in order to guarantee female representation and, thereby, make democracy fairer.

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Flies in the Ointment!

Beware, Cerebus Readers!

Flies in the Ointment!


It seems that I'm still getting used to the structure here and came to an unhappy realization earlier this week that, even though I can produce three weeks' worth of Blog & Mails in a four- or five-day period, that still only buys me two weeks of lead time until it's time to produce the next batch of Blog & Mails (since it takes me four or five days to produce them). So instead of having a 5:20 days ratio of Blog & Mail-to-actual work ratio it's closer to a 5:10 ratio or half of my life spent doing the Blog & Mail. This came to the forefront when it took me three days to produce the latest commission, then an additional three days to produce the back cover of Collected Letters volume II. Then I found myself stymied, ready to do either another commission or to start work on whatever-it-is I've been discussing with Marvel or work on my secret project. On all three there were impediments that I'd just have to wait and see if the logjam broke?but it did seem clear that if I was ever to produce anything of value for the rest of my life I was going to have to scale back the Blog & Mail in some way (I mean, Sandeep snorted quite derisively when he showed up last time to download it onto a disk to e-mail to Jeff Tundis and saw that it was 71 pages long)?


The Recipient of the

2006 Howard E. Day

Memorial Prize:


Chemistry

By Steve Peters




Ordinarily I'd write a long, glowing report on Chemistry at this point, as well as some nice words about runners-up Jim Coon's Beaver Dusty Neal and Christopher Studabaker's Under the Midnight Sun Pat Lewis' Abominable and One Horse Town, Michelle Arcand's Being Different, Mike Dawson's Guitar Solo and Chad Lambert and Tom Williams' "Too Much Matheson" but then I would be faced with the choice of either just reading the same comments out loud at the Day Prize Ceremony at SPACE (coming up on the third weekend in April: more info at www.backporchcomics.com including hotel and directions to the show) and having all the Yahoos in the audience go "Wow, couldn't have written something different? This was already on the Blog & Mail WEEKS ago." OR having to come up with a whole new set of comments which really amounts to a double load of FREE WRITING which is something I'm trying to phase out around here now that I'm having to balance the books AND pay Gerhard his asking price for his 40% of the company. I mean, I really LOVE all you guys, you know I do, but I'm afraid I have to cheat on you folks for the next five years or so with people who have, like, BANK ACCOUNTS and who aren't afraid to use them. I'm sure you understand.



Tomorrow: More FREE WRITING about the logjam?


There's LESS for you

In Today's (and for the next

Five Years') Blog &?

?MAAIILLL!

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REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

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

Looking for a place to purchase Cerebus phonebooks? You can do so online through Win-Mill Productions -- producers of Following Cerebus. Convenient payment with PayPal:

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.