Dave Sim's blogandmail #248 (May 17th, 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.

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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Happy Birthday to me,

Happy Birthday to me,

Happy Birth. Day… dear DAY-YAVE




Aw, Get Outta Here and I Mean it!



Hap. Py. Birth. Day. Tooooo

MEEEEE!

Oslo, Norway

25/2/07

Dear Dave Sim,



I write this to you asking for some leverage.



This is not a request for money (but rather for culture). A couple of months ago, I bought High Society and recently started to read it. Suddenly I was halfway into the novel. This stuff is the best illustrated novel I have read in my life. Enjoying the whole Cerebus work is one of the things I would like to do in my lifetime. I also would like my son to inherit such a quality result of our cultural society.



SO WHAT IS MY PROBLEM? I HAVE CANCER.



This is where the leverage comes in. Normally I would buy the remaining novels over time, as the household economy would allow it. Since I am under attack by cancer, and I am given a marginal chance of survival (actually my prognosis is death, period), I will have to speed it up if I wish to enjoy the whole Cerebus story. Spending a considerable part of the rest of my life (I am 35 years) reading Cerebus is a choice I hope you do not disapprove of (it must be said that one of the most important ingredients in a fight against cancer is to be positive and in a generally good humour. So I reckon I will not lose, but actually gain time).



My question to you, then, is it would be possible to buy all the Cerebus novels at a reduced price. Also, I wish it would be possible with a signature from you within. For my one-and-a-half-year-old son that would be of special importance (when he is a lot older, that is). Either this story is told by me sometime in the future, or he will read it in one of the blank pages of the first volume.



This is my wish for leverage.



Sincerely yours,



Cornelius Brekke



I probably should have dealt with this a while ago and I apologize for not having done so. I'm afraid I just stack the mail in my filing cabinet here and I don't even think about it until it's time to answer it here on the Blog & Mail.



Tell you what, Cornelius – I'll send you a copy of the first volume and you send me whatever you can afford to pay for it. When I get the payment I'll send you a copy of Church & State volume one and you can send me whatever you can afford to pay for that one and so on. If you don't make it through all 16 volumes, leave instructions with whomever is going to be your son's guardian that I'll be happy to pick up wherever we left off when he's old enough to know whether he's interested in reading Cerebus or not. Sometimes the interest passes from father to son and sometimes it doesn't and I'd hate to saddle him with a bunch of books he has no interest in if he turns out to be a mathematics devotee or something instead.



This was the part where I notified you that the books wouldn't be autographed because they are mailed out from the A-V warehouse in Leamington. However when I tried to fax your address to the warehouse, the fax machine kept switching to "telephone" even though I had successfully faxed a Diamond order through the day before. So, taking this as a hint from God, I guess your books WILL be autographed.



If anyone wants to send Cornelius an e-mail telling him the book is on the way, you can find him at cornelius@europan.no



Good luck and I hope you enjoy the book. I'll look forward to hearing from you.





Okay. Here we go. Long, Long Letter from Mike Moore:



Dear Dave,



Just read my letter to you online (it was kinda creepy to see it, so I would have been a little more cautious as to mentioning specifics such as the names of friends and so on if I'd know they'd end up on the Internet. I'm not a very private person, but being cavalier with other people's privacy is a great way to lose friends, I've found, so it gave me pause.) I'm OK with everything I wrote being published online except [deleted] because a friend of mine would be very understandably upset with that isolated incident from years gone by being published online by me without her permission. You did publish my name, so there are hundreds of people who could figure it out and say, "She did that?!" should they read it and put two and two together. They would disapprove of her [deleted] and her father IS still trying to be a good missionary, just as she's coming to terms with what that act means to the rest of her religious life.



I agreed with much of what you said, and will characteristically, keep chewing away at what wasn't covered, stuff I thought you missed the point of or that I didn't agree with your views on. The way my letter was transcribed online resulted in some real confusion as to which bits were me and which were you, as some paragraphs switched to "you" midstream so that even I had to read them carefully to see the switch in writers.



I'll make a certain number of efforts to accommodate you, Mike—running this letter in boldface AND italic type instead of alternating, as I usually do between italics and non-italics, as an example, even though I think that alternating italics and non-italics for most people is a pretty clear way of demarcating between two correspondents—however, I have to point out that right here in your first two paragraphs you are accusing me both of printing too much of your letter and too little of it. Since my reputation was destroyed by people writing about me online I have absolutely zero interest in anyone's privacy concerns. If you don't want me to run something, don't write it to me. Since I don't have any friends I'm not particularly concerned about losing friends when the issue comes down to honest communication versus dishonesty for the sake of someone else's sensitivities. You're also accusing me, by saying "what wasn't covered" of being dishonest and evasive. I'm trying to be interesting enough to hold a readership here and a lot of what you brought up is well-trodden territory in my view, so last time out I picked out what I did find interesting and answered that. So, we'll see how long it takes to answer all four pages of your current letter. I apologize to the Blog & Mail readers if they see this as not going anywhere in particular.



Tomorrow: Not Going Anywhere in Particular? As always the choice is up to YOU, the discerning and discriminating (in a good sense) Blog & Mail reader

There's MORE for YOU

In Today's Blog &…

MAAIIILLLL!

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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.