Dave Sim's blogandmail #255 (May 24th, 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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Okay. I got a little clever this time and decided to keep a record in my notebook of everything that happened after the last time I worked on the Blog & Mail which should help me with bringing you up-to-date on everything that happened since I started drawing again two weeks ago. First note: "italics boldface and typefaces":



Computers are like card games to me. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I think I've learned how to play Euchre a half dozen times and always forget how the moment I've finished playing. In addition to this high crime I also stand accused of forgetting what Mr. Computer can and can't do. Guilty as charged, Your Honour. For eight months I've been changing point size and – last time – even type style for the headlines forgetting what I learned a while back: when you are e-mailing documents as Sandeep is to Jeff Tundis, there is no such thing as headlines. And, of course, the fact that anything outside of straight typing doesn't work is something I noticed in a disk from L.C. this week where he had (obviously) scrupulously searched for the correct French accent on an "e" and of course it arrived with a "?" in its place. This was brought home even more emphatically when I was re-reading the May 13 entry where I had promised to underline parts of the G. K. Chesterton excerpt to discuss later. "Gee, I forgot to underline the passages." Wouldn't matter, I don't think, since underlining is an instruction and it's instructions that can't be translated from one computer to another. So welcome to the new Ever Exciting headline-free, italic-free, symbol-free, underlining-free Blog & Mail. Not since the teletype went out of popular usage has there been a more leaden means of communicating in prose form. It seems to me that there's a message in the fact that you can instruct your own computer to instruct itself but you can't instruct your computer to instruct another computer to instruct itself. "I Am No Man's Cybernetic Vassal Save My Purchaser and Owner/Operator's" being the computeroid equivalent of "All Men Are Created Equal"…or something like that. Actually it's probably a PC Apple Microsoft thing where they're still hoping to convince Everyone to do it their way and Shun the other guy into non-existence. La La La My Computer Can't Hear Your Computer's Instructions. The Childish Underbelly of Capitalism in Action.



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Do asterisks work? I won't find out, but you will. That's supposed to be five asterisks on the line above there. So, let's go to press in Times New Roman monotone. Deet deet deet deet.



Next note: "Running for President". If you're one of the few people who actually reads all this stuff, you may have wondered about my mentioning that I was going to be running for President of the United States in my answer to Jim Waley's letter earlier this month. It all started with a Green Lantern costume in a store window next to the Post Office. On the lookout for anything that could be made into good visual YouTube comedy-in-ten-minutes-or-under in the week leading up to SPACE, I had decided that it would be funny to buy the Green Lantern costume and announce, sitting at Gerhard's old cherry wood desk that I was running for President of the United States and – as you could see by my costume [gesture towards costume] – I was engaging in "outreach" to our "mainstream comics brethren and cisterns". Trevor was coming in to tape me reading the first ten chapters of Samuel anyway so I thought that would make a funny capstone to the afternoon. Then I was going to mention that time was of the essence since we had less than sixteen months to overturn the constitutional requirement that a candidate for president has to be an American citizen and to get my name on the ballot – as both Republican and Democratic nominee – in all fifty states. "I realize that this might seem like an insurmountable task, but I am addressing a constituency that makes it all the way through the phone-book sized Diamond Previews Catalogue every month. Overturning a constitutional requirement should be a snap by comparison". Green Lantern had been chosen because he was the best known of the Canadian super-heroes.



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This would have been followed by a mock news conference at SPACE, with me in my Green Lantern costume using the lectern we use for the Day Prize and the Yahoos standing in as reporters.



Tomorrow: How I pictured the news conference going



There's More for You in Today's…Blog &…Maaaaiiiillll.

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