Dave Sim's blogandmail #303 (July 11th, 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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UPDATE 26 JUNE 0702 HOURS EST Bit of a late start today which I attribute to the NATIONAL POST actually having a series of interesting articles in its first section. The last few days I've been able to skip most of their coverage as embedded Marxism of the Al Gore strain. This time pretty much everything was worth reading.

Overnight cable traffic from the Technical Director & Research Assistant. I sent him the 6 July posting and offered to let him make any deletions he wanted. RETRO-DELETE the name of the state that he lives in.

"I certainly flinched when I saw you were planning on running that. My comments about Howard [Cruse] and gays was awkwardly stated in a way that would probably give offense to many gays and I'm sure Howard in particular, but I wrote it. Honesty demands that if you want to run it you do so as is. Go ahead with it if you want, and thanks for checking first. If it gets a reaction from the Yahoos it might give us an opportunity to gauge our approach."

Personally, I don't think gays are nearly as sensitive and easily bruised as is popularly believed in some quarters. I think that's just another example of the feminist mythology which consists of trying to cram everyone into their own (tactically) self-pitying, leaky little rowboat of Poor We Who Have Been Oppressed By White Heterosexual Men And Consequently Deserve A Free Ride Everywhere In Our Society. Obviously the blacks got out of the rowboat a long while back and I think the gay men quietly did, as well. Some of them have started to openly make fun of the feminists. There was a gay comedian who wrote a piece in the NATIONAL POST's "Arts & Life" section where he mentioned that for heterosexual women of a certain age, having a gay male friend is "the new handbag". Ouch. That one would cut pretty close to the collectivized feminist bone. "See my new Hermes bag? And look! Here's my matching gay friend!" Then there was the news item about the gay club that banned women because they were showing up as hen parties to ogle all the good-looking men. I can see the point: what is this? A children's zoo? Shoo. Go on. Git!

Wow, I thought. It's going to take a LOT of dry white wine to console that little clutch of wounded hen feelings. "But I RILLY, RILLY respect your homosexuality – I RILLY, RILLY do!" And then to be rejected that vehemently and that specifically. How SAD for them.

He's requesting cut-off target dates. The solicitation is usually due in mid-month, so I'd call it as September 12 (the first day of Ramadan this year) just to be on the safe side. There is some flexibility built in to Diamond's system. Because the descriptions of the different books vary, you need to get those in earlier. The earlier the better since as far as I know they fill the catalogue on a first come, first serve basis. The cover reproductions are all the same size in the "back of the catalogue" where Aardvark-Vanaheim and a zillion other publishers live so you can usually get those in around the third week of the month.

It isn't really carved in stone. I'd like to avoid Christmas shipping which tends to happen with anything you try to print at the beginning of December. Every working environment gets the "giddies" and work slows to a crawl earlier and earlier in the month every year (a residue of Good Christian Fellowship a la A Christmas Carol's "This Festive Time of Year" but having more to do with Christmas party hangovers and psychotic Christmas shopping and family get-together planning uber alles than anything else). Last year, as I recall, nothing got done from about the 18th onward. I'm from the Scrooge school and I'm usually working up until about 6 pm every Christmas Eve and I'm right back at it on Boxing Day.

So, optimistically I'd like to ship in November before all that happens. If November isn't possible then I'd skip right to January. The nice thing is that we can call an ABORT MISSION right up until September 12 just by not sending in a solicitation – and since you're the last one working on the book, it's going to be your call more than it is mine – and that will instantly buy you another sixty days (solicitation for January wouldn't be due until mid-November) until the next INITIATE LAUNCH SEQUENCE date. It's funnybooks. We're not waiting for the skies to clear over Cape Canaveral. It's either next week or five weeks from now or eight weeks from now. And that doesn't even take into account that the comic-book field takes late shipping as a given. I got a little huffy with Lebonfon when it became obvious that COLLECTED LETTERS 2 was going to miss its June 6 in-store sale date by a week – and then by two weeks. They wanted to know when my PO (Purchase Order) cancellation date was which wasn't until July 6. The impression that I got was, "Well, duh, what's the problem, then?" Uh. The problem is that I SAID it was coming out June 6, not June 20.

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

UPDATE 26 JUNE 0805 HOURS EST - Time to hit the showers since I have no idea when the fine art pick-up and delivery firm is showing up and then a further EYES ONLY cable for my TD & RA and then it's time to tackle the old mailbag.

Tomorrow : Old Mailbag's Got Me!


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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:

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