Dave Sim's blogandmail #444 (November 29th, 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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An interviewer has asked Einstein if his idea of God is Spinoza's God. [Baruch Spinoza, 18th century philosopher who taught that reality is one substance with an infinite number of attributes of which only thought and extension are capable of being apprehended by the human mind]

I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but I admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.

Obviously, I consider any form of pantheism to be misguided and I think if you believe in the soul and body as being one (which I definitely don't believe) instead of two then you have effectively turned your back on monotheism. The quick leap from "fascination" to "admiration" I find troubling as well and I see it as a systemic poison in our society. There are many fascinating theories of creation and the nature of reality but I think the core reality is which one of them do you believe? Otherwise you just go through your life successively fascinated by Mother Nature, Kali, the Easter Bunny and whatever science fiction novel you read last week. Which leads into the next question:

Do you believe in immortality?

No. And one life is enough for me.

I'd see that as having a couple of different comedic layers to it. I think "No" is Einstein's sincere answer to the question, both as a human being and as a soul. The second part of the answer I think comes from the demon that would have been inhabiting him because of his atheistic/agnostic ways which left him vulnerable to incursion which then became permanent because of his choice not to pray or engage in any sort of acknowledgement of God's sovereignty. The demon was obviously prevailing (easily!) over Einstein's God-given soul and was therefore in the pilot seat and could say that his/her/its only concern was Einstein's one life. If he/she/it prevails (as he/she/it presumably did: Einstein never shifted his focus to prayer, Scripture or any other than a "dim awareness" of God, then Einstein's soul wasn't going any further) ("One life is enough for me."). Even in terms of forensic accuracy, the correct answer would be "As a human being, I think one life is enough for me." That might not, however, have been how God planned it. Einstein's life in this world might have been just the first stage in a multi-stage upward progression that Einstein's aborted through his conscious choice to do so.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.

Well, in that case I wouldn't describe him as devoutly religious at all. As I keep trying to emphasize, submitting yourself to the will of God isn't the same as understanding God or (as Einstein suggests here) "grasping" God. Wonder and standing "rapt in awe" are good first steps, but if the entirety of your life unfolds and all you've managed to do relative to God is stand in wonder and awe at the immensity of His works then I don't think you will have fulfilled your potential in His eyes. I think you have to start with submission to His will and then aspire to fulfilling your potential there and to keep your eye on the ball and to realize (as Einstein must have consciously realized better than most) that virtually everything you see that appears real is strictly illusory and transitory. If you can mentally eliminate all of those things from your top priorities and replace them with He whom "our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly" then I think that can take you in a far more positive direction.

Boston's William Henry Cardinal O'Connell addresses this pretty directly (as he is quoted in the article):

The outcome of this doubt and befogged speculation about time and space is a cloak beneath which hides the ghastly apparition of atheism.

It's a good way of putting it. Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein, an Orthodox Jewish leader in New York sent a very direct telegram to Princeton, "Do you believe in God? Stop Answer paid Stop 50 words Stop" That is, he prepaid for a return telegram. Einstein answered

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself (sic) in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

Well, in that case, you don't believe in God, as far as I can see, at least not in a Scriptural God who revealed Himself to man through His Scriptural revelations. The use of the male gender pronoun is a convenience that you can use or dispense with because you take it as an agnostic given that the answer is impenetrable. There is no difference between that God and Mother Nature. Or Nature as a neutral reality of symmetrical and orderly happenstance. Your God can be a he… a she…or an it…or all three simultaneously. And to me that's the point of the (presumably) cosmos-spanning debate in which, here on our lonely little blue pearl of an outpost, our local YHWH is the primary proponent of the infernal view. If you believe in the Scriptural God, the infernal view isn't possible. Definitively in the Torah, the Gospels and the Koran, God's gender is definitively masculine which rules out "she" and "it" as accurate pronouns.

A Bronx rabbi asserted that "Cardinal O'Connell would have done well had he not attacked the Einstein theory. Einstein would have done better had he not proclaimed his non-belief in a God who is concerned with fates and actions of individuals. Both have handed down dicta outside their jurisdiction."

I would disagree with that because I believe that belief is within each individual's jurisdiction. Einstein pronounced "What I Believe" which to me is sacrosanct. If he sincerely believed in the "unknowability" of God and could bring himself only to believe in a nebulous unknowable force behind "the lawful harmony of all that exists" well that's a free will protected choice, however uninformed and self-destructive I – or any Cardinal or Rabbi – might deem it to be. It was Einstein's choice and he'll pay the price for it if there's a price to be paid (which I think I and the Cardinal and the Rabbi would agree that there will, indeed, be a price that needs to be paid). Just as the Cardinal will pay the price if his beliefs prove to be unfounded, as the Rabbi will and as I will. I also think the Cardinal was on solid ground establishing that – whatever else it may be -- "speculation about space and time" constitutes "a cloak" for intrinsic atheism (I thought he was being diplomatic in keeping it as an "apparition"). In Einstein's case, his conclusions led him to infer that there was no need to have a relationship with God and to advocate that as the sensible way of dealing with reality.

The Theory of Relativity=Spinoza's God. QED.

Well, by stating it that overtly what Einstein is doing is endorsing a viewpoint and tipping however many people in a direction away from God, or at least away from Orthodox Catholic or Judaic observance and, arguably, away from a conscious sense of morality. I don't think he meant to do that but most people at the time just assumed that Einstein was the smartest person who ever lived so if he told you that God was this remote unknowable force uninvolved and unconcerned with mankind that carried a lot more weight than I think he intended it to carry (and a late realization of that might account for his anecdote about his uncle "Ah, but you never know," that is, admitting that he had no actual knowledge on the subject himself, one way or the other). Even if my own theories of the structure and nature of reality prove to be unfounded, I think I'm on safer ground counselling submission to the will of God as a first priority: counselling a reality which holds God as a complete irrelevance to individual men and to mankind in general seems to me self-evidently infernal in nature. No good can come of it, in my view.

There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.

Tomorrow: My view of Einstein's assertion: There are people who say there is no God, but what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #443 (November 28th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

The million-dollar question posed to Einstein around his 50th birthday by an interviewer: Did the great physicist believe in God?

I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.

I think it would have been more accurate for Einstein to say, "You're asking the wrong person. You're assuming that because I figured out one little contradiction/glitch in our perceptions of space/time and the fact that that solution led to the creation of the atomic bomb that I know all of God's secrets. I haven't really figured anything out of any great significance since I came up with the Theory of Relativity and that's almost thirty years ago now, almost half a human lifespan. A Complete Unified Theory has escaped me and I was working on it before and I've been working on it since." The more you know in the maths and the sciences, I think he was saying, the more you realize that you have only a dim understanding of how the whole of reality is put together. You can figure out how space/time works and from that an atomic weapon can be built – or a nuclear power plant -- but that doesn't even begin to solve or even address the idea of whether, say, interstellar travel is possible. All that he had been able to figure out had only established for him just how an immense a proposition even perceiving the nature of reality was. Einstein only dimly grasped the immensity of the metaphorical library we are in and could only perceive just how limited his own perception and capacity was, while most people thought of him as the New Librarian who would be able to assimilate and explain all of the books to us or at least figure out whatever we wanted figured out: how to change lead into gold, how to create a car that ran on bottled water, how to create a 100% effective means of birth control, how to teach monkeys to talk and play chess and so on.

The larger point for me is submission to the will of the Actual Librarian, God, who wrote all of the books and understands every word and every nuance in them. That brings me back to Scripture. The limitations of the human mind and the human lifespan are a given, the immensity of the Library is a given, the ultimately futility of however many man hours Einstein devoted to the Unified Theory is a given. From that I extrapolate that everyone is better served by having the Actual Librarian direct them since we are, as Einstein said, dramatically limited in every meaningful aspect of effective action. No one but the Actual Librarian is going to know the best use of our 70-or-so years given our severely limited grasp of the nature of reality.

Is this a Jewish concept of God? the interviewer next wanted to know.

I am a determinist. I do not believe in free will. Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine. In that respect I am not a Jew.

I think Einstein's defining himself as a determinist originates in his discovery of the underlying nature of space/time that, in effect, everything that will happen has already happened if you expand the context far enough. Einstein was born when he was born and died when he died and in the context of the fifth dimension of time he is, as Alan Moore has pointed out, a metaphorical millipede or snake-like being that begins here and ends there and was doing, has done and, for all space/time, will do only the things that he was doing, has done and will do all along the winding millipede like track of his life. Einstein, probably more than anyone, perceived that more accurately and earlier than anyone else did. Alan Moore could only come up with the metaphor because of the work that Einstein did.

But that in no way refutes the reality that Einstein did actually make choices. Every Friday that he chose to work after sundown he violated his (residual?) Orthodox Judaic faith. Every Sunday I choose to do the opposite, to not work, to rest, to read and comment on Scripture from midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday. That doesn't mean that I shape my own life (so far as I know) but it does mean that I shape a part of my life, and it does mean that there are choices that I make that I believe are significant: significant for the exact reason that I don't inhabit the larger context. Although linear living is illusory, that is how I perceive my life, that is the context I inhabit, so I try to make good choices instead of bad choices. Whether there are alternate realities where my better choices have a net positive effect even while in the main reality I continue to drink and to womanize and so on, that is beyond the limitations of my mind to perceive. But choices I perceive. Choosing to fast for four days every three weeks, to fast in Ramadan but not to choose Islam OVER Christianity and Judaism, those are all choices. Arguably the only person who would know if I broke Sabbath would be God. I never see anyone I know in town and most of them have no idea of my observance. But breaking Sabbath – going out and eating in a restaurant, having a glass of wine, taking in a movie – would be, to me, a significant negative act so I don't do it. It is now true that Dave Sim has only broken Sabbath a handful of times since the late 1990s, that he always did and always will observe a Sabbath in the larger context of space/time from the late 1990s to 2007. But the decision still has to be made next Saturday night, next Sunday morning, next Sunday afternoon, next Sunday evening, next Sunday night. And the one after that and the one after that and the one after that until, metaphorically speaking, my millipede is completed and it can be said that I observed a Sabbath from the late 1990s to the point of my death with a handful of exceptions. And I do think that that decision would shape my life and would have a larger net positive effect than whatever Einstein was doing from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday for the last forty or fifty years of his life.

The interviewer next wants to know: Is this Spinoza's God?

Tomorrow: Is Einstein's idea of God Spinoza's idea of God?





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #442 (November 27th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, in answer to the question "Should Jews try to assimilate?":

"We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform."

My assessment of this would depend on what he means by "idiosyncrasies" and what the interviewer (whom Einstein evidently misbelieved to be a Jew and who, instead, "proudly traced his lineage to the family of the Kaiser and (who) would later become a Nazi sympathizer") meant by the term "assimilate". I think you can change your mode of dress, as an example, and remain a Good Jew but I also think that surrendering religious observance -- observance as mandated in the Torah -- is a far more serious matter. Of course, I'm strictly a "Scripturalist". Orthodox Jews would disagree with me vehemently on any subject covered in the Talmud. You can't be a Good Jew unless you obey the Torah the way the Talmud tells you to. To me the Talmud are commentaries, like the Hadith in Islam or Paul's Epistles in Christianity. A lot of Germans of the time would see assimilation as naturally including apostasy: you haven't assimilated until you've given up the Synagogue for the Lutheran Church. In fact, the next question seemed to point in that direction.

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?

As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.

This strikes me as either disordered thinking, an attempt to occupy contradictory positions or (I think more likely) simple Jewish self-preservation in a context where the next Christian pogrom against the Jews was never far away (in this case less than a decade). Einstein did attend a Catholic school (his parents were complete atheists) so presumably what he means is "I received instruction both in the Gospels and the Torah," unless he's being forensically accurate and is using "The Bible" as a way of avoiding a direct answer. As I say, it might be simple self-preservation. To the Christian ear of the time, "in the Bible and in the Talmud" would translate as "the Gospels and the Torah" since the Bible was seen by (and still is seen by) most German Lutherans as consisting of a true New Testament and a false or discredited Old Testament. Just calling it "the Bible" would provide a certain amount of cover if Einstein suspected that his interrogator was a Christian – "I've been influenced by Christianity at least to the extent that I call it the Bible" – and would likewise provide an appropriate nuance if the interrogator was a Jew – "I call it the Bible, but I also studied the sharper intricacies of Mosaic Law in the Talmud".

"Enthralled" could be comparably forensic and euphemistic. You can be equally "in the thrall" of John F. Kennedy or Adolf Hitler. It really just denotes an inescapable charisma or force which the Jews had certainly experienced at the hands of Jesus' successors (the endless Christian pogroms against the Jews, again). "Luminous figure" would translate differently to the Christian and Judaic ear. To the Christian ear, it would come across as a derivation of "I am the way and the light" which would compel the inference that Einstein was a convert to Christianity or was bordering on becoming a convert which was the stock-in-trade of being a Jew at a time when you were always, in one way or another, under a Christian death sentence and how you phrased your assessment of Christianity could mean the difference between life and death. In a Judaic sense, "luminous figure" could denote a marginalized political figure along the lines of the Apocryphal "Sons of Light and sons of Darkness" of later non-scriptural Judaism (such as were being found at Qumran – the Dead Sea Scrolls – around that time). That is, Jesus was probably more of a son of light than a son of darkness, but no big deal except for the way it's worked out for the Jews. Likewise calling him the Nazarene. To the Christian ear it would denote a level of familiarity with the Gospels that would likewise denote interest which they always tend to read as borderline, virtual or actual capitulation to Christianity. To know him is to love him, kind of thing. To the Judaic ear, I don't think much would have changed since Philip inquired regarding the Johannine Jesus "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" That is, Nazareth was about the lowest of the low Judaically speaking and the natural assumption was that anyone coming out of Nazareth was probably a shyster or something similar.

You accept the historical existence of Jesus?

Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.

This would be a DUH question for any Jew who had experienced or heard of Christian treatment of Jews which Einstein would have known intimately. If Jesus hadn't existed, then how do you explain this astronomical level of poisonous animosity directed against Jews by a religion founded on his teachings? If you had studied the Torah and the Talmud and then read the Gospels, it would be pretty clear that this is where the gross Christian hatred of Jews originated from. I experienced it myself having read the entire Torah and Apocrypha before reading the Gospels:

Oh. Christianity is about profound hatred and unthinking malice directed towards Jews. I get it. I certainly don't agree with it, but I get it.

(There's a lot of that in monotheism that I never dreamed existed: A letter writer in the National Post this morning says that the Koran says in three different places that Muhammad changed the Jews into monkeys and pigs. I've read the Koran dozens of times, twice through most recently during Ramadan. I can assure you that it doesn't say anything remotely like that anywhere. Just as the Jews can assure you that virtually everything the Synoptic Jesus says about the Torah is misquoted or quoted out of context. Doesn't do any good when it originates in the emotionalism of profound hatred and unthinking malice.)

Do you believe in God? the interviewer next wants to know.


Tomorrow: Did Einstein believe in God?





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #441 (November 26th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

We left off yesterday with this quote from Albert Einstein in the April 19 issue of TIME magazine:

The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.

This is presumably revelatory for secular humanists and will cause more than a few of them sleepless nights (did Einstein really say that?) but in terms of faith, again, there is nothing alluded to here that couldn't be Mother Nature, Kali or the Easter Bunny. "Dim consciousness" is a freely protected free will choice: if you choose not to believe in God and not to read Scripture and not to pray I think it's pretty much a given that your awareness of God will remain in your "dim consciousness" and your life will instead be dominated by your pleasure centers, vested interest and whatever "particles/waves flying in loose formation" self-hypnotism to which you choose to actively or passively submit. You can believe that nature is "in no way an accidental game" without coming near to believing that there is any purpose to life, and you can believe that life is "not accidental" while still believing that morality is an arbitrary cultural prejudice, that all morality is relative and that all ethics are situational and so on. There is any number of antonyms for "accidental" before you come anywhere close to ethical and moralistic interpretations of the term lawfulness. Newton's laws of motion are very different from Thou Shalt Not Kill but I don't get a sense that Einstein sees it that way. This appears to be as close as he ever came to a religious sensibility and he came to it late in life. The next quote from Einstein is

Through the reading of popular scientific books, I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of free thinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was crushing impression.

This is Timestyle again: putting the early youthful rebellion against faith in Scripture after the closest proximity to religious faith that Einstein achieved decades later, obviously to prejudice the article in favour of the former view. To devout secular-humanists like the editors of Time, "a fanatic orgy of free thinking" is the thing devoutly to be wished so long as it steers people away from religious faith. The next quote from Einstein is an anecdote where a dinner guest has lumped in religious faith with astrology as pure superstition and is apprised of the fact that Einstein himself harbours religious beliefs. Disbelieving, the dinner guest seeks verification, to which Einstein replies:

Yes you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.

Again, the secular-humanist mind will totter on its foundation at this, but Mother Nature, Kali and the Easter Bunny are equally subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration can also mean different things for different people and I assume that Einstein's form of veneration was for that which his own empirical scientific mind and philosophy could not encompass, explain or dissect while in no way dealing Scripture and prayer into the game. It has as much to do with the "limited means" of human beings as it does with any kind of Higher Nature. Drawing a distinction between Einstein's views and my own, I don't find God be to either subtle (although He can act with great subtlety), intangible (although He certainly isn't tangible in any human sense) or inexplicable

[that's what Scripture is for as far as I can see: explication of God and YHWH and what the context is in which we find ourselves: to cite to immediate modern examples, feminism and gay liberation are just two manifestations of YHWHist nature, he/she/itism. The fact that Scripture is and has been so widely misinterpreted as to make God and YHWH into the same being doesn't, to me, mean that Scripture is inexplicable any more than the Theory of Relativity is inexplicable because you refuse to apply yourself to understanding it or because you have misunderstood it on your first or one hundredth time through an explanation of it]

Shortly after his 50th birthday, Einstein gave an interview where he offered these views:

On whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. "It's possible to be both. Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind."

I find that interesting but glib since the point of the question is really whether it is possible to be a Good German and a Good Jew simultaneously. Einstein attacks the former instance in what I see as a "too general" way. German nationalism hadn't yet hatched out into Nazism and when it did it would change the thrust of the question. And by attacking Nationalism rather than the popular concept of the Good German at the time, he dodged the question entirely on what makes a Good Jew. Eschewing military service, as an example, would have made him a Bad German but a Good Jew (in an Orthodox sense), an irresolvable dilemma particularly when Judaism itself became a pariah reality during the Third Reich.

Should Jews try to assimilate?

Tomorrow: Einstein on "Should Jews try to assimilate?"





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #440 (November 25th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________


Just as we were leaving the Norman Rockwell Museum the Saturday night of the opening ceremonies, Matt Dow gave me a copy of Time magazine which contained an article on Albert Einstein's views on God ("Einstein & Faith" April 16, 2007) and suggested that it might make a good Sunday Edition piece for me to comment on.

It's an exclusive excerpt from Walter Isaacson's biography of the great physicist. I imagine the piece has been "Timestyled" to a fare-thee-well, so I'll try to limit my extracts to Einstein's specific quotes. Here's an example of why I'm doing so:

In his later years Einstein would tell an old joke about an agnostic uncle who was the only member of his family who went to synagogue. When asked why he did so, the uncle would respond, "Ah, but you never know."

I would consider the "old joke" reference to be pejorative, prejudicial and classic Timestyle. It's not a joke, it's an anecdote or a family tradition that the unnamed agnostic uncle would say what he did. To call it a joke is to compel the inference that agnosticism, as opposed to atheism, is intrinsically humorous, which again prejudices any discussion about faith in God.

Another hallmark of Timestyle is that we hear first from his "worshipful (!) younger sister" before this lengthy quote from Einstein:

When I ask myself how it happened that I in particular discovered the relativity theory, it seemed to lie in the following circumstance: The ordinary adult never bothers his head about the problems of space and time. These are things he has thought of as a child. But I developed so slowly that I began to wonder about space and time only when I was already grown up. Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have.

It's an interesting passage, but, shorn of its Timestyle "spin" (the lead in to the paragraph and the drawn inference of the succeeding paragraph) it's readily apparent that the passage has nothing to do with faith or God and is, in fact, introduced to prejudice the discussion away from faith in God. The subsequent paragraph concludes with two quotes from Einstein:

spirit manifest in the laws of the universe

again, without the Timestyle "spin" bracing the embedded quote it doesn't really mean much of anything and certainly tells the reader nothing of Einstein's views. This is followed by

God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists.

This at least tells us that Einstein was of the "Nebulous God" theological school. The problem that I see with a quote like this is that – like those who see God as love rather than love as a manifestation of and implication of God – it tends to diminish God. I would certainly agree that "the harmony of all that exists" is a manifestation of God and a direct implication of the universal reality of God but I think it far more sensible to believe that God reveals Himself primarily and more specifically through Scripture, the Torah, the Gospels and the Koran. If His primary revelation is through natural harmony (the Theory of Relativity, the geometric and symmetrical purity of the planets' orbits around the sun among other things) then there is nothing to differentiate Him from Mother Nature or the Hindu goddess Kali or Some Mysterious Natural Order which is remote from and/or ignorant of human affairs, whereas Scripture (which is really all that we know Him through) is very specific in terms of gender (He is He) and very specific in terms of His role in human affairs: central, or rather Central.

The next quote from Einstein is

a work which I read with breathless attention

regarding the 21-volume People's Books on Natural Science which, of course, has nothing to do with God or religious faith. The next quote from Einstein is

The religious inclination lies in the dim consciousness that dwells in humans that all nature, including the humans in it, is in no way an accidental game, but a work of lawfulness that there is a fundamental cause of all existence.

Tomorrow: Get Comfy this may take a while

___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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

Dave Sim's blogandmail #439 (November 24th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #5 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

THE INEFFABLES: POLITICAL SCIENCE trade paperback is by Craig Bogart, another member of the Panel Collective (Tom Williams helps out with the cover colour and Dara Naraghi does the lettering on "Political Asylum"). If you're a) an atheistic secular humanist and b) a fan of early 60s Marvel Comics, this collection is for you. The Ineffables are Chet Burnett, a sometime journalist, Mason, a scientific genius animated Easter Island head, Clarity, a living piece of artwork, and the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln (who joins in the course of the "Patriot Act" storyline). It really is extreme leftist/atheistic stuff but it's very, very funny. Funny enough that I'll forgive Craig for misappropriating a Republican President for his shenanigans! Check it out at www.theineffables.com

WEIRD MUSE MINI COMIX has hit its third issue which is Dan and Carrie Taylor's joint effort and submission for the Day Prize this year. The first page is Carrie's and includes household hints, a "no bake cookies" recipe and a cute photo of three kittens. A 7-pager by Dan, "Think Twice and Be Nice", follows. Get the whole story at http://weirdmuse.ecrater.com

A STOOPID PIGEON TREASURY collection of Stoopid Pigeon strips written by Brett Neveu and drawn by Richard Sparks. There's Stoopid Pigeon, Aubrey the Robot, Strappy (a squirrel with a bad attitude and a permanent erection), Susan, a pretty girl with a skull head, a pumpkin and Josh, a disembodied head. You know, the usual. Sparks writes in the back: "Ten years ago Neveu walked up to me and said, `We should do a comic strip called Stoopid Pigeon.' I said, `Okay, as long as it's not funny.' We did, it wasn't, and now it's today. These are real tears. Don't look at me." Actually, it is very funny but I guess Sparks has "issues" so Neveu hasn't, you know, told him yet.

Jason Butler contributes HOME a black and white digest comic that contains four stories: "The Transformation", "Crosswalk", "The Last Time" and an untitled effort. He's still a ways from hitting a professional level, but he has a lot of ability in the composition/storytelling/pacing end of things. You can see his work at www.jasonbutlerart.com

Boy, between The Ineffables, Stoopid Pigeon and now Mr. Happy Pants, this is the year for unusual groups: this time out a cartoonist named Robby who buys a movie prop from They Saved Hitler's Brain that turns out to actually be the head of a still living college student who died while dressed up as Hitler at a Halloween party, a starving lab rat with a nose growing out of his back, Donald, a fish with narcolepsy and Mr. Happy Pants a psychotic clown and the cartoonist's friend Gus. You know, the usual. Tony Miello of Wyandotte, MI draws and writes it. His website is www.boneyardstudio.com. You think Tony Miello is done with you now? Foolish mortals! No, he also has a title from Twisted Gate Entertainment called GAPO THE CLOWN. Like Crusty the Clown only a little more over the top which you can check out at www.gapotheclown.com. "There are new strips every Tuesday and Friday. And over 250 comics to read in the archives. It's be a drunken, greased painted good time." That pretty much sums it up. 5 strips to the page and 24 pages so you're definitely getting your money's worth for $3.95.

Matt Dow has some major competition in the MOST ENTHUSIASTIC NEWCOMER category with THE ADVENTURES OF MARKY #1, written and drawn by six-year-old Maddie Shires with some help from her Dad, Ian Shires and published by Dimestore Productions. So Maddie wins a special Junior Day Prize reserved for cartoonists born in this century. As does Zach Flippo even though, because he's 10 he's actually a "last century" cartoonist. We've been missing a RAM (Really Adorable Moment) at the Day Prize Ceremony up `til now, but I think handing out two Junior Day Prizes just before the Day Prize itself should do it, I think, and give me a leg up on becoming the Art Linkletter of Independent Comics.

Hey, here's another Truly Infernal Comic called TWISTED TOTS. Explicit sex and extreme graphic violence. It all started with SR & JC Griffith's Twisted Tots website, TWISTED TOTS ("Rotten to the core horror dolls custom made to scare the hell out of you. And you thought your kids were bad…Zombies, vamps, demons, evil clowns, gory and autopsy tots") http://www.twistedtots.net. Well, it seems that it wasn't perverse enough taking innocent little dolls and modifying them infernally, no, now they needed a comic-book version of them with, as I say, explicit gruesome horror and sex. I figured this would make a great follow-up to 6 year-old Maddie Shires' and 10 year-old Zach Flippo's Junior Day Prizes since there's obviously nothing you folks like better than perverse corruption of innocent images purely for its own sake. www.twistedgate.com





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #438 (November 23rd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #4 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

PANEL 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck How can you not love a title like that?). Yes, it's them wacky Panel Collective guys from Columbus, Andy Bennett, Steve Black, Craig Bogart, Tim Fischer, Tony Goins, Tim McClurg, Sean McGurr, Dara Naraghi and Tom Williams. Since I'm launching my own title this year, I'm cutting down on the 9-plaque nominees, which is a shame. This one comes with it's own 3-D glasses for the front cover by Tim Fischer and the back cover by Tom, both of which are really, really good. See what the Collective is up to at www.ferretpress.com

MINI RING KING from Jury Rigged Comics a digest comic with a boxing/wrestling theme with three of the Panel guys doing the honors, Sean "The Equalizer" McGurr, Tim "No Palooka" McClurg and Steve "Not a Tomato Can" Black. Has a full colour painted cover and four-page colour story by Steve Black. Includes pin-ups of Hulk Hogan, King Kong Bundy and Andre the Giant among others. Very nice package, stylish and (as a ring fan in recovery) it attracted my attention. Can they overcome the potential "3-plaque nomination jinx"? Stay tuned. Remember this is just the submissions stage right now.

FL!PPED: JOURNEY TO SPACE. I guess it had to happen eventually. Terry Flippo at 8-Ball Graphics contributes a 24-page digest part autobio, part fictional piece about him and the family coming out to SPACE. He's been here four times all the way from Mt. Airy Maryland. Good clean semi-pro/verging on pro style. He includes Jim Coon in his story who was one of the short-list nominees for 2006. FL!PPED was inspired by Jerry Smith's autobiographical comic SOUTHERN FRIED which you can check out at skybot99@yahoo.com.. He also submits ZACH FLIPPO'S MONSTER BOMB from Little Big Man Productions. Zach is his 10 year old son who has been drawing monsters since he was 8 and Dad gave him a hand with this digest-sized 24-pager. The inking's even better than on FL!PPED! No website for Terry (or Zach) but you can write them at 205 Breezewood Ct. in Mt. Airy, MD, 21771

High concept Hard center would describe BREAK-UP BOTS a fat mini-comic from Robert James Algeo's absentia press. Very funny. Basically each page is a different robot and a different break-up line (i.e. "Stop calling me at work." and "But you're the one who wanted to see other people" and "How can you expect me to compete with a dead person?") As it says on the indicia page: "The robots depicted in this book are fictitious. Similarities between them and any robot, living, dead, operational, decommissioned or disassembled are completely coincidental. Several robots were harmed emotionally during the making of this book."

This one has real break-out real world potential written all over it.

In an obvious effort to keep from getting typecast as the "Break-Up Robots" guy, Robert also produced a colour comic this year on high gloss paper with very high production values called SKULL PEN No.1. It's a really very straightforward title about really ordinary happenings: two friends playing video games, a computer store where they do repairs and in comes…SKULL PEN. A six foot ballpoint pen with a skull on the top of it who talks like Dr. Doom even while he's trying to just deal with the world on its own terms.

SKULL PEN: My, it seems as though you are quite the video game warrior, James. With a score of 10 to zero to your advantage, one wonders if Marshall's mind is truly focused on the matter at hand.

JAMES: Yeah, it's like he didn't even show up.

SKULL PEN: Yes…Well, on that note, I am off to participate in the drudgery of consumerism. I shall return later this eve.

JAMES: Cool. See you later, pen.

Check out both titles at: www.inabsentiapress.com

Rickey Gonzales of Pretentious Comics offers up VICTIMS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, a graphic novella, 75 pages, squarebound, digest sized. It's very accomplished material in the "Lives of Quiet Desperation" category with a multi-character cast that he manages to keep tightly reined in even as he goes to town with the narrator's introspection. A very difficult balancing act and I was very impressed. You can check it out at www.pretentiouscomics.com and this one definitely enters the graphic novel section of the Off-White House Library between Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's ALIENS adaptation and Jimmy Gownley's AMELIA RULES volumes.





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #437 (November 22nd, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #3 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

Christopher Dunsmore writes, pencils and inks OZARK MEAT #1. If the SOUTH PARK creators ever decided to do a slasher film comic book, it would probably read a lot like OZARK MEAT. Not quite "there" in terms of finish, but some interesting computer effects, soft focusing the backgrounds and so on. "Horror never tasted so good" it says on the cover. Some nudity and explicit extreme violence. www.quidndunz.com

RUFFIANS #6 from Brian Canini's DRUNKEN CAT comics out of San Diego. Regular SPACE patrons probably remember the Drunken Cat costume Brian had someone wearing a year or two ago. That had to be a first for indy comics. "Cancer Worn Soul" is a very interesting experiment in the character meets the creator field, this time done with drawings and photographs (by Patrick O'Dell) edited by Aaron Groch. A 14-pager with newsprint cover and interiors for $1.50. Check out Brian's work to date at www.drunkencatcomics.com

Hey, remember when I told you about Matt Dow's RACECAR? Well here it is again. Your choices for the next Mouseskull Entertainment pop culture icon include Fluffy the Jungle Bunny, Barry, "The Freak Who Has Had Too Much Damn Coffee" (Shannon Wheeler might name you in the lawsuit), Break-dancing Buddha, Stand-Up Comedian Hitler, Austin the $ix Billion Dollar Cat, Joe the Paper Boy from Hell and "Sexy-Sexy Go-Go Kitty". Vote at mouseskull@gmail.com. It's your duty as an American, as Matt reminds you.

As you can well imagine, there's usually a generous share of Truly Infernal Comics in with all the Day Prize submissions. THE HAUNT OF HORACE ("Everyone's favourite Vampire Boy!) is definitely in that category. Includes "My Big Dumb Hell", "Journey into ADHD", a Cthulu Pinup, and the debut of Horace's pet vampire unicorn. www.thehauntofhorace.com

DAYBREAK Vol. 1 by Brian Ralph of Jersey City, NJ is an interesting balance between mainstream indy and avant-garde indy. With its post-apocalypse motif it's more mainstream indy but the drawing style and production look wouldn't be out of place at Drawn & Quarterly. Interesting experiment in making the reader into one of the characters that doesn't always work 100% but Brian definitely knows what he's doing here. This is Episode One (magazine size, squarebound, 48 pages, sepia tones). It originally appeared on the New Bodega Blog newbodegablogspot.com and in the magazine THE DRAMA. If you just pretend it's an avant garde comic, it's pretty much self-contained.

Ed "2 Hugs from Joining the Trenchcoat Mafia" Piskor of Munhall Pennsylvania (www.myspaceedpiskor.com) contributes a 24-page revenge fantasy mini-comic that starts with him surfing MySpace and ends with "Understand this kids! MySpace is a spot for superficial, ignorant automatons to appeal to other drones in attempts to acquire friends, popularity and acceptance. A kiddy pool of internet culture if you will. But hey, this is only the opinion of someone smarter than you and if you don't agree be sure to post your rebuttal on your LiveJournal." Nice drawing style, though.

He follows that up with episode 1 (of 8) of THE W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G. TECHNICAL PAMPHLETa black and white digest comic. Here it's a little more clear that Ed is a huge fan of Joe Matt and Chester Brown but with a far greater compulsion for doing detailed backgrounds that comes more from the Wally Wood/Rand Holmes/Dan Clowes end of things. Avant garde but with a bonus helping of "eye candy". It's a full 32 pages (including the "Misadventures of Steve & Steve" back-up) telling the story of Boingthump (aka Kevin J. Phenicle Jr.). In terms of the balance of art and story and making it clear that he knows what he's doing with this 200 to 300 page biography of a criminal genius "Who he is and how he came to be" you can't do much better. Take a look for yourself at www.edpiskor.com





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #436 (November 21st, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #2 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

L'IL DUDE is a digest zine created, written and drawn by Randolph Gray II out of Louisville KY, two daily strips to a page (and printed by a printing traditionalist where each page faces "out" whereas comic strips always work better if you can just read two and two top to bottom). Not quite a slick enough finish (yet) but good iconic newspaper strip style character designs and some genuinely funny strips with an edge to them as well as Family Circus-style fun for the whole family. I really liked this one. http://lilduecomics.comicgenesis.com

Two mini-comics from Kris Lachowski's Mean Goat Comics, one a 24-hour comic called CHEETAH STORY ("his third one so far because he is a masochistic idiot"). Doing an all-animal 24-hour comic? I'd have to go along with the masochistic idiot thing. NEW VENUS is a more finished piece, 14 pages with colour cardstock covers and good use of computer graphics. He knows what he's doing. John Buckenmeyer came up with the original concept. Check out more of Kris's work at www.webcomicsnation.com/krislachowski

Clint Basinger's BACKSEAT DRIVERS is issue #1 of a four issue mini-series from his Cosmic Moustache Comics (edited by Tonya Northernor, asst. editor Ross Boswell). It stars a 1,000 year old Viking Hero, The Cosmic Norseman (he of the star-bespangled cosmic moustache) and including The Laundry Archer ("Are my space retinas failing me? – or was I knocked from the sky by a stinky tube sock?"), Dr. Herman, The Foxez. A very funky Alex Nino drawing style. "See pics and get updates at www.myspace.com/clintbasinger" issue 2 was supposed to be out in the winter of 2006 so caveat emptor.

SAKI THE PANDA by Stephen Plczynski. Digest zine. I've got issues 2 and 3 here, "Stork Raving Mad" and "The Mother of All Problems". Good funny, all ages, all-funny animals title as Saki tries to go on a date and to get the local Rave Culture venue to turn the volume down. As with Randolph Gray II, the "finish" isn't quite there yet, but the expressions, storytelling, story density, etc. are really good. Great colour cover on issue 2 by Jill Habing. www.sakithepanda.com

APE Entertainment's OMNIBUS #2 collection (APE is keeping Chad Lambert's POINT PLEASANT in print, wonderful 32 page self-contained work that no comic store should be without) contains one of Chad's two submissions for this year, "Possum At Large: The Origin of Flyboy". I've got to give Mike Hall the Managing Editor credit, all of these entries are at least semi-pro. The Possum at Large story introduces the Incontinent Five, including Men's Room, the iconic black male figure used to designate a men's room. Don't want to give away the ending but, it's pretty funny. www.apecomics.com for their complete catalogue.

Chad also submitted "Bliss" a short story printed in Digital Webbing Presents #16 with art by Amanda Morley who does a very creditable job. The rest of the stories and the cover aren't too shabby either. Check them out at www.digitalwebbing.com

Chad ALSO submitted "American Patriot: The Enemy Within" (with great art by Ryan Scott) as his contribution to HOPE NEW ORLEANS, a nearly 200 page anthology of stories and art to raise money for flood relief in New Orleans. 80+ creators. The one I have is a Wizard World Chicago 2006 Convention printing. Chad's is about the best contribution in here, in my opinion and worth the price of admission. Find out more at http://www.ronin-studios.com





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.

Dave Sim's blogandmail #435 (November 20th, 2007)

_____________________________________________________

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.

_____________________________________________________

STOCK INTRO INSERTION #1 - As you are reading this, Dave Sim is quickly running out of things to do on Secret Project #2 that fall into the "intellectual exercise" category and is, consequently, coming up on the point where he is going to have to decide if the project is a Go or a No Go. Fortunately, he also needs to be doing the Blog & Mail so, at least for the moment, he is able to use that as an excuse to postpone making a decision. Please stay tuned as he makes his way through the Day Prize submissions one at a time. Somewhere up ahead he has to make up his mind about Secret Project #2 – in the next week or two weeks, tops.

Okay, I'm back from the opening of the Graphic Lit exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA. As promised, here (and for the next couple of weeks) are Dave Sim's Capsule Reviews of all of the Day Prize submissions for 2007. Well, except for Matt Dow's RACECAR COMICS. I just saw Matt and Paula in Stockbridge (they drove sixteen hours from Wisconsin!) and Matt said submitting RACECAR COMICS was Jeff Seiler's idea. So Matt wins the MOST ENTHUSIASTIC NEWCOMER AWARD (a politically correct way of saying "don't quit your day job") which has no cash prize and no plaque. But, hey, at least he won something. And my vote for the newest Mouseskull Entertainment character sensation is Break-Dancing Buddha. More on this later.

Matt had this idea for a super-hero story (he has way too much time on his hands at his day job, by his own admission and that tends to spill over even when he's socializing in my suite at the "Since 1773" Red Lion Inn) so I'm toying with the idea of submitting Matt's ideas to Marvel and DC as my own and then splitting the money with him. You know, in all of my ha-ha spare time.

I intended to answer Asa M. Larsson's letter first but that's going to require re-reading all of the news clippings I've got stuffed in her envelope and, as far as I know, there's still no reply to my most recent letter to Gary Groth which means that if you clicked to go over there when I suggested it in the posting for 15 November you just saw his most recent response which has been up for about a month now.

There's always a danger of my capitulating structurally to Marxist feminism in the popular imagination just by continuing to allow Marxist-feminists like Larsson and Groth to dominate the debate and, consequently, the Blog & Mail which could otherwise be the comic world's only Marxist-feminist-free zone. So, ultimately it seemed more sensible to reply first to Groth (which I've done and which will be posted when his reply comes in) and then to do my promised capsule reviews of the Day Prize submissions this year before getting around to Asa M. Larsson's multi-page letter.

So, starting with the biggest and thickest of the Day Prize submissions (and the last one I read), Rafer Roberts' PLASTIC FARM volume one, SOWING SEEDS ON FERTILE SOIL, has been collected as a (wait for it) 300-page graphic novel. Assisting Rafe on the book is (ladies first!) Danielle Corsetto (chapter 16) Wendi Strang-Frost (chapter 10) (returning the favour: Rafe illustrated DOPE FIENDS OF THE ZOMBIE CAFÉ written by her husband Sean for Wendi's Hula Cat Comics imprint http://www.hulacatcomics.com) Nan Roberts (Muse and Proof reader), Dave Morgan on chapters 2 and 13 and Dennis Culver on chapter 11 (what sort of bad financial luck do you have when you draw "Chapter 11"?), Jake Warrenfeltz (chapters 3, 5 and 7).

Rafe would have qualified as a MOST ENTHUSIASTIC NEWCOMER on the PROLOGUE to the first volume, but it's still pretty interesting and engaging material, very low on the "eye candy" quotient. It's something I've gotten used to in reading a lot of amateur and semi-pro material and I never rule something out purely on the basis of the quality of the artwork (although I understand why Diamond has to). Danielle and Dennis are about the most professional of Rafe's team (although you might forget that because Danielle – who has done some inking for Marvel -- also draws the ultimate gross-out drawing assignment) (she writes and draws her own, presumably LESS gross-out webcomic "Girls with Slingshots" Tuesdays and Thursdays at www.girlswithslingshots.com ).

PLASTIC FARM remains innovative although sincerely demented. As the back cover quote of Johanna Draper Carlson says, "I have to admit I still don't get it…and what I do get disgusts me."

That's okay, Rafe, she hates my guts too.

PLASTIC FARM officially enters the Off-White House Library between Joel Priddy's PULPATOON PILGRIMAGE and Alex Robinson's TRICKED. Check it out at www.plasticfarm.com

Next up, we have Book #1 of 19TH CENTURY DETECTIVE: THE GRAYBRIDGE TERROR and Book #2 AN INSANE ARMY featuring Lane Brain. Story and pencils by Larnad Justin (and inks by our old pal Tim Corrigan on Book #1). I'm afraid that this is in the same MOST ENTHUSIASTIC NEWCOMER category vis-à-vis the artwork, although the storyline is pretty intricate and as a writer who draws rather than an artist who writes, I always tend to make allowances (and often picture how I would have drawn it). It even comes with an "Open ONLY after reading Book one" stamped envelope with a sheet inside explaining what Larnad was driving at which is a very funky extra touch. www.candidcartoons.com





___________________________________________________

REPLIES POSTED ON THE CEREBUS YAHOO! GROUP
___________________________________________________
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.