Dave Sim's blogandmail #471 (December 26th, 2007) - The Final Blog&Mail

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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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The FINAL Blog & Mail!

That's right! I got an early Christmas present from God when the computer seized up!

As long as the computer was here, I believed I was obligated to use it (waste not, want not) the fact that it went on the fritz, however, changed the structure of the situation. Fixing or getting something fixed that's broken implies that you believe it's necessary (which is definitely not something I have ever thought about computers).

I have a warranty (a platinum warranty) on the furnace and I will do what needs to be done to keep it functioning because the idea of living in Canada without a working furnace is unthinkable. But the computer? AS IF! I need a computer like I needed the television I threw out.

Sandeep's over here and has pronounced it officially deceased. I'm just going to put in a safe dry place and all the stuff that's on there will be preserved by future generations. The only thing that's actually "lost" (in terms of being in the here and now) is a review I did of Jules Feiffer's HARRY THE RAT WITH WOMEN for Sandeep's VERSUS magazine #7. He's going to see about recovering it but he's no more interested in going to computer repair hell than I am and I have too much work to do to let someone in the house and have to explain "No, I don't want the computer FIXED, I just want the stuff that's on there saved on disk". There's also a first draft of what was going to be the next four Blog & Mails, correspondence up through File 57 (this isn't as much of a concern as it sounds. I have hard copies in the Archive and Claude has enough of the correspondence to do five or six volumes before I need to be worrying about 2007-2008 correspondence: considering that I've only done two volumes in four years, I think we can avoid panicking before, say, 2015 at the earliest). My commentaries on Mark's Gospel are on disk.

As for me, it seems my "lifelong" prison sentence has turned out to be just short of four years: a year answering the backlog of mail when CEREBUS ended, keeping up with the mail (total of a little less than 3,000 pages) and doing the Blog & Mail (probably another 2,000 pages) as well as various articles, interviews, reviews, etc. As I said all along, I was just reading into the record and it looks as if God decided that I didn't have much to add (I was starting to wonder: I think I've answered every question at least five times!).

I will be spending roughly 100 hours on the Internet promoting my new bi-monthly title (starting, God willing, January 30 at 6 pm EDST on the Comics Journal Message boards and then going on from there. I'll be posting my schedule at that time).

I know this was supposed to be the official launch of the new title here on Boxing Day but, you know, in a strange way it IS! The official launch will now take place when Jeff Tundis declares the website officially and totally up and running. We'll pick up from there January 30 through most of the month of February when the ordering period is.

Thanks to all of you for sharing my imprisonment with me while it lasted...thanks to Jeff Tundis, Sandeep, Darrell Epp, Matt Dow, Scott Berwanger and all the regulars. Ted Adams for sending me all the IDW stuff (much obliged -- sorry I won't be able to plug it anymore). I've got 50 more of the 1,000 PLATINUM REAL WORLD PREVIEW EDITIONS to put in plastic bags with backing boards and then into the specially stamped mailers with the 4-digit back cover access code to the website VIP areas. That leaves 1,000 GOLD VIP to be likewise stuffed on Saturday and Monday (Christmas Eve).

Happy New Year everyone and thanks again!




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

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

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

Win-Mill Productions

Or, you can check out Mars Import:

Mars Import

Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.
Here are the Diamond Star System codes:

Cerebus #1-25 $30.00 STAR00070

High Society #26-50 $30.00 STAR00071

Church and State I #52-80 $35.00 STAR00271

Church and State II #81-111 $35.00 STAR00321

Jaka's Story #114-136 $30.00 STAR00359

Melmoth #139-150 $20.00 STAR00431

Flight #151-162 $20.00 STAR00543

Women #163-174 $20.00 STAR00849

Reads #175-186 $20.00 STAR01063

Minds #187-200 $20.00 STAR01916

Guys #201-219 $25.00 STAR06972

Rick's Story #220-231 $20.00 STAR08468

Going Home I #232-250 $30.00 STAR10981

Form and Void #251-265 $30.00 STAR13500

Latter Days #266 - 288 $35.00 AUG031920

The Last Day #289 - 300 $25.00 APR042189

Collected Letters - $30 FEB052434

Collected Letters 2 - $22 MAR073054