If the intent of the Chronicle is to keep the comics fresh, one must ask the question, why do you keep any of the following:

Beetle Bailey
Peanuts
Blondie
Marmaduke
Family Circus
Rex Morgan MD
Hi & Lois
or
Dennis the Menace

I am 40 years old and all of these strips were old when I was a kid and most aren’t even drawn by the original artists and in the case of Peanuts are re-runs anyway.

I demand you not only bring back Mallard Fillmore in the print edition, but when Chris Muir brings out Day By Day in self-syndication in May I demand you do a little "freshening" and replace one of the above with Day By Day as well. You will note I am not demanding you dump Doonesbury or Opus or any of the other overtly leftist propaganda that passes for comics, only that there be some balance, and what you have right now is unbalanced. You could dump the lion’s share of the above and save a whole lot of money and few people would care all that much.

The LST 2006 Spring Begathon’s Online Auction will be launched tomorrow morning and run through midnight Wednesday.

We are in the process of generating a final list of "must haves" that all of you will be able to bid on.

It’s still not too late to donate something to the auction; simply email us at the following distinct address– lstspring2006auction@gmail.com –and describe the item, service, or "experience" you’d like to donate to help us raise money for our cause.

Let me be clear– you are perfectly free to approach donations to the auction from a cynically selfish perspective. We really don’t care if you’re only just trying to market and promote your product or service, as long as what your donating will fetch high dollars and put money in our pocket.

Ya’ll just go ahead and exploit us– we’ll get over it.

Naturally, "The Penguin" reserves the right to reject any offers, for whatever reason she sees fit.

Meanwhile, we’re reviewing comments threads for any suggestions that have been made in them the past few days… but it wouldn’t hurt for folks who donated or proposed items in those forums to email their thoughts to us as well, so that they become "official" and don’t get overlooked.

Again– lstspring2006auction@gmail.com .

This promises to be a unique experience.