Welcome to visitors – click here for my 2007 New Year cartoon.

I would like to point out that the fact that my New Year cartoon has appeared in the Church Times this week is really not my fault. By a strange co-incidence my Christmas cartoon will be appearing in the paper at New Year.

In next week’s paper there will a full page worth of my material. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to tell you though.

Posted by Dave at 3:37 pm on December 16, 2005 and filed under Cartooning.

2 Comments

I’m rather ashamed that I don’t have a little box for my newsletter that you can just type your e-mail address into thereby subscribing and unsubscribing on an automatic basis. I have spent many hours looking into possible ways to do this and haven’t yet found one that I can make work and/or like the look of. So for the time being at least the only way to sign up for my newsletter has been to send me a blank e-mail as it says somewhere over there in the right hand column. But, in a bid to get newsletter subscribers up into the high single figures* I am going to have a public altar call so that those of you who have thought about receiving my newsletter but never got as far as making a public commitment to that effect can now do so.

It really is a very good newsletter. It only comes out when there is anything interesting to say, so not that often. Once a month at the most. It contains updates on the latest additions to the site and related news. The December one is now available.

What I’d like you to do if you’ve been touched by what I’ve said in this post is scroll down into the comments and post a message accepting my newsletter. That’s all you have to do.

It’s ok, all heads are bowed (in despair) and all eyes are closed (through boredom), so no-one will see you. Your coaches will wait.

That’s it – make your way down to the comments.

Thank you.

Alternatively:
If you’d prefer not to comment on the site just send a blank e-mail to info(at) cartoonchurch.com, replacing the (at) with the normal symbol and I’ll add you to the newsletter list.

I will of course only use your e-mail for this purpose and will definitely not pass it on to anyone else.

*mild underexaggeration

Posted by Dave at 2:00 pm on December 15, 2005 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.

13 Comments

I have been working very hard today as I have various deadlines and projects to be working on.

I did however have time to take a little break and take part in my latest online distraction, building pages in Squidoo. I mentioned this the other day you may remember. At the moment the site is in its very early days, so there is a chance to add pages on subjects that no-one else has written on yet.

I clicked some buttons and managed to claim the truly great and marvellous Squidoo address www.squidoo.com/uk. This is going to be my exhaustive guide to the UK. At the moment it isn’t that good as it only lists six towns, the first six to come into my head in fact. It also lists some books, but I didn’t choose them, although I will be.

What do you think should be included in any authoritative guide to the UK? Possibilities might include the top benches overlooking the sea, good places to drink tea or sundry facts about red phoneboxes. But I’m sure there must be something more interesting. Please do make suggestions in the comments.

As an unrelated aside I was quite pleased with today’s Advent Calendar cartoon. Hope you are enjoying them.

Posted by Dave at 10:41 pm on December 14, 2005 and filed under In-depth analysis, Sundry posts.

10 Comments

Tony Blair
The World Trade Organisation Ministerial meeting is from the 13-18 December in Hong Kong. One of the items on the agenda is the subsidies to western farmers which have an effect on the ability of famers in poor countries to seel their goods. The KickAllAgriculturalSubsidies blog is a good place to find links to help explain what is going on. If you go to the Make Poverty History website you can send a Christmas card to Prime Minister Tony asking him nicely to do what he can to Make Poverty History in 2006. It’s quite fun to do too – you can read other people’s cards, though your browser does need ‘Flash’ to do it.

Rowan and Jane Williams
I think Archbishop Rowan has been having a pretty tough time of it lately. What with nasty letters from Bishops and this and that it can’t be easy. According to Ruth Gledhill:

Towards the end, (Simon) Mayo asks him (Rowan), ‘Are you enjoying the job?’ He replies, ‘Depends which day of the week you ask me really. I get on with it.’ This is a veiled hint at what several independent sources have told me privately – that in fact, he is finding it pretty awful, even hellish.

I read an interview with Jane Williams in which she talked about the Christmas cards they are sent, so when you send yours why not send a card with an encouraging message to Rowan and Jane? The address is:

Lambeth Palace
London
SE1 7JU

Posted by Dave at 3:25 pm on December 13, 2005 and filed under Anglican goings-on, Make Poverty History.

1 Comment

During my lunchbreak today I made what is known as a ‘lens’ on a new site called Squidoo. It’s here if you want to see it. A ‘lens’, as far as I have gathered up to this point, is a webpage about some topic of interest to the person writing it. The idea is that people can search for things and it will all be very useful.

I’ve no idea whether Squidoo will turn out to be popular or interesting in the long term, but the reason I thought it worth investigating is the man behind it, Seth Godin, is one of my favourite writers on business and marketing related topics about which I have needed to learn a lot over the last year or so.

Commenters at Darren Rouse’s Problogger site have been trying it out too.

Posted by Dave at 2:34 pm on December 12, 2005 and filed under Blogging, Starting a Business, Technical.

4 Comments

Apparently it is possible to identify different Christian groups by their beards.

(There are a few in-jokes which will only make sense to those who have had some involvement with the ‘alternative worship’ community in the UK.)

Posted by Dave at 2:22 pm on December 12, 2005 and filed under Mundane.

2 Comments

Bloggers were the first to be reporting on the Hemel Hempstead explosion – see the England Project. Richard has other links and there are photos on Flickr.

Thankfully there seem to be few people injured, though whether there will be knock-on environmental and other effects remains to be seen. In Essex there is no sign of any more pollution than normal and people haven’t started panic buying petrol.

The man behind and to the right has been having a bonfire in his garden, but that is all.

Posted by Dave at 5:19 pm on December 11, 2005 and filed under Current events.

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No, its ok, I haven’t reached a billion entries on the blog yet.

I was searching for some words on Google and was surprised at the words which have over a billion entries on the search engine. For instance the word ‘specific‘ has over a billion entries, whereas the word ‘man‘ has only half that number. How odd.

What other words have over a billion entries on Google that shouldn’t, and under a billion that should have more? Go on, type in some words and help me in my in-depth analysis.

Posted by Dave at 11:22 pm on December 10, 2005 and filed under In-depth analysis.

1 Comment

What to do about excess condensation around the home

I have nothing to say to the world today so I am going to bring up the subject of ‘Condensation’.

There is a house in the south east of Essex which suffers from an excess of condensation on its single pane windows. I am wondering whether it is possible that it relates to steam leaking from some of the hot water pipes. Would that be possible? I don’t know, but I am hoping some readers might be able to help.

What can one do about excessive condensation? I tried opening a window, but that made it worse.

I have started a new blog category entitled ‘Household hints‘ specifically for the discussion of such pressing issues of the day.

Posted by Dave at 11:15 pm on December 10, 2005 and filed under Household hints.

2 Comments

I had the opportunity to go to the National Gallery yesterday and had a wander around with of of the special audioguide headphones devices. They really do make a visit to the gallery more worthwhile as the commentary is very enlightening. The tour we followed was the ‘Director’s choice’ tour but with a few diversions. I tend to find some of the religious paintings the most interesting and thought I’d post some links to some of six of these on the National Gallery website. If you click ‘image only’ below each picture you can see a larger version. They aren’t necessarily particularly Advent-related but this blog has never claimed to bide by ecclesiastical seasons.

I’m becoming a great fan of audioguides in art galleries. Particularly with older paintings there is often so much in them that the modern day untrained eye (ie mine) doesn’t pick up on until it is pointed out to them.

The paintings are under the ‘read more’ link.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Dave at 12:44 pm on December 9, 2005 and filed under Art.

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This is a shot of a routemaster bus on the route 159 in London on the last day but one day of service before they are all withdrawn except for some of them.

Unfortunately I was on a pedestrian crossing and it was about to run me over, so it is not a very good shot.

If you’d like to see proper photographs of routemasters and full analysis of today’s final routemaster day then Diamond Geezer will no doubt be the man to provide them. See his post here in particular.

Posted by Dave at 9:22 am on December 9, 2005 and filed under In-depth analysis.

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Lots more like this on the Advent Calendar blog.

No more posting from me today I don’t think as I’m away for the day. Comments are set to a setting whereby people who haven’t posted before may have to wait to see their comments appear until I can moderate them.

Posted by Dave at 7:54 am on December 8, 2005 and filed under Cartoons, Mundane.

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