Just a reminder that the deadline for the cheapest tickets for the Greenbelt Festival is at the end of October, ie in a few minutes. However, due to unforseen whathaveyous you now have one more day to order your budget passes at the Greenbelt website.

Talking of Greenbelt (tenuous link), you might remember that a few years ago I and a few others dressed up as Ned Flanders from the Simpsons at the festival and got our pictures in the Daily Star. I posted the photo here. Well, the ‘Ned Flanders Appreciation Society’ have been in action again, this time on the Graham Norton television show. A report by one of the Ned-ees is here on the Ship of the Fools website.

I had the misfortune to watch the programme itself, which really was awful, though well done to Simon and Steve for getting on there. It was quite amusing to see Graham Norton swearing that the Ned Flanders Appreciation Society really is genuine and really has an annual meeting once a year. Somewhat of an inexactitude there I think Graham.

Posted by Dave at 11:28 pm on October 31, 2006 and filed under Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt, TV.

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Posted by Dave at 12:50 pm on October 31, 2006 and filed under Cartoons, Environment.

4 Comments

Admired by Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass, Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986) was one of the most innovative and unusual pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionising graphic design and encouraging the creativity of thousands of people - all while living and practicing as a Catholic nun in California.

So says the Guardian on a slide show page about an Exhibition of Sister Corina’s work currently showing in London. The official site has more examples of her work, and there is a new book of her work published by Four Corners Books - more about the book, ‘Come Alive! The Spirited Art Of Sister
Corita’ can be found on their site. Thanks to Richard Embray of Four Corners Books for the image used in this post.

Posted by Dave at 3:46 pm on October 30, 2006 and filed under Art, Ecumenical matters, Design, Books.

5 Comments

I have noticed when talking to technical internet geek types that they give me a funny look when I mention that I still use the old fashioned Outlook Express e-mail programme. In these circles using Outlook Express is akin to walking around with a big hat on saying ‘what an idiot I am’, so I decided that I would try one of the more fashionable e-mail programmes, Eudora.

Well, I tried. The download is easy enough, but when it comes to importing messages and settings the programme trundles away for ever giving you no idea what is going on before finally dying in a heap.

For now I will continue to wear a hat proclaiming my idiothood.

Posted by Dave at 3:22 pm on October 30, 2006 and filed under Technical.

10 Comments

I’m sorry that the site has been down for the weekend. I’ll say nothing more about it at the moment except that I was aware of the situation but could do nothing about it. I just hope that no subscribers requiring an urgent cartoon have been let down in their hour of need.

All being well normal service will resume tomorrow. As we’ve been away I may be a little behind answering e-mails etc - please bear with me.

Posted by Dave at 12:41 am on October 30, 2006 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.

7 Comments

I took this photograph in a seaside town yesterday.

I’d like to reassure everyone that any peering on my part was merely to ascertain the extent to which peering was or was not allowed. Once I had read and understood the notice I was quick to bring any peering that I had undertaken up until that point to a sudden and abrupt end.

Posted by Dave at 8:35 pm on October 27, 2006 and filed under Art, Photographs, Signs.

9 Comments

Part three in a hastily thrown together selection of links.

People who don’t do their drawings on paper:

indexed
Graph-like things on index cards.

gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"
Hugh draws on the back of business cards. (His work may contain strong language at times.)

gapingvoid: how to be creative
Hugh’s ‘how to be creative’, his best selling blog post I think.

Posted by Dave at 6:22 am on October 26, 2006 and filed under Cartooning, Links: bloggers.

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Thinking about cartooning specifically in part two of my hastily thrown together links series.

Chewing Pencils: Helping you make money from drawing cartoons!
Matt Glover has been building up this ‘how to’ site about cartooning over the last few months. At the moment there is a bit of a ‘Christmas cartoon’ contest going on there, but there’s lots of good stuff in the archives.

The Cartoon Fiend
Interviews with various cartoonists. Very interesting. May contain non PG rated material.

Posted by Dave at 6:22 am on October 25, 2006 and filed under Cartooning.

1 Comment

A hastily thrown-together set of links.

We’re going away for a few days and so I’m just going to leave some links in the fridge for you to heat up. They are all of the vague theme of ‘being creative’.

Nick Page » Ideas and Creativity
Nick has written lots of books, mostly Christian sort of ones I think. This is where he answers the ‘where do your ideas come from?’ question.

DaveJeffery.com: Top 10 Creativity boosters
More ideas for getting ideas.

Posted by Dave at 6:00 am on October 24, 2006 and filed under Art, Links: bloggers.

1 Comment

I spend a large percentage of my time online dealing with spam. E-mails, comments on the Wiblog system and comments on this blog are the main three. Automated anti-spam systems can help a bit, but at the end of the day one still has to go through everything for what are called ‘false positives’, which are like ‘false prophets’ but spelt differently.

One day the whole internet will be so overwhelmed with spam that we will have to give up on it. I will be so inflicted before most people, at which point I will turn off the computer for ever and spend my days tending a small vegetable patch.

Posted by Dave at 11:40 am on October 23, 2006 and filed under Cartoons, Technical.

8 Comments

Two good points in the comments from yesterday’s post:

Are the shops safeguarded?
Well, yes and no. As Neil pointed out, the SPCK shops are only ’safeguarded’ if people keep buying things from them, a point that I should have made.

Who are the people who now run SPCK anyway?
Joe did a bit more digging around than I did yesterday and came up with some interesting snippets of information on the St Stephen Foundation website, which seems to be linked with the St Stephen Trust, the people who have taken over the SPCK shops. Interesting beliefs listed on their ‘Why Orthodoxy‘ page include:

• The Orthodox Church is the only true church:

  Since the time of Saint Peter, the Orthodox Church has remained unaltered with seamless continuity. Established in A.D. 33 at the time of Pentecost, it is the only church true to the Word of God, and therefore, the only one that offers true salvation and eternal life.

• Certain Christians, the precise identity of whom is uncertain (but they could be evangelicals or perhaps protestants generally), are going to hell:

  In the United States of America, people are flocking back to what they believe is Christianity but, in reality, they are being misled by false prophets - a blind man. They are persuaded to join “Feel-Good” churches where they are told they will be saved by making a donation and saying a few simple words. Unfortunately, many of these are “feel good” churches are established just to make the management rich, or where the minister actually believes his own message, they are leading poor misguided souls into eternal damnation - both will fall into the pit.

• The Roman Catholic church is not ‘the true church of Christ’:

  One hundred and fifty thousand souls convert or revert back to the Roman Catholic faith each year in the USA. In their misguided belief, they assume that this is the true Church of Christ.

As Joe says, how are they going to feel about stocking Protestant or Roman Catholic literature?

Posted by Dave at 11:37 am on October 22, 2006 and filed under Ecumenical matters, Save the SPCK.

2 Comments

Orthodox charity St Stephen the Great Charitable Trust are to take over the SPCK bookshop chain, which you might remember from my campaign earlier in the year.

This is splendid news as it means the future of the shops has been safeguarded.

Thanks to Neil for passing on the news.

Posted by Dave at 12:21 pm on October 21, 2006 and filed under Current events, Ecumenical matters, Save the SPCK, One-man campaigns.

5 Comments