Here are some quotes from Christians about the Manchester Super Casino. They are all taken entirely out of context:

Sanctus1 Blog:
“Super, we get a new massive casino in a part of town where the main recreational opportunities already involve spending money that many don’t have – Gala and Mecca hang your heads.”

Church Action on Poverty:
“Likely to create ‘crippling debts and undermine efforts to tackle child poverty in the city’.”

The Evangelical Alliance:
“Manchester is not well enough equipped to deal with the social impacts of problem gambling.”

Ruth Gledhill:
“I reckon that the problem is tax revenue. So many people are stopping smoking, the Government needs to foster other addictions in Britain to keep the cash coming in.”

Sarah from the Wibsite: (30th January entry)
“I don’t know if I’m just missing the point but I find it difficult to see this as the fantastic news it is reported as.”

Dr Rowan Williams:
“I’m very concerned that we can’t think of better ways of regenerating deprived areas than by developing institutions which may well contribute to the material and spiritual deprivation of the area in the long term.”

Bishop Mike of Bristol:
“To lure us into thinking we can be winners when most of us will be losers will break human spirits. To offer people no hope is bad enough; to offer them false hope is utterly cruel.”

The Bishop of Blackburn:
“I would always be keen to back any further application for a casino if similar proposals arose.”

Feel free to grab one of these images and put it on your blog if it (for instance) might help illustrate your own post on the subject. You can use the following codes:

First cartoon (machine with buttons):

<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/casino-cartoon-2.gif" alt="cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com" />
<p>Cartoon by <a href="http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/">Dave Walker</a>. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at <a href="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/">We Blog Cartoons</a>.</p>


Second cartoon (money down drain):

<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/casino-cartoon-1.gif" alt="cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com" />
<p>Cartoon by <a href="http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/">Dave Walker</a>. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at <a href="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/">We Blog Cartoons</a>.</p>


Posted by Dave at 7:55 pm on January 31, 2007 and filed under Current events.

5 Comments

I’m no expert, but that dosn’t stop me talking about a subject. Here is my advice:

1. Read Seth Godin’s thoughts on Powerpoint

Seth’s Blog: Really Bad Powerpoint

He’s approaching the subject from a marketing / sales perspective, but I think what he has to say is very useful.

2. Remember that you don’t have to be tied to Microsoft these days

I’m sure most of you know this, but you can get software to do presentations for free – no need to go and buy Microsoft Powerpoint for your church. I use OpenOffice – the presentations bit of this is OpenOffice Impress. It will open Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and you can save presentations as Powerpoint files in case you need to pass them on to people who do use the Microsoft programme.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have entitled this post ‘using Powerpoint’, but that is still the phrase that most people use.

3. How about using some cartoons?

This is where I come in with my heavy handed sales pitch.

You can get a licence to use my cartoons as many times as you want in your church presentations for £35 a year. Worth thinking about perhaps.

[Small note to existing subscribers: I'm going to be adding quite a bit of new material for you soon. I'm also aware that I'm still woefully behind with my renewals reminders - if your 'year' has run out please keep using the material and I'll hopefully get in touch with you shortly.]

Posted by Dave at 9:46 am on January 31, 2007 and filed under Church, Technical.

13 Comments

Update (31st January, 1am): Well, the good news is that I think my first ever tax return has been entirely filled in. I’m sure I’m being very generous to the tax man, but such is the price of not being good with these things. The bad news is that the tax website has entirely stopped working, so I’m unable to be sure that they got it (I didn’t see a ‘we’ve got your tax return’ screen, though I did get an encouraging e-mail). I’m also unable to pay my tax, so at this moment the £100 fine is still coming my way. Anyway, giving up and going to bed.

Update (31st January, 9am): All done and paid. Hurrah!

Posted by Dave at 8:21 am on January 30, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress, Cartoons, Starting a Business.

12 Comments

Hello everybody, this is your Anglican news reporter
With all the news that is news across the nation
On the scene at the Anglican Communion
There seems to have been some disturbance here
Pardon me sir, did you see what happened?*

Ahem. Sorry. This is work, not procrastination as it might first appear. I have not entirely done the tax return, but I am getting there. Never let it be said that tax is not taxing.

Don’t ask where the Ray Stevens quote above came from. We’ll call it stress.

Ok, Anglican matters of interest this Monday evening:

The main Archbishops are about to have a big meeting
It is the primates meeting. A few Bishops from the USA are going along – one that has just been announced is one Bishop Epting (News report of some sort). It turns out that Bishop Epting has a blog entitled ‘That We All May Be One – reflections on unity’, and he sounds like a thoroughly decent sort of fellow.
(Link to the blog found via Father Jake)

Bishop Mike’s Blogosphere
Bishop Mike Hill of Bristol has been sharing some of his favourite blogs. He mentioned my inaccurate comment about the C of E being ‘fairly anti blogging’. My line is now ‘the more centralised institutions of the Church of England have generally been fairly anti-blogging up until now’.

How many hours a week should a Vicar work?
Rev Sam and the Mad Priest have a chat about it here.

U2Charist coming to Britain
U2Charist to Hit England for the First Time

Seating will be moved so that the 500-strong congregation can dance or wave their arms. Bishop Ellis, who will be chief celebrant, said he had yet to decide whether to swap vestments for jeans.

Too right – you can’t wave your arms with the seating there.

Yes, yes yes. I’ll get back to my receipts and my columns now. But I do also have to do a lot of thinking about the Anglican church at the moment. In fact I spent this afternoon in Starbucks in Basildon making notes on that very topic. Any thoughts you might have on all things ‘Anglican Communion’ would be welcomed.

*Original lyrics and (for the brave) mp3

Posted by Dave at 9:49 pm on January 29, 2007 and filed under Anglican goings-on, Religion.

10 Comments

I am under pressure with the tax return and also important drawings which must be drawn. Therefore I am posting cartoons which had not, until this moment of desperation, met the exacting standards I usually require for drawings to be posted on this weblog.

For some reason I have spent much of the morning on the phone to Orange. My mobile telephone has never worked properly in the 2 years I have had it and for reasons I cannot fathom I chose this morning to contact them. Idiot.

Posted by Dave at 11:18 am on January 29, 2007 and filed under Cartoons.

10 Comments

How do you organise your drawers?

Posted by Dave at 5:12 pm on January 28, 2007 and filed under Art, Essex Life, Household hints, Mundane.

22 Comments

Hey, look at this:

(Diagram showing co-occurrences of names in the New Testament)

This is from a site called ‘Many eyes‘, which enables you to look at data in interesting ways. Your computer might need a special widgetty-thingummy, I don’t know. Here are some interesting ones I found done by Crossway, who are Bible-related people. I don’t really understand them, but they look lovely and look like they should be interesting. You can zoom and click and all sorts of things.

Examples:

Many Eyes : Co-Occurrences of Names in the New Testament
Many Eyes : Who Gets Mentioned Together in the New Testament

I’m sure they will be a blessing to some of you theological geeks and people like me who like the Bible and nice pictures.

This page explains it all a bit more. I found the link here.

Posted by Dave at 8:11 pm on January 27, 2007 and filed under Profound, Spirituality.

4 Comments

No time for cartoons today as I am doing paperwork. Some links:

cartoonchurch.com – Web Site Audience Profile from Quantcast
Apparently CartoonChurch.com readers are mainly female, asian, passers-by rather than addicts, and the largest group of you are aged 55-64.

What Does 200 Calories Look Like?
Have I posted this before? Not sure. Contains pictures of food.

Cowboy Church Network
No idea what this is all about. Planting cowboy churches or something.
(Decided this link was without much merit so deleted it. You can always Google it if you really have to see it.)

John Davies: Tale of Alan and Eve

Seems to me that rights of conscience are made subject to legislation all the time, and today my conscience is troubled (yet again) by the Church’s choice of which matters of legislation it wants to get worked up about.

Posted by Dave at 10:53 am on January 27, 2007 and filed under Sundry posts.

4 Comments

[Click on the image and a great big large one will pop up in a miraculous fashion]

At the church homegroup I go to (yes, I go to a church homegroup) we read the parable of the mustard seed and some of the other pictures of the kingdom of God that Jesus talked about. Now, I don’t claim to entirely understand the parables, but it seems to me that the picture of the kingdom of God described by Jesus is like something that grows organically and in subtle ways, not by force or making demands or by insisting on our rights.

I think that in the UK the Church / Christianity is in danger of being seen as an entity / religion that is continually standing up for its rights and making demands. I think, for example, that the British Airways cross incident made us look particularly bad despite the fact we ‘won’.

That said, standing up for the rights of the oppressed is something we should indeed be doing.

The current ‘gay adoption’ issue is a difficult one I have to say. For those on the conservative side of things standing up for the right to hold their belief is the obvious thing to do. But even for those with more liberal views it is not straightforward – I think for instance that Kim on theconnexion.net states things well in this comment.

Personally I hope some sort of compromise can be reached. Perhaps this one being discussed on William Crawley’s Will and Testament blog. There is of course a lot more being written about this everywhere – Thinking Anglicans has some links.

This is the code to republish this cartoon on your blog. It’ll just be the small version, not the miraculous popping up version. I can provide cartoons, but miraculous popping up I cannot provide.

<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/mustard-seed.gif" alt="cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com" />
<p>Cartoon by <a href="http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/">Dave Walker</a>. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at <a href="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/">We Blog Cartoons</a>.</p>


Have a good weekend everyone. If you’re in Manchester why not go along to this Johnny Cash service.

Posted by Dave at 12:37 pm on January 26, 2007 and filed under Anglican goings-on, Cartoons, Religion.

14 Comments

Posted by Dave at 5:54 pm on January 25, 2007 and filed under Blogging, Cartoons.

2 Comments

I drew this months ago. I can’t for the life of me remember why. The code to republish this on your blog is below and I’ve added code for yesterday’s too. If these aren’t to your liking you can always use one of my other republishable drawings from We Blog Cartoons.

<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/they-are-wrong.gif" alt="cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com" />
<p>Cartoon by <a href="http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/">Dave Walker</a>. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at <a href="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/">We Blog Cartoons</a>.</p>


Posted by Dave at 9:19 am on January 25, 2007 and filed under Cartoons.

11 Comments

I regularly read blogs which express extreme opinions about both ‘sides’ in the various debates that are going on within the Anglican church at the moment. I find that the websites portraying extreme liberal and extreme conservative positions are amongst the best sources available to give me the material I need in order to do my drawings.

I find that the persuasiveness of any individual site depends largely upon the way that they put their message across. If you express your views aggressively and without respect for your opponents as fellow human beings I will be quite likely to dismiss your opinions and, for repeated offenders, your RSS feed.

Some of these websites hide behind humour as a way to make their aggressive point. Sorry, but you do not fool me.

I suspect though that sometimes I am as guilty of these crimes as the next weblogger. Feel free to give me a knowing look in the comments when that is the case.

Apologies that today’s drawing is rubbish. I, like my fellow tax returnees, am devoting my energy today to my paperwork.

Update: Apologies that todays post appeared and then disappeared. There seems to be some sort of bug in the latest WordPress that makes a post automatically and suddenly mark itself ‘private’ for no reason at all a while after it is written. This has happened a couple of times now since I upgraded and never before then. I’ll look into it. … 5 minutes later… It seems that I am not alone.

The code to publish this cartoon on your blog:

<img src="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/cb/your-aggression.gif" alt="cartoon from www.weblogcartoons.com" />
<p>Cartoon by <a href="http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/">Dave Walker</a>. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at <a href="http://www.weblogcartoons.com/">We Blog Cartoons</a>.</p>


Posted by Dave at 10:24 am on January 24, 2007 and filed under Anglican goings-on, Cartoons.

19 Comments