Today has not been an entirely good day, not least because I have had problems with Paypal, the system I use to collect payments on this website.
All of a sudden Paypal has started to charge postage on every single order, even if it is a licence which will not be posted as I do not post the licences. The code on my website has not changed, so it is a problem at their end. I have spent hours phoning them and messing around with the code for the payment buttons, but all to no avail. There does not seem to be any way to resolve the problem.
It would be a nuisance if I have to stop using Paypal because of this, as I cannot afford another credit card system, which would mean I cannot take payments.
In the meantime apologies to everyone who has paid me today for the extra postage charge you have been forced to pay. I will be in touch shortly to offer you a refund.
Posted by Dave at 11:59 pm on August 31, 2007 and filed under CartoonChurch progress.
8 Comments
This is the ’spot the difference’ that was included on the children’s activity sheet at the Greenbelt Festival communion service last Sunday. There should be 20 differences between the two pictures, but you won’t be able to see them in the online version so you’ll need to print off the ultra-high definition version which you can do here on the main CartoonChurch site. I’ve done it as a gif image for including in documents or a pdf which should print off nicely on its own.
It is entirely free to print off this worksheet for your own personal use whilst sitting at the kitchen table, but if you print off copies for a group of people or publish it anywhere else I ask you to buy a licence – normally £3 (single use) or £35 (unlimited use for a year) if you’re a church or suchlike – see here for the particulars. Hope that’s fair.
It goes without saying that you don’t have to be a child to do a spot the difference. Some of our Greenbelt campsitemates (Alice, Jacqui, Lemly and Rhys) did a very good job during the communion service and afterwards. I think they got 18 in total.
I will post the answers in a few days when you have all had a chance to get very frustrated and waste a reasonable amount of time.
[Note for bloggers: Please note that the download locations may change as bandwidth limits dictate. As always I highly appreciate any links, but please post links to the post rather than the high resolution files. Thank you!]
Posted by Dave at 10:01 pm on August 30, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, New CartoonChurch cartoons, Religion, Worksheets.
9 Comments
I thought I’d post some of the drawings I did for various Greenbelt-related things for those who have not seen them. These are the rare black and white versions of some colour cartoons that appeared on the Guide to Greenbelt published by the Church Times.
Incidentally I had a great time loitering in the Church Times yurt pretending to be important and writing my name inside books when no-one was looking. The Church Times Team were promoting their new magazine for girls called ‘Caris‘. I posted about it a month or two back if you remember – at the time it was going to be called ‘Grace’ but this was changed for legal reasons.
Also in the yurt were Third Way, now also part of the Church Times setup. They had the folding table on the right.
In other Greenbelt news, you may not have read this link on many other blogs. From the Bexhill-on-Sea Observer:
Members of the St Peter’s Youth Group go to Greenbelt with the blessing of the Rector, and return again to Bexhill as planned on Monday evening.
Posted by Dave at 6:27 pm on August 29, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt, Religion.
10 Comments
Usually it takes a few days to go through these phases (with the showering being first) but today I have been through all of them.
I have had a splendid time at the Festival and have returned invigorated. This is mainly because of the many friends I have seen and people I have met I think. It was great to see and meet you. I did go to some good sermons and lectures and pop groups too. I will be posting about some of the things I saw and heard and drew at Greenbelt over the next few days although that might depend upon whether I lapse back into one of the earlier phases and if so which one.
The camper van made it and made it back again. This is a wonder to us all.
Feel free to use this cartoon on your blog. A link here would be lovely.
Posted by Dave at 10:56 pm on August 28, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt, Religion.
7 Comments
[Cartoon from the Dave Walker Guide to Greenbelt, 2005]
We’re about to leave to go to the Greenbelt Festival via various places. Here are some sundry bits of information relating to Greenbelt this year:
I have done 2 lots of drawings for the 2007 festival, both of which will be available free. These are:
- Some drawings for the children’s booklet for the Sunday morning service. You should be able to get hold of one if you lie about your age, or indeed if you have children. The Sunday morning service is being organised by Sanctus1 this year and they asked me to make a contribution which I was pleased to do.
- The Church Times Guide to Greenbelt. The Church Times did a Guide to the Festival in 2005 and 2006, and we have done another this year. I say ‘we’ because I have done some cartoons for the cover and also some inside (I think). I’ve only seen the cover so I don’t know what is inside. You can pick up a copy from the Church Times tent, and I’ll be helping to hand them out around the site.
I’ll post some or all of this material on the blog in September, as I’m aware that many people reading will not be at Greenbelt (and for whom this post is, I imagine, quite tedious).
Talking of the Church Times, they will be giving my book away again this year as part of an introductory ’subscription to the newspaper’ offer, which I’m pleased about. They are signed copies, which reduces the value of the book by about 13 or 14 percent, but it is a good offer nevertheless.
Once again we will be holding our annual Wibsite gathering, this time at 3pm on Sunday on the campsite. If you are connected to the Wibsite in some tenuous way then you’re most welcome. This year Chris, who built the Wiblog system will be with us, which is marvellous. We might or might not have some news relating to the Wibsite which we will announcing to a great fanfare and some ready-salted cashew nuts. We have been blogging on the Wibsite for 5 years now – would you believe it.
All sorts of other people are doing all sorts of things at the festival. Here are a few:
Weather Forecast: At the moment it’s looking good. But we all know that 5 day forecasts are a load of nonsense.
If you’re at Greenbelt it would be great to meet / see you. All being well (if the van makes it) we’ll be in campsite 9 with a rusty campervan and a big white ‘W’ flag, so do come and say hello. Alternatively the Church Times tent would be a place to contact me. If I’m not there you could leave a message perhaps.
Comments on this blog may take a while to be moderated for the next week.
Posted by Dave at 10:53 pm on August 20, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Festivals and Exhibitions, Greenbelt.
5 Comments
Church House Bookshop are doing the book and calendar together for £8.99 until the 1st of October. Non-UK readers can take advantage of this offer too.
Posted by Dave at 10:27 pm on August 20, 2007 and filed under Books, Religion.
Comments Off
This is a mishmash of posts that I will not have time to make before we leave for Greenbelt and various other places.
Vegetables
This is to show what can be grown in fairly small plastic pots in a garden in Essex by people who usually remember to do the watering but not always.
Prayer One
Apparently pastors in Denver have taken to praying from on board a helicopter called ‘Prayer One’. Unfortunately at the time of writing the website is down, but you can see a Google cached version here. There is a newspaper report on the LA Times, but it might ask you to subscribe if it isn’t in the right mood.
From the website:
It is hoped that with enough awareness, every person in the city, when they look up and see a helicopter flying, they might ask, “I wonder if that’s a group of pastors praying over our city?”
Marvellous. Though they should be walking.
What’s my blog rated?
Find out here. Mine is rated a ‘G’ (Which I think is a ‘U’), even though I occasionally use the word ‘hell’. I’m not displaying the special graphic though. If I display one ‘online-quiz-sort-of-thing’ graphic I’ll have to display them all, and we know where that leads.
Christian Book Awards
Whilst we wait to hear about the nominations for the controversial Christian Blog Awards here are the Christian Book Awards. I can’t remember who told me about this, but it might have been Russ at Inspire Magazine.
Once again the categories prove to be problematic. If you are not a children’s writer you have two options: (1) Most challenging, life changing book (2) Most persuasive, revealing book.
Hmmm. The problem with these categories is that they sound a bit, well… fervent. There are some of us who (and I really am not trying to set myself up for some sort of an award) could not really be ‘challenging and life changing’ or ‘persuasive and revealing’ even if we put our minds to it.
I think what is needed is some slightly more half hearted categories:
- Most sensible, not getting too carried away with things book
- Most suitable book for a reasonably lengthy train journey
- Best book to keep in the bathroom for a bit of a chuckle
- Book with the most evenly-spaced stapling
I’m sure you can do better.
Posted by Dave at 7:12 pm on August 19, 2007 and filed under Sundry posts.
10 Comments
I am of course only larking around. I love and adore Facebook, just like everyone else. However, I have been thinking about a few Facebook-related things that might or might not be causes for concern and worry.
1) Facebook is now allowing feeds of some content to be posted outside of Facebook
You can now get a ‘feed’ of your friends updates. I’m not talking about the standard ‘News feed’, but RSS feeds like the ones that blogs have. For those who don’t know what feeds are – see the link on the right hand side of this blog entitled ‘what is this orange thing?’. You can find feeds in the right hand column on such pages as your ’status updates’ page. This means that people can read your Facebook status updates using a site like Bloglines or Google reader. This is good news, but it could be concerning news if your privacy is important. If you have the standard Facebook settings there is now nothing to stop one of your friends publishing your status updates to the world, say in the sidebar of their blog or somewhere. From now on you need to have friends you can trust.
2) Some of the ‘applications’ in Facebook are being rather naughty
See this link on Techcrunch for details. In summary, some of the applications such as ‘My Questions’ and ‘Superwall’ have been engaging in something described as ‘notification fraud’. I have noticed this very thing. The My Questions application makes up questions you don’t know about, and then e-mails friends without you knowing. I was very surprised to find people answering a question I hadn’t asked the other day. It was nice of these people to answer my question of course, but it was worrying that I hadn’t asked it and that the application had contacted them all of a sudden without my knowing. Very very naughty.
3) Er… that’s it
Usually I try to have 3 points to a blog post, like in sermons.
For a Facebook cartoon you can post on your blog and for more information about how Facebook will destroy us all, see my previous post on the subject.
Posted by Dave at 11:40 pm on August 18, 2007 and filed under Technical.
4 Comments
I have had cause to glue several pieces of wood together lately, so I thought I would keep you updated.
The budget dining room chair
This became broken because someone had been leaning back on it in the way that we were told not to do at school. I poured some wood glue into the holes and then put it back together. Unfortunately since my gluing the chair has one leg that is longer than the others so the chair wobbles when you sit on it or when a cat jumps on it. At the moment the short leg has a piece of folded-up newspaper underneath it which means that it is approximately level. As a longer term project I plan to cut a little bit off the other three legs (using my saw). This may need to be repeated so it is likely that the chair will become quite a bit lower than our other chairs. We will mainly use it for sitting at coffee tables or to take the humblest seat like it says in the Bible.
The budget two seater settee
This became broken during a particularly lively game of scrabble. One moment I was thinking of words using seven vowels, the next I was on the floor. I poured some wood glue into the holes and then put it back together. I plan to be a bit calmer when playing scrabble in the future.
The budget Argos lightbox
This became broken because it was not very well made in the first place. I use the lightbox to trace cartoons from one sheet of paper to another or to trace things I cannot draw, like horses. The lightbox had been broken for several months and broke into two pieces every time I picked it up to use it, which was a mild annoyance. I poured some wood glue into the holes and then put it back together. From now on I will be doing more cartoons about horses. Actually I do not think I have ever done a cartoon about horses.
Posted by Dave at 11:39 pm on August 17, 2007 and filed under Household hints, In-depth analysis, Utter nonsense.
7 Comments
I’m aware that this is a rain cartoon, not a hypochondria cartoon, but I cannot find the hypochondria one and it is too late to scan as it will wake the neighbours. “It is that blessed cartoonist and his 2am scanning again”, they will exclaim as they are awakened from their slumber. 2am typing is even a bit of a problem as I tend to hammer on the keys a bit to make sure the keyboard gets the message. In Eastbourne I used to keep the lady downstairs awake with my heavy typing, but she always said she didn’t mind.
I am awake as I have tingling and numbness in my arm and my leg and various other places. Last night I had the same thing along with some shaking. I have had this before as I think I have told you. I have been to the doctor, who told me that there is nothing wrong with me. This usually happens when I go to the doctor. I describe my various worrying ailments but am told that I am perfectly fine. I find it quite concerning to continue to have various worrying ailments when there is nothing wrong with me, so I become anxious. The combination of various worrying ailments and anxiety is worse than just having various worrying ailments, so I return to the doctor, who says that there is nothing wrong with me apart from perhaps some anxiety. I then become concerned about how to get rid of my anxiety, and so the process continues.
I am telling you this so that you can tell me to snap out of it and stop being so silly.
As an aside: Apologies to all the people still awaiting replies to e-mail messages. I have been suffering from various worrying ailments caused by my own concern about those same worrying ailments, so there have been delays.
Posted by Dave at 2:42 am on August 16, 2007 and filed under Sundry posts.
37 Comments
[Original available for republication on payment of a small licence fee here]
Steve Tilley reflects on his time at New Wine, the large Christian summer camp for charismatics. I have never been to New Wine, but I have been to a lot of similar events and I tend to think what Steve thinks but in a less coherent way.
I tend not to go to large Evangelical gatherings these days. Not because of the preaching aspect, because I quite enjoy writing down the things about which I am disagreeable in my little notebook. It is the worship and ‘ministry’ aspects and the high volume of nonsense spoken from the platform that keeps the likes of me away.
That said I quite like the sound of being able to wander off as Steve did when the worship leaders got a bit overexcitable. Perhaps we should go to New Wine next year. It might be quite fun.
Posted by Dave at 1:38 pm on August 15, 2007 and filed under Church, Festivals and Exhibitions, Religion.
7 Comments
As a creator, it’s tough to have a great inspiration every day. If you add the constraint that the inspiration has to be in a narrow field, you bring down the odds considerably.
[Scott Adams - from today's post on his blog.]
It is quite difficult drawing cartoons about religion all of the time. I am quite often driven to distraction in various ways, the details of which you are mostly spared as there is nothing worse than a blogger going on about how difficult their life is. Which mine is not really, when looked at in the grand scheme of things. Unfortunately it is difficult to look at the grand scheme of things as we do not understand it. Which is where religion comes in, which is why I draw cartoons about it.
Sorry, I decided that today’s post was rubbish once again, so it was struck forth.
Posted by Dave at 10:32 pm on August 14, 2007 and filed under Cartoons, Religion, Utter nonsense.
6 Comments
The not- quite- daily internet column of Dave Walker. Dave is a freelance cartoonist who also writes and draws for the Church Times. (
Especially like the "thistles"!
