Oh Pat, You've Done It Again!

Pat Robertson, host of TV's The 700 Club, professional religious authority and font of comedy material, is at it again! This week, in a startling and landmark declaration, Pat aimed his sights at video games yet again, stating that murdering a character in a game is the same as murdering someone in real life (!).

A concerned gamer called in to The 700 Club and asked the beloved spiritual leader if God considers "virtual killing" a sin.

Robertson confirmed the gamer's worst fears by quoting Jesus: "If you look upon a woman with lust in your heart, you've committed adultery." Robertson then somehow applied that old saw to the activity of playing a video game, declaring it a "virtual sin."

Robertson, who has never actually seen a video game, added, "I think mayhem, killing, Grand Theft Auto, they get pretty bizarre. So if you're murdering somebody in cyberspace in a sense you're performing the act, whether you like it or not."

Well that's that then! I'd better high-tail it to my local police station and turn myself in immediately, because I'm one of the biggest mass murderers and serial killers in the history of our country. In my time playing the various GTA games I've wracked up literally tens of thousands of murders. Maybe hundreds of thousands. I wouldn't be surprised if I got life without parole plus one million years. I'm deeply sorry I've put my family through all this and hope some day they can find it in their hearts to forgive me.

Jesus wept.

Pat Robertson has become the PETA of the religious world. I have no doubt that normal religious folk cringe every time he opens his noise hole, just as rational animal lovers do whenever PETA makes one of their insane, attention-getting cry-for-help press releases.

Say Pat, regarding this whole, "thinking it's the same as doing it" thing in the bible... do you suppose maybe, just maybe that passage wasn't meant to be taken literally? Could it be possible it just means something like "if you want to be a good person, don't sit around thinking about murdering that guy that cut you off on the way to work this morning." Interpreting it in absolute terms just seems like taking the off ramp to crazy town. A god who gives his children imaginations but then punishes them for using it isn't worthy of being worshiped.

And you do realize that before the invention of the printing press the only way to create copies of the bible was for monks to transcribe it by hand, right? Did you ever play the "Telephone" game? The one where you whisper "bath towel" to the first person, and they pass it on to the next person and so on around the room until the last person hears it as "pee pants Hitler gravel." Is it slightly possible that the word of god may have gotten mangled by the monks over the long centuries? 

Not to mention the fact that words change meaning over the milllennia, and the bible's been translated, added to and revised several thousand times since it was written.

While you think about that, Mr. Robertson, I'll be sitting on the floor in front of my TV murdering away.

Things You Should Know About Me: Courtroom Artist

I was once a courtroom artist.

Back in the early 1990s I got a phone call from my former high school art teacher. He was moonlighting at a local TV station as their graphic designer and said they needed a courtroom artist for a prominent area murder trial. He wasn't available (due to his daytime job as art teacher) and asked if I'd be interested. Being the young and dumb artist that I was back then I enthusiastically agreed to do it. I was sure that such a high profile gig would get me noticed and lead to more work.

I showed up at the courthouse the next day, drawing tablet and colored pencils in hand. Things took a turn for the worse early on as I saw that everyone had to pass through a metal detector to enter the courtroom. Right before it was my turn I suddenly remembered there was a metal X-Acto knife in my pencil box! As I was trying to think what to do, a policeman barked "Next!" at me and I sheepishly walked through the detector. Amazingly the knife didn't set off any alarms, so I spent the entire day in court with a knife on my person. Take that, courtroom security!

I took a seat and got out my pencils and paper. There was a stylish and attractive woman sitting next to me who glanced at what I was drawing from time to time. There was also a family of less than stylish people in the row in front of me who noticed what I was doing and kept turning around to watch. I didn't think much about them at the time.

The trial involved a defendant in his late twenties who was accused of killing an underage girl and burying her body in a shallow grave in a field. Real Citizen Of The Year material. There were lots of grisly descriptions of the body and the crime scene. It probably sounds interesting in a morbid kind of way, but it was anything but. Despite the way they're depicted on TV and in movies, courtroom trials are extremely tedious affairs. In fact it took several hours just for the two sides to decide if a certain word could be used to describe a piece of evidence, lest it color the jury's attitude.

As the trial dragged on I sat there and sketched the defendant trying to look innocent, the judge looking scholarly and pensive and the jury looking like wished they'd been smart enough to get out of duty. The family in front of me kept monitoring my progress, pointing and whispering excitedly to one another.

After what seemed like eons we broke for lunch. When I came back I took the same seat and noticed the family in front of me was gone. The stylish woman was there though and leaned over and introduced herself, telling me she was the prosecuting attorney's wife (!). Talk about a small world. She said that right after I left for lunch, the family in front of me asked her where I went (thinking that she knew me).

It turns out they were the family of the accused murderer! Apparently the mother of this clan was very impressed with my drawing abilities, especially my portrait of her son. You know, her son, the accused murderer. She actually asked the lawyer's wife if she knew how to get a copy of my drawing of him! What the hell was she going to do with it, frame it and set it on the mantel? 

"Let me show you my pichures, Betty! This here's my daughter Luann and her husband Junior, this one's of my sister Jolene and her third husband Eddie, these here are all my grandbabies, and this one... this one here's my pride and joy, drawn special by a genyoowine artist. It's my little boy Bill at his murder trial!"

Now THAT'S Scary!

A month or so ago my pal KW Monster and I went to the Fright Night Film Fest in beautiful downtown Louisville.

Among the many attractions at the show was a booth taking green screen photos of people... at no charge! Never one to pass up anything free we had are picture taken, complete with murder props and spooky background matted in behind us.

The results were terrifying to say the least! I don't know which one is scarier, KW's brain dead gaze or my murder-death-kill scowl. By the way, that's the same look I will give you when I'm behind you in the grocery checkout line and you wait until the clerk tells you the total before you start looking for your checkbook.

There were several backgrounds to chose from, such as abandoned shopping mall, creepy mansion and the one we chose, dilapidated hotel. There's actually a couple of twin girls, ala The Shining, at the end of the hallway, but KW is covering them up.

I'm not sure how taking free scary photos of people makes the tshirtbordello.com people any money, but hey, free scary photo!

Torr Murderfeld

Just a quick little illustration to close out the month.

Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet. I kept having trouble with the pen while I was drawing this. The lines it drew would skip and it just seemed sluggish and "off." I was starting to worry, fearing the pen or tablet or both were giving up the ghost. I finally realized the battery in the pen was dying and replaced it. After that it worked like new. Whew!

Here's the original sketch of Torr. I drew him walking in the final illustration to give it some visual interest.