God, the Cartoon Version

Back in the 1970s, I went to high school with Mike Harty at Mercy High School in St. Louis, a co-ed Catholic school. We hit it off immediately back then and we remain good friends today. One thing I enjoyed and admired about Mike is his ability to draw. After high school, as young adults, we periodically got together to draw cartoons. I threw a lot of bad ideas his way and he tried to make them funny. We tried to get them published by several newspapers and syndicates, but we weren't successful.

We've kept those cartoons and I recently pulled them out of mothballs. As I looked at them yesterday, I found that about half of them still seemed funny to me. Yesterday I called Mike and we agreed to risk yet more public rejection/humiliation by publishing some of these cartoons on my website, Dangerous Intersection as well as featuring some of them on FB. We'll publish these in six small batches, starting this this group on the topic of God. I smile as I look at these because Mike has always been religious and I have never been, yet we both enjoyed batting around these ideas. We hope you enjoy some of these too.

One of our two-panel Christmas Cards focused on the related topic of eschatology:

Here is a gallery of our other cartoons on the topic of God:

[More . . . ]

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Family Gymnastics Traditions

My grandfather, Robert Wich, was an amateur gymnast. Below, you'll see a photo of him doing a routine with his gymnastics partner (I'm assuming that this photo was taken in the early 1920's My grandfather is the one in the air).



I am trying to respect this family tradition, but I find it easier to do impressive acrobatics in my own way at the Oto-phay Op-Shay Branch of the YMCA. Here I am performing the rarely seen finger-balancing routine with my gymnastics partner, Edie White. I'm also attaching a close-up so you can appreciate the critical placement of fingers.



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Worst movie of all time?

For many years, I was under the impression that the 1959 film, "Plan 9 from Outer Space," was the worst movie of all time.  It is very good at being bad: But I was just introduced to "Turkish Star Wars," a move with Spanish subtitles. I don't know anything about whether this movie ever hit the big screen anywhere, but it is quite entertaining for its many failures. It's difficult to think of any aspect of film-making that this movie doesn't fail at.  From Wikipedia:

Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World) is a 1982 Turkish science fantasy adventure film also known as Turkish Star Warsbecause of its notorious use of unauthorized footage from Star Wars and other movies worked into the film.

Upon its initial release, the film was panned by critics for its incoherent storyline, poor performances, and use of stock footage and music from other films.

Despite this (or possibly due to this), the film has gained a significant cult following over the years. Louis Proyect of Rec Arts Movie Reviews called the film "classic midnight movie fun."[2] Phil Hall of Film Threat gave the film a perfect 5 stars, calling it "jaw-droppingly insane ... a film that makes criticism moot."

Here is "Turkish Star Wars" in its entirety:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4441&v=arpH88Mx3z4

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