LA Time's rips into Thomas Kinkade AKA "Painter of Light"

Today's LA Times has a character-assassinating cover story on Thomas Kinkade, the guy who paints scenes of woodland cottages with windows that seem to glow.

First, the Times discusses Kinkade's alleged shady business practices, which have driven at least on gallery owner to ruin. Next the article launches into Kinkade's alleged pattern of drunken and belligerent behavior.

In sworn testimony and interviews, they recount incidents in which an allegedly drunken Kinkade heckled illusionists Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas, cursed a former employee's wife who came to his aid when he fell off a barstool, and palmed a startled woman's breasts at a signing party in South Bend, Ind.

And then there is Kinkade's proclivity for "ritual territory marking," as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

"This one's for you, Walt," the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade's company, in an interview.

Well ok then....