Friday 25th April: Noda's Hat-Trick

Mark this date down for posterity; on the feast day of St Alda, the 117th day of year 2008 Noda secured the Hiroshima Cock-Eye 3 Player Mahjong title with (spookily) a winning total of +117. His lead is such, that only a biblical disaster along the lines of Noah and the Great Flood will prevent his inevitable third consecutive title. The race for the basement position and runner up is the only one left to be run. At the end of this night’s play, Noda’s lead is but a trifling 626 points over Kenyon in 2nd place. The fat lady has broken the glass and retired for the year. The contest is done, dusted, finished, over, it has ceased to be, it has shuffled off its mortal coil… it is an ex-competition. It was a particularly painful night for Jaime, who once more followed a victory (last week) with a crushing defeat. Sometimes as a player you have to accept it is not your night. The Gods, the Ides and the banshee in the wind has decided that this night one's fate would be be a pitiful one. You have to accept that this comes with the territory of playing games. What is unacceptable however is just not concentrating on what is happening in the play. Just like last week, Jaime made two dumb chombo that combined with his abandonment by Erebus, led to a very expensive night and has sunk into the bloody red of defeat in the overall grand table. It was a night that no matter what the circumstances or state of play, Jaime could confound the odds and either start with bugger all and no chance of a hand or brilliantly choose the precise tile needed by another player to complete their gargantuan hand. Sometimes you just have to role with the punches…. Kenyon, making an appearance from his home in the wilds of Miyoshi, was more fortunate and followed minor triumph with respectable defeat. He, although still in the red has jumped to 2nd place after Jaime’s Dieppe Raid like calamity, which relegated to him 3rd, wedged above Dionysus (Hurley’s protector) who cleverly has avoided the skirmish of the MJ baize and rests comfortably 17 points adrift. Six games were actually played and Noda was top in three of them, Kenyon the remaining three and Jaime, failing even to reach the black at all, -1 being the ceiling to his heights. A theory proposed originally by Jaime, predicted that a player’s mahjong total was in direct opposite the result of his own beloved football team. Thus, Hurley victory on the Friday night was the sealing of Leeds Utd’s doom come the Saturday’s match. If Jaime is right, and frankly it can be the only shred of comfort to be taken from tonight’s debacle, then the thumping manner of his own defeat should be turned into a brilliant victory for United in both the league game against Abramovic FC and the European Cup semi-final against Barca on Tuesday. Please let it be so…he needs something to wash away (preferably in beer) the lightening of his wallet through mahjong defeat. As of Monday morning that theory seems to be up there with alchemy and intelligent design in the pantheon of scientific accuracy... Noda +39, +7, +38, -26, +62, -3 = +117 Kenyon +8, +45, -29, +27, -19, +31 = +63 === Jaime -47,** -52, -9#, -1#, -43, -28 = -180 **Yakitori #Chombo

Flemish Paintings from Prague, Okuda Genso Art Gallery: From the Mysteries of the Flesh to the Mysteries of the Spirit...

The attentive reader of this blog, if there is one, may recall that its author has a penchant for the things of the flesh, preferably female and of ample but pleasing proportion and a comely countenance. Save your fasting for Lent and Advent, sweet ladies mine, and in the meantime be good Christians and follow the council of the Ecclesiast, who was a cheerful Epicurian and of the healthy opinion that there's

...no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry &c.

Vast, e x p a n s i v e, as boundless as the sea and as voluminous beyond proportion or girdling restraint as the subject of the female form may be, may it not be summed up in an adjectival phrase as brief and to the point as a bodkin, videlicet, "voluptuous and Rubenesque"?

Now it just so happens that an exhibition of Flemish paintings from the National Gallery in Prague is currently being held at the Okuda Genso Sayume Art Gallery which features several works by our hero, Peter Paul Rubens, as well as some by Peter Breughel the Younger, and even one or two by our old quaffing partner Teniers the Younger, who hardly ever failed to include a relatively inconspicuous fellow pissing against a wall in his pastoral scenes.



Almost as inconspicuous as the pisser-against-the-wall in Teniers' Peasants in Front of a Tavernis the Nativity scene in Breughel's The Adoration of the Magi, one of the first paintings the visitor to the exhibition will see. The setting is Flanders in the middle of winter. The bustling crowd of peasants are going about their daily affairs and look as if they are chilled to the bone. It makes you feel chilly, just going over the details of the painting.



The Rubens collection did not contain so many voluptuous beauties as one would hope for after making the effort to drive out to the gallery. Moreover, several of the paintings are copies by accomplished imitators, although we can't complain about the painting by one of Rubens' protégés, Jan Boeckhorst, The Virgin with the Sleeping Infant (right).

There were still several exhibited works that are credited as being orignals, including two of his copies of panels from Mantegna's The Triumph of Caesar and a beautiful monochrome painting of The Visitation. That painting alone, a fine study of composition and gesture, is worth the trip to the gallery.



There is also a fine portrait in profile of a bearded man looking up which looked like a contemporary work to me and not as if it had been painted more recently than 400 years ago.

The biggest work by Rubens at the exhibition is his portrait of St. Augustine of Hippo in full bishop's regalia. He is by the sea, and appears both monumental against the low horizon and intimate as he stares into the sea in contemplation of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. His hands stretch in blessing towards a child who is attempting to ladle out the sea with a scallop shell.




O altitudo divitiarum sapientiae, et scientiae Dei: quam incomprehensibilia sunt iudicia eius, et investigabiles viae eius!


The exhibition continues until 2nd December.