Boxing Great

Random Memorandum™ to the legion of phony baloney “out-of-the-box” thinkers of the land — the marketing copycats, advert agency nitwits and double-talking digital doofuses who wouldn’t recognize an out-of-the-bloody-box idea if it bit them on their sorry arses: Famed Dutch Boy® painter Pieter Paul Mondrian is Celebrating a Deathday™ today. A graduate of The Academy of Fine Art in Amsterdam, Mondrian was originally an impressionist — as impressionable brush slappers and wall splashers of the time were wont to be — before gravitating to a cubist style that he made his own, colorful and precise as it was abstract. Those familiar with Mondrian’s starkly original drawerings — and who've spent a drug-fueled evening in his famed Sunset Strip hotel or passed out in the back of the Partridge Family® bus that appropriated his style — will attest to the power of his decidedly “inside-the-box” thinking. On a more cheerful note, Mondrian was the brains behind the Pieter Paul Candy Co. and gave the world the chocolate-drenched coconut Mounds® and Almound Joy® bars we enjoy at the station house to this day. Happy Anni-hearse-ary™ to Pieter Mondrian, laid to rest — in a box, presumably — January 31, 1944.