Rubens, Sandwiched

Celebrating a Deathday™: Masterful Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens took his brushes, pigments and palette thingamajig up to that unfurled canvas in the sky on this day, May 30, 1640. Known for his richly-wrought Baroque overtones and bare-arsed depictions of pale-skinned tub-a-lards, Rubens was inspired by early Renaissance show-offs like Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Caprio, before bringing his own flamboyance to the form. Highly-regarded among European nobility, the Catholic Church and 17th century storage container pickers who fetched a fair shilling for rare finds sold on consignment, Rubens would later see his artistic renown eclipsed by a scandalous second marriage to his voluptuous — which is to say, beefy — 16-year-old niece and, more recently, by the unfortunate cinema hall flagellations of his great, great, great, great, great grand nephew — the impish, public masturbator Paul Rubens, a.k.a., Pee Weeee! Herman. On the other hand, Rubens — the brush stroker, not the other sort — has benefited from his association with another great, great, great, great, great, grand relation, one Peter Paul Halajian of the Peter Paul Candy Company™ — maker of Mounds®, a "Rubenesque" bit of chocolate and coconut if there ever was one. Methinks a lighting of a proper Dutch Masters® cigar is in order — indeed, let’s break the seal on a whole bloody box of Perfectos® for all the Peter Pauls in the pantheon — sins forgiven! — with the exception of botoxed balladeer Peter Paul Cetera, who once proclaimed that karate chopper Ralph Macchio was a man who would fight for our honor, who’d be the hero we were dreaming of and who'd live forever, an unlikely feat for even a man of exemplary skill like Peter Paul Rubens, whose feet were gutted with gout and down he went at age 62. Happy Anni-hearse-ary™, Citizen Dutch Boy.